>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas at the Sands, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, of course, Dell Technologies World 2018. It's now a pleasure to welcome to the set, we have Bryan Bond, director of IT Infrastructure at Siemens eMeter. Bryan, thank you for being with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> John: And Andre Leibovici, who is the Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Andre, good afternoon to you. Good to see you. >> Great to see you. >> Alright, Bryan, tell us about Siemens eMeter, first, just for viewers who might not be familiar with the company and your mission. >> eMeter, basically, is a software development company. We do enterprise-level software for utilities, so gas, power, water, just about anything that has a meter. We do not make meters, but we deal with all the data that comes from those meters. So, data acquisition, meter data management, loss prevention, all those types of things that come from that data that's leaving your house or your business. We deal with that for the utilities. So, back-in billing systems, longterm data analytics, all of those types of things, that's what we do. >> Yeah, so, Bryan, most companies I talk to, it's like your industry's changing so fast, digital transformation, software, everything. Utilities are considered by most to be one of the slower moving pieces, so what's the reality in your world? >> It's like selling to a rock. (Stu laughs) A rock, right? It's tough, historically, it is very tough. Especially in the United States, with PUC regulations, with the way you can charge customers and can't, it makes it very hard. And I wish I was a real expert at that type of stuff, but... It's a slow-moving process. The good news is most countries in the planet have decided that they need to go full-on smart grid and they need to do it fast. So, in a lot of countries in Europe, there's an edict out, we're going to do this and that has helped move this along. So it's very helpful to us, as a business. I also think it's very helpful to us in general, you know, on the planet, being able to manage grids better and more efficiently. >> Okay, so we're not going to be talking about power grids and all the things on the utility. You're an IT guy. And that's what we love talking about on theCUBE here. So, give us a thumbnail sketch of your environment, your purview. What's going on? >> All right. So, like I said, so we're a software development house. It's all developers: dev test QA, sales, support, you know, all that type of stuff. I'm fortunate to be part of a very large company, so I don't have to worry about e-mail, SharePoint sites, or any of that stuff. I get to deal with the real fun stuff, which is our product, how it's deployed, how it's developed and tested. We're a pretty much a 100% virtualized. VMware shop. We use VMware-based cloud services for the appropriate things for that. And we do all of that work ourself with our own team. So we have a small team in the U.S., we have a small team in India, and we handle all of that ourselves, we don't really outsource any of that. >> Alright, so Andre, I want to pull you in here. You're software development in VMware environment. Brings me back; I remember early days of VMware was always only for test dev. Today, I hear developers, I hear this stuff, and it's like, "Oh, isn't that kind of public cloud "and some of those things?" So, give us your viewpoint on customers like Bryan and what kind of things Datrium brings to that environment, obviously virtualized and all that. >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So... All types of customers know suddenly looking at how they can leverage private cloud, but also public cloud. Create the ideal, hybrid cloud. What does that mean, right? So we have Fortune 100 companies like Siemens who are leveraging our technology to deploy the private cloud, run the VMware infrastructure on us. At the same time, create, you know, DR strategies to their secondary sites. But there is also those customers who are looking to, "How can I actually push workloads to the cloud? "How can I create a strategy around disaster recovery "to the cloud?" And I believe that, as part of our journey as a company, embracing private data centers, we got to embrace, also, the cloud. And this is the next big thing for us at Datrium. Where are we going to help customers on the journey to take their workloads running on-premise to the cloud, but at the same time enabling them to use as as DR and also move back when needed. I may as well just spill the beans here. I'm not sure if I'm getting trouble with marketing or not. >> John: I'm sure you're not. >> So we actually releasing very soon a fully orchestrated DR from our platform to the VMware cloud, to VMC. Fully orchestrated and enables you to fire over environment to the cloud and back, once your DR site or your primary site is actually back. There's a lot of promise on this market. There's a lot of companies doing, saying that they would do, but, you know, I see that's something that customers are really excited... >> You know, how does it work when you're dealing with a customer who is dealing with a customer, who's dealing with customers who... You know, privacy's essential, right? And there's a lot of concern... They have to be the customer of a utility. So how do you treat them, you know, because they have very unique needs, I would assume and that's a major consideration, because of their position with their customer. I mean, that's got to create a new dynamic, or an interesting dynamic, for both of you to handle. >> Yeah, it does. You know, from a development standpoint, you know, you may not be actually dealing with that particular customer's data, but you're helping that customer deal with that data. So, we're having to go through and make sure that our software doesn't have any holes in it and it's patchable, and that it follows, you know, simple guidelines. But, at the same time, we make recommendations to customers all the time, you know. "Well, how are you guys doing X, Y, Z in-house, "because you seem to be doing okay." And we say, "Well, we're using this particular platform." And, their encryption is probably the best there is right now out there. De-duped encryption, it's just fantastic. And across different storage arrays. And being able to that to the cloud and be encrypted there, and not have to worry about that is a big bonus. And that's definitely something that we look at. Obviously, we don't encrypt all of our data, because a lot of it's just nonsense. But, we do have stuff that we do that with. And we do it both for testing purposes and to prove that this meets the requirements of the customer. Because those requirements are different, not just in different countries, but in every state you go to. So, being able to provide that level of assurance of yeah you can meet your requirements with our software regardless of what platform you're running on. >> Bryan, you mentioned a couple of features there. But I wonder if you could back us up a second. You've got a virtualized environment. There's, you know, so many options that you can choose on there. Walk us a little bit through the problems that you were having, the decision process, and ultimately what led to Datrium. >> So... The set of primary goals for us was the typical thing you see in IT is you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. You're buying the same stuff, you buy more of it, you renew, and then they tell you that the price is going to go way up on support. So you buy a new one and start over again, right? The hockey stick approach. And so that's the time I like to actually stop and say, "Hey, am I doing this right, still?" Because what I did five years ago may not be right, you know, going forward, knowing what the changes are in the business. We were looking for great cost to capacity. Right? And ease of management and overall cost of the deployment. And when we started looking at all the different players in the space... For us, the big thing was going to NFS. So, single file system for management. Prior to that, we were either fibre channel on or iSCSCI. So, mini management points. Hundreds of LUNs. Hundreds of LUNs. We're managing storage, right? A small group of people, three, four guys? You're spending 20 hours a week managing storage? That's nuts, right? So, day one, we put these guys in in a POC. And my guys are like, "This stuff's never leaving." Because now I'm down to one management point, right? Six months, seven months later, I'm down six hundred LUNs from where I was with three management points. I don't manage storage anymore. None of my guys manage storage anymore. That's a hidden cost, you know? And I'm not suggesting reduction in FTE or anything like that. I'm saying, "Oh, now those guys can go work "on operating system patching." You know, the other paying points that you've got in the business, rather than managing, you know, that platform. So, all of those things rolled in together. And when we tried to compare them to other vendors, we couldn't get an apples to apples comparison. We had to go with multiple vendors to get the same performance, to get the same capacity, and we could never get the pricing. The best-case scenario we got for capacity and performance was three times the cost. Best-case scenario. And I still had to manage LUNs. >> Yeah, Andre, I used to always joke simplicity in the enterprise was an oxymoron, because there's so much happening. You hear, "Okay, get rid of one thing, I got to patch the other thing." There's no such thing as eliminating bottlenecks, you just move them. But, you know, sounds like some common problems we've been hearing out there. What's typical about his environment? What are you hearing from customers in general that Datrium's helping? >> So, I think the first point is simplicity. And it's something that I know we've been evolving, it's a journey not only for Datrium, but the whole data center industry, right? Went through ACI and now it's open conversions. So the whole simplification of the data center and make sure that most of the task can be automated. So some of the things that we do, that we simplify from a management perspective: we have no knobs, you don't decide if it's compression, the de-duplication enable, the erasure codings. Everything is owned by default and that's the way it's going to be because it doesn't make sense for an organization with thousands of virtual machines and applications to start tweaking every single knob to make sure they're going to get the best possible performance. Across the board, once we've actually verified, you might get like one or 2% CPU back. So, simplicity's a big point. Also, the other point that we mitigate in the organization, especially compared to ACI's solutions, is the data resiliency. So we actually offer enterprise-grade data resiliency that for ACI... And when talking about evolution with data center, you know, taking like putting SSDs into the servers, ACI clusters, and moving forward. So we actually make all the management of this SSDs much simpler. I forgot the line, where I was going to, but I... (laughs) I think the message is simplicity, skill ability, back data resiliency. Making sure you get enterprise-greater data resiliency in the data center. And you don't compromise on that. You get capacity, data resiliency, simplicity at the same time. >> Keep it simple, make it work. >> Andre: Exactly. >> Right. Faster. Gentleman, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. Thanks for telling the Siemens eMeter story. We look forward to seeing you down the road. And good luck, continue success at Datrium, as well. Thanks, Andre. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, thanks for having us. >> Back with more. You're watching Dell Technologies World 2018 right here on theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017 brought to you by VM ware and it's ecosystem partner. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back, we are here on the ground at the VM village live in Las Vegas at VMworld 2017. People buzzing around us here on the ground floor in the hang space, I'm John Ferrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Nunez, Chief VP of Marketing at Datrium, Andre Lebosi? >> Lebosi. >> VP Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> I've been looking forward to this since I arrived in Vegas, man. (laughter) >> You guys are the hottest start-up right now on the track in Silicon Valley. A lot of people talking about you guys. Want to get this out there. Give you a minute to just talk about Datrium. You guys are a new model emerging, some real pros. David Doman everyone knows about your success with that. Frank's Loop and that went that way. You guys have a great team of XVM guys. >> Craig: Yes. >> So you're working on a really compelling unique thing but it's getting traction so give a minute to explain what Datrium is. >> In simple terms, we are a very different take on conversions. We were conversing VM ware and Linux virtualization even bare metal container hosts with your primary storage we leveraged host Flash for that with secondary storage and archived to cloud. All in one super simple system. And I mean, what a lot of our customers kind of tell us, wow you are a simpler more scalable kind of nutanix that meets rubrik. You're like this love child of nutanix and rubrik. (laughter) They just love it 'cause it's one thing that does it all, super simple. >> A lot of free love going around this generation. (laughter) You got AWS and VM ware bonding together. Google playing in here, it's like the 60's all over again. (laughter) >> Yeah, yeah, not that I remember. >> Tech B generation.6 >> Dave: Summer love 2017. Summer of love, that I'm going to use that. >> Okay love child between rubrick and nutanix. What specifically does that look like? Just clarify one from a product p6erspective. >> First of all there is absolutely zero Call it, HCI cluster administration and so you know growing is as simple as adding a server. Adding capacity, you add those independently as you need it, so it's super economic. Everything runs fast 'cause it runs right out of Flash in your server adjacent to your VM. Again no back up silo, you take care all of your protection and archiving to the cloud with the same console that you're running your business on. So it's in a nutshell what you get. >> So contrast that Andre with the classical hyper-converged infrastructure in terms of how it's scales and how it's managed. >> Yeah I know that's a good question. So if you think about hyper-convergence. It was great, it really changed the years. In many ways it simplified, you remove the no silos that san was creating complexity around scalability or configuring rate, lunz, zoning. All the things that you'd specialize as skill to manage, right? And as you know, as you move along in your journey in the data center, you end up with multiple different vendors. They have different skill sets to manage. So HCI really changed the game in that way. But it also created different challenges for the data center. And we were lucky enough that HCI's only starting, right? This whole thing about converging is only getting started. So one of the first problems that we are dress is being able to scale performance, independent of capacity. So we've hyper-converged for the most part. You know, if you might want more capacity you need to have a computer, if you need a computer, you need more capacity. So we enable customers to go in different directions as needed. We also enable customers to bring their own existing environment into the solution. With HCI generally speaking, you need to buy that specific appliance or that specific HCL and sort of like pour everything in that specific solution. Which kind of becomes a silo as well. So we enable companies to leverage the existing environments and get the same benefits that you'd get from a performance perspective that HCI is bringing. Data locality and relook or read IO's with ...... But at the same time, with your existing hardware. And allows you to use whatever you want. There are other benefits on the resilience side as well. A primary and secondary bad cops so all the primary data, leaves in the nodes in the servers but we have the copy of the data or the back up in what we call a data cluster. So, what that really makes is the solution is stateless on the server side. I don't know if you remember, it's the same timeframe. All the servers were stateless. If a server went down, you would just, no move. You restart the VM's or the workload in a different server. And it's great. With hyper-convergence, now it's always stateful. All the data is actually living on the server. So when you lose a server, you actually putting data at risk and to be cost effective with ACI, you need to do what they call IFTT1 or replication factor two which means I have two copies of the data across the cluster. But it's not very uncommon to have avoid this failure and the read error and then you down to back up and have to restore. You want to rely on the backup as your insurance-- >> Dave: Not as your-- >> Not as then we use it for a day today. >> Yeah. >> So there are a number of different things that we solved that we believe we solved well. That hyper-convergence was not able to solve in its first instance. But you know what? That said, hyper-convergence started this whole journey to convergence is starting. I think I heard Chad Sakeet saying that, there's 440,000 VMX out there. Those are all coming for renewal, no refresh cycles. And now customers that have been able to see what HCI was doing the past three, four years. What worked and what was not working well and look at the use solutions and see how we are addressing those changes. >> Well what about the data protection side. You guys obviously have with Brian and Hugo, a lot of experience as a target. >> Voiceover: Yeah, yeah. >> But you're talking about more. You're talking about a software platform. >> Yeah from a data protection perspective, first of all you've got a platform that's totally unified with your primary storage environment. You then have this wonderful grandularity at VM and V dis level, container level. Great scale, I mean again the chops that the founders bring to that. But one of the things that you know, it think is really powerful. other platforms will talk about, hey we can snap VM's. We can replicate but then they will store them on expensive Flash in those nods and we have a separate device that is cost optimized, globally dedupped compressed on very low cost capacity. That is ideal for all that capacity you need to keep to protect the business. And so bringing that together with the great performance of Flash, this thing really does it all end to end And so it's a different way to think about it. And when we go in, we typically solving problems on the compute primary storage side. >> Voiceover: Uh huh. >> But when we then describe what we do from a backup or archived to cloud perspective, the lights go on and oh my gosh, I simply don't need-- >> John: I got a two for one here. >> Yes exactly. >> Your file system basically you're saying eliminates the need for any separate backup software, is that right, or? >> We do, I would say 80 or 90% of what most people need because the convenience of having your virtualization engineer do it all is so good. Now what I would say is, there are a lot of requirements in the world that we absolutely are going to turn to our pals at Zerto for and Cool Replication. Our friends at Veem, Rubert Cohesidi. All of those guys, we'll team up with because if you want you know back up off platform you know we're daydream to daydream. >> Voiceover: Yeah, right. >> We're not, going to sugar coat that. But there are specific requirements that those guys do that you need. We're going to give them a ring and bring them in. But what we're finding is, most of our customers are looking for ways to just do it all in one spot with a guy running the business, so. >> So I want to back up for a second. We had Brian's founder on Monday and this is an interesting story. I want you to take a minute to describe why you're doing this, because a lot of people, you come in, okay primary storage compute and then that's how I used to operate and then the next guy comes in with his solution. You guys have an interesting perspective with the data domain backup side. Why are guys taking this approach? Explain the uniqueness, why you guys are engaging in this way and what does it mean for the person the customer on the other end. >> Craig: Yeah. >> Is it all in one, is it optional? I mean, the approach is unique 'cause of the founder. >> Craig: Yeah. Just take a minute to explain that. >> Here's the world, the world is hard and getting harder, right? I mean it's just a morning, noon, night and weekend job to keep businesses running with the pace of this economy we're in, right? >> John: The economists are pulling their hair out, basically. >> And the, exactly and so the winner in the market is the one who can bring the simplest approach that gets the job done. And the problem is the bolt on, peace meal solution's that folks are tasked to live with, if you sit down and just draw all of the software stacks and consoles, then you need to put together to go from your virtualization environment. Flash, your backup environment. Replication DR, security, you want to blow your brains out. (laughter) >> John: Hang from the raftors. And again guys, they're trying to get the job done. They're forced to move fast and they're tight on budget. And so if you Ycan bring them the simplest possible solution that solves the problem today and future proofs it going forward, that's what folks are looking for. And there's a lot of nuanced edges to a lot of different solutions out there but at the end of the day show me simple and that wins. >> Alright so, now give me the reactions. That's important to buyers to understand what the (mumbles) is, thank you very much for that. Now the reactions. So you walk into that buyer and say, hey don't blow your brains out. Don't hang from the rafters, we got you here. This is beautiful for you, simple works. Cleans those lines up. What are they reacting to? Are they skeptical, they say you're full of you know what? Do they test the hell out of it? What goes on? >> When you walk them through it, and I'm going to let you take this too. You've talked to a ton of people already. When you walk them through it, they totally get it. Where should Flash be? Right next to the VM on the host. Makes perfect since, it's cheaper there, right? How should you scale, well stateless host. You know, servers that aren't storage nods. You know you lose two and you cluster down. That's not a great situation. >> Voiceover: No problem. >> Voiceover: Yeah. (laughter) >> And so stateless hosts. Any number of servers can fail, you're still going. People love that, they get that. Bringing all the backup capability into that one console. If you've got it, people get it and by the way, a quick demo is kind of icing on the cake. But I mean-- >> Share some color. >> Yeah, no, I've been traveling the last few weeks and talking to customers. I joined Datrium four months ago, and customers understand the proposition and they like. They like that we bring performers. They like that we bring resiliency. They like that it re-utilize the existing investments in the data center. And they like that we do primary and secondary backup. The customers that we're talking to they get it and they understand it and they want to do POC's and move on. >> So you're talking about a lot of VMX's out there. 400,00 plus, obviously that's been a target for hyper-connected verge. Clearly a target for your guys.6 But you're also talking about stateless. And when you think about these emerging cloud native apps, these stateless apps, certain IOT apps that are being developed. Do you see the emergence within your customer base yet? Of those type of emerging applications that aren't staple. >> Absolutely, I mean well first of all. If you look at the public cloud world. Architecturally what those guys have had to do to kind of get latency low and scalable, they think EC2 and S3, you know think of how Google cloud is architected with Kolassas. They have separated that persistent capacity from what's going on, effectively on the nods, the compute nods. And they've done that for exactly for that reason. To scale, low latency workloads as you need as you grow on demand. >> And to make that infrastructure invisible to the developer. >> Absolutely, absolutely and so the approach we're taking is fundamentally to give customers in kind of this hybrid world a way to bring that kind of infrastructure with the simplicity, scale, performance you need and kind of on prim. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And then it's a wonderful map when you take that in hybrid way to public cloud, 'cause you can very easily map that capacity layer to capacity layer, compute to compute. Instead of this kind of crazy dance you have to do with traditional infrastructure. >> That was actually part of it. You look at the VM ware and nowadays there's keynotes and embracing double ups and container. It's all over the place now. Now we're counting the days for how many store engineers or infrastructural engineers who actually need the data center moving forward. But the way system that we said was the architecture while in mind just support very medal containers and provide all of the performance benefits. And really finding a way to run containers and native apps, called native apps across data centers, across clouds. And we're moving in that direction more and more to support (mumbles) integrated and a few other architectural solutions. >> So I want to follow up with that. I mean, everybody talks about cloud. The show it's cloud, cloud, cloud and obviously the big wave. But the, you know this well John being all the time you spent with AWS, Reinvent and Jassie and so forth. The (mumbles) cloud is not VM's. >> Voiceover: Right. >> Right, and so is the conversation beginning to change? And your customer base around more of a developer mindset and what does that conversation look like. >> For the customers that I've been talking they still are very VM centric. There are some discussions about containers and developing, developers embracing containers. Off brand on the &cloud and on premise but they know VM is still pervasive in the prize. >> Dave: So that's where the money is? (laughter) >> That's where the money is, at least for the large majority of -- >> I'm sorry now on premise. And so cloud is just a different vernacular true but-- >> But the reality is though folks have that've got a VM environment. A lot of people we talk to are they have mason container development work going on. >> John: Right. >> And the challenge is though that those kinds of customers wind up having to silo out the infrastructure that supports those. You just don't have the bridge. >> Dave: And with you, you're saying-- >> And the point is yeah, you can have your ESX, VM's, your Linux VM's, your containers running in those VM's or you can have those containers running bare metal. >> Yeah. >> It's all one shared pool of resources like it ought to be. >> And to some extent when I talk to customers, what I figured out is they all starting using containers running VM's. But as soon as they figured out their frame of work, their management, their orchestration, they wanted to move to bare metal 'cause they wanted to have is that additional 10, 15% performance that they get running bare metal. And that I see constantly and talking to Docker and other companies, that's what they see on their customer base as well. >> Voiceover: Yeah. >> So you know where all that is going, I don't believe everything is going to be running in the cloud. I don't believe everything is going to be running in the data center. There'll be a mix of everything. You talk to two customers, they have different hyper-visors, they had red hat visualization, they have VM ware, they have hyperV. And large customers are embracing everything to some extent. >> Yeah, and you want to set it up in a way that you know, you set your policies and you don't care where it is, right? You set it up, and economical way that is lined with you service levels and who care if it's you know, a different prim site, the cloud, which cloud it doesn't matter. It's all your cloud, one cloud, right? >> Guys, thanks for coming on. Andre Leibovici. >> Andre: Yeah. (laughter) >> Got it right? >> Andre: You, got it. >> Greg Nunez, good friend congratulations on the start-up. >> Craig: Thanks. >> Quick, I want to give you the last word here. Talk about the company's status, what you guys are hiring for, where you guys are in the start-up journey. I see great validation with multiple rounds of funding. How many employees? How much revenue are you doing? Tell me the product cost? (laughter) Share! >> We are growing rapidly, 130% quarter of a quarter. We are hiring literally across the board. We can't hire fast enough to keep up with the demand. And for us the number one goal is just getting in front of customers looking for a way out from personal infrastructure. >> John: Sales people, field organization, channel? >> Channel we have a wonderful channel network and absolutely hiring guys to partner up with our channel. Both sales and marketing and yeah we just-- >> Alright, I'll put you guys on the spot because we love big fan of start-ups, certainly ones that have great pedigree in product that's unique again like Utonics in the early days, no one understood it, founders had stayed on course. You guys are on a similar track where it doesn't look like everything else but it's game changing so. Each of you take a minute to explain to the buyer, a potential customer out there, why they should work with Datrium and what you can bring to the table. We'll start with you. >> So first of all, if you are on a ray based infrastructure now, you're dealing with your performance constraints, managing lines, you've looked at a modern approach to convergence and it just doesn't scale, it's not right for your infrastructure, and enterpriser service provider has to take a look at this new approach to convergence we've got. It will change your world, literally. Your business and your personal world. And if you don't take a look, you're missing out. It is different from hyper-convergence. But fundamentally brings your that wonderful X86 based infrastructure that the whole planet is moving to. Got to take a look. >> Andre you can't say the same thing he's said but in your own words what would you say to the potential buyers that are out there. Potential customers, why should they look at you guys. >> Sure, I'll let you all in on the HCI in the simplicatiion of the data center. You know HCI was great simplying data center, removing a lot of the complexity. We do the same things. We do it in a different way. We remove all the nobs and buttons that you have in the data center as an example our infrastructure doesn't require any tuning on performance. So enable this duplication, enable compression, disable original recording. All those features that people, that when you're managing hundreds or thousands of yams, there's no way you know what needs to be enabled and disabled for each one of your workloads. So we lack from simplicity and that's where I met my pace CI peg, it's simplicity. And we do the same thing but we now solve different challenges that HCI also brought into the market. >> Datrium start-up, hot start-up in Silicon Valley and all around the world. Congratulations. It's The Cube coverage here at VMWorld 2017. I'm John Ferrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)