>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody, this is theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. A lot of noise on cloud, a lot of signal on cloud, and we've been unpacking that. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Alexander Kozlyaev is here. He's the Head of IT Architecture at MTS. He's joined by Konstantin Yakovlev, who is the lead System Architect at MTS, a telecommunications company in Ukraine. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Not Ukraine, in Russia. >> Oh, it's not Ukraine. Oh sorry, just hear Ukraine. >> We had some bad data. We'll make sure to clean that up. >> Yeah, yeah, we have a data quality problem here. Sorry about that. Okay, yes my apologies. Okay, let's start with Alexander. Maybe you could describe MTS and tell us a little bit about the company. >> Yeah, surely. MTS is one of the largest mobile operator in Russia. It represents the Russian market for the last 23 years. So currently, our subscribers in Russia only maybe counted by the number of 80 million. We have subsidiaries in different countries like Belarussia, like Romania, and other countries. So we are putting forward our digital services, cellular services and others. Me, personally, working from the first day of MTS so I'm roughly 20 years in MTS staff, starting as system administrator. >> Okay, so you've seen the evolution of the various backup and we'll come back to that. But I wanted to ask Konstantin, it's a long way to come to a show like this. How are you enjoying the show? What has it been like for you? >> It's a nice conference but main thing for us, I think it's backup of physical servers. Because now we have different systems to backup physical servers and virtual servers. Maybe we hope in the future to join these systems, and have only one backup for all our services. So it's good step for Veeam to make a physical backup also. I think it's main goal for us here in this conference. >> Okay, so that was one of the big announcements this week. Of course, Veeam is oftentimes been pointing out that up until this point has not backup bare metal servers, physical servers as you say, and now that happens. So that allows you to consolidate your backup architecture, is that right? >> Maybe, we hope. It's a first step. It's a first step, so now we have to look how Veeam will backup bare metal servers. >> We would like to harmonize our backup software because currently we have three or more even backup software featuring like Symantec, like Network Error. So we would like to join them, and to choose best of breed of them. Currently Veeam software now can play this role as being the big player like them. >> Alexander, you have the history of MTS. You've seen the backup systems of all from before virtualization. >> Alexander: Yeah, all the way through. >> Can you share with us the MTS backup and data protection journey? >> Backup and data protection journey. Surely, it started from very simple tape drives staying on top of the table. I am personally was who repairing them from jammed tapes and so on, (faint) tape, autoloaders and others, and others. But nowadays, we have a huge amount of data. Okay, it's very big amount of data. So simple tapes cannot operate properly. So we have historically a different software solutions to which we acquired with different companies which were merged with us. So currently, we would like to harmonize all these suite of software features. So the how big way was passed by. >> So from an IT architecture perspective, Konstantin, what are the big challenges in the telecommunications industry in terms of high availability? We hear a lot about always on. What does that mean to your business? >> I think it's maybe always on is not a first main goal today. Maybe for us, main goal is NFE, if you heard about it. It's virtualization of network part of telecommunication company. This is a first and main question. After that, we can talk about always on, and data protection because in telecommunication world, it's very important part of our business. >> Dave: So NF-- >> So just NFE is really about being able to deliver software services to your users. >> I would like to say NFE is being like a tool. But real goal is agility of the business because we are challenging very different range of tasks, and we need to act very fast. So the only way to withstand such threats is to react very fast by means of very flexible infrastructure. So the only way is to build NFE infrastructure NFE radius so. >> It's a shift in mind. >> Yeah, I think back, I worked in telecommunications 20 years ago. Lots of big gear, and cabling, and it's a software world now. NFE is just part of the term to help you deliver agility sounds right. >> Just to (accented) into solutions, which are built everywhere. >> I've talked to many of the large telecommunication vendors over the years. The whole cloud wave, some telecommunication players try to be a cloud provider. Most of them, NFE is an exciting thing they're looking at. How does cloud impact your journey? >> It doesn't impact us very, how to say, I guess. So currently, what do impact us most of all is the need to reorganize our internal processes. Currently we are not cloud oriented in our minds, and our process have other dimensions that our company more than 20 years old. All the processes from the very beginning. So most of them should be re-in full completely and build up from scratch. So currently it's a big, big task, and we are trying to work with that. We are talking with helps, you know the tool. For example, to state the tasks in different ways, to work different, think different as we probably should. >> Where does Veeam fit in? You mentioned you have a lot of different flavors of backup software because you have to support both physical servers and virtual servers. Where does Veeam fit in, and where do you see it going? >> Veeam is our main solution for backup of virtualized systems. In IT, we already virtualized most part of our systems but now we start this NFE process in telecommunication part. So Veeam will play more, and more important role in our life because we start to transform our telecommunication part to move it to IT-like world. In IT, the Veeam is main solution for backup virtual machines. So in all other part of our company, Veeam will start to play this role as a main solution of data protection for the virtual machines. So when more and more virtual servers will appear in our life, Veeam will play more, and more important role. So this is a Veeam role in our life. This is a main solution for backup virtual machines so. >> Yeah, it's got to be more and more reliant on that platform to support your future. >> Less and less physical servers but still as head of one of the division in Veeam said, we cannot virtualize 100%. So always will be some small part of physical servers. >> Okay, good, well we're out of time. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Stu: Appreciate it. >> Alexander: Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> All right, keep it right there buddies. Stu and I will be back to wrap right after this short break. Be right back. (enlightening music)