>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VEEAMON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2018 in Chicago, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Karl Rautenstrauch is here, Karl Rautenstrauch, Senior Program Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft. Karl, thanks for coming on. >> It's a pleasure, guys. Thank you for having me. >> You've got a beautiful picture of your family. You got three boys at home, is that right? >> Karl: Three boys. >> Alright. >> They keep me out of trouble. They get into it, they keep me out of it. >> I'm one of three boys. My mom, you know, kept us going. You must have a strong woman at home. >> She is a saint. >> At any rate, thanks for coming on. We love talking Microsoft Azure, Cloud and storage. Let's start with your role. >> Karl: Sure. What do you have? >> What do you do at Microsoft? >> Absolutely. So for the last year I've been program manager with the storage team, and I've kind of a unique role. Usually you see program managers who focus on features, right? You are championing a new feature in your service, your platform. For me, I get to work with our partner ecosystem. So I spend a lot of time with our great partners, like Veeam, and our channel partners, like SHI, CDW, Softchoice, Insight. I'll tell you, I've got the best job in the business. I can't complain. I get to work with great, smart people everyday. >> So is your role transferring knowledge to those partners, assisting those partners, acting as a catalyst, gathering information from them and feeding it back to the product teams? >> Yeah, really all of the above. Helping to make sure that we've got a combined solution, an end-to-end solution, that's the best thing for our customers. So everything from upfront assessment through implementation through health check afterwards, our goal is to have the happiest customers in the public Cloud, and we can't do that without our partners. >> How should we think about the Azure Storage portfolio? Can you paint a picture for us? >> Oh boy, it has grown drastically just in the last couple of months. So not only do we have our first party offerings in the disk, traditional VM disk as we all know it, you're going to attach to a server, we have hosted file infrastructures where we provide file shares that don't require a server to manage, our partnership with NetApp where we are going to be operating NetApp systems in our data centers and offering their native services. And we just continue to expand with big data solutions, with Avere, our new acquisition, that is really aimed at high performance compute environments like we see in genomics and media and entertainment. It's just a portfolio that continues to grow. We all joke that storage is boring, right? Nobody cares about storage, but honestly, it's one of the most interesting and fastest growing and evolving platforms in Azure. >> We joke, sometimes we call it snore-age, but Stu and I are kind of boring people, so we love talking about it. >> I like that. >> So you got file, you got object, you got block, you got big data solutions, you got high performance file solutions. Okay, like you say, this expanding portfolio. >> Karl, I look back at my career and Microsoft's had a long partnership, not only on the compute side, but really on the storage side, maybe isn't as well known as shipping on every PC and server out there. Lot has changed, when you talk about Azure and Azure Stack coming out. Maybe explain a little bit, I believe you called it the first party versus the second party. How that Microsoft does it versus Microsoft partners, how those mesh together. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well I'll tell you. So I joined the company about five years ago, and I've been on the storage team for the last year. I was a field specialist, a subject matter expert, before that working very, very closely with customers. And what I love that I've seen over this period through the Satya Nadella era, is just this open Microsoft that says, we don't have to do everything. We don't have to try to provide everything to the customer. We really believe in, and I think we just diffuse that best of breed attitude going forward. Our partners feel that. Whether we're working with Veeam in Azure Public Cloud as a target, or them offering protection of VMs in public cloud, which is necessary by the way. I think that's a huge fallacy in the industry, that you place your app, you place your machine in a public cloud, and it's magically protected by pixies. It's not. >> Backup and security aren't a concern, wherever you put it, right? >> Absolutely, wherever they are. So we rely on our partners like Veeam to provide that. And really where Azure Stack comes in, is providing that consistent experience, not just to our customers, but also to out partners. So Veeam is able to protect Azure Public assets, in the same manner they're able to protect Azure Private, for Azure Stack resources. So really it's just offering customers choice to use best of breed solutions, and allowing our partners to have an easy means to support both on-premises and public Cloud. >> So it's like a service catalog that you guys offer, and then you advise customers or they pick and choose what they want? How's that all work? >> Yeah, so really what we do, and that's a great way to put it. We have what we call the Azure Marketplace that's present in the Azure Public Cloud, and we extend that to Azure Stack. So if I'm a customer who wants to deploy Veeam, per se, in either infrastructure, I go to this catalog of apps. I mean it literally is a catalog of apps. Search for Veeam, there it is, and I can single click deploy in either Azure Stack or Azure Public. >> Microsoft is unique in the sense of its hybrid strategy, in terms of what you have in the cloud you have on-prem. You're trying to, wherever possible, make it identical. >> Karl: Absolutely. >> Microsoft and Oracle are really the only two companies that have a stated strategy to do that. Let's talk about Microsoft in terms of where you're at, in terms of getting that substantially similar capability in on-prem and in the public Cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. That's a great, great topic to discuss. Azure Stack, I always like to tell folks, full disclosure, and we don't try to hide this at all, that's not who we are, but it will always lag a little bit behind Azure Public. When you think about the controls in customers' data centers for rolling out code updates and new versions of software, new capabilities, there's always an adoption curve. You have folks who are a little more hesitant to release quickly and adopt quickly. So Azure Stack offers them the capability to defer some of those updates for a period of time. So there will be a lag. We have to qualify for multiple vendor platforms, we've chosen to go to market in a hyperconverged model with our partners, like Dell EMC, HP, Lenovo and Cisco. Whereas Azure Public, that's a completely controlled infrastructure, and we're able to deploy very quickly. And we do; we're constantly iterating and releasing new features. So I think that's the biggest difference between the two. >> So Karl, you give a session here at the show called Migrating to Azure. That whole move is pretty challenging. >> Karl: Oh yes. Am I lift and shifting? Am I transforming? Am I building new? What are you hearing from customers? And give our audience a taste of some of the key takeaways that you were talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the biggest concerns that we've had over the last couple of years. I said earlier, we want the happiest customers in Public Cloud, and no Cloud regret or remorse. So what we talked about in our session was a tool that we released recently called Azure Migrate, that is all about assessing and setting expectations for customers around what can and cannot migrate, how much it will cost to run that infrastructure in Public Cloud, either as is or optimized, and then suggestions for optimizing their infrastructure to get the best bang for their buck. So there are great opportunities to save cost when platforms are adopted, like Azure sql, platform as a service offerings. When I've got that time-sharing concept, when I take away maintenance activities around operating systems and software releases, there are significant cost savings versus a lift and shift, which can quite honestly be more expensive than what that customer is doing on-premises today. So Azure Migrate is meant to help customers avoid that, no regrets. >> I wonder what you're hearing from customers cuz there's some concern. Maybe I should just do infrastructure as a service. Cuz if I get into those platform as a service, am I locked in? Microsoft is used for lots of business scribble applications. I see Microsoft strongly in the Kubernetes ecosystem, getting into the functions as a service, which those things are trying to give me a little bit more portability and flexibility. Maybe discuss some of that. >> Yeah, that's great, and I'm glad you brought that back around. So there is always that concern about the Cloud Hotel California, right? And that said, I like to half jokingly refer to it as you get in, you can never leave. And there is that jeopardy with any provider. That if you're using some proprietary platform that you can be locked-in, and really we try to promote the use of containers extensively with those customers who have that concern. And even with our hosted analytics and hosted database infrastructures, we make sure to provide those portable cross-Cloud platforms, like Postgres, MySQL. Our analytics is all Ubuntu based. Really we don't want that lock-in to be there, we don't want that to be a concern. So continuing support for open platforms and ecosystems is really something we're committed to. >> The lock-in, openness choice, it's a spectrum. I've been in this business for a long time, and Unix used to be the open system. And then today, you can't get more locked-in then a Unix platform. So I feel as though, and I wonder if you guys can comment, the Cloud has transparent pricing and transparent billing. And so lock-in is if I have a customer and they're trying to move and they're up for a contract renewal or something or a maintenance, I'm going to jack their maintenance. But you can't just do that across the board, if you have transparent billing. So there's the pricing aspect. There's certainly a lock-in with the processes and procedures that you choose, but no matter what you choose, whether it's open source, a Cloud provider like Amazon, an on-prem provider like the many that we know out there, you're going to be locked-in to your processes and procedures. So it's a matter of degree. I personally see it, because of the Cloud, as a lot less onerous than it used to be. Do you guys agree with that? >> I mean Dave, it's that application is the long pole in the tent for ones I see. What I've been using and if I go to something new, if I go build this new architecture, Cloud Nader or whatever, that's a pretty big bet. So depending on how deep and tied that is to a specific platform, even if I'm choosing a database, migrating databases aren't easy. >> But that's the issue. It's the bet that you're making. It's more so than the lock-in because lock-in, you're going to be locked in to whatever bet you make, so you've got to make the right bet. To me, it's a way for consultants to act like an advocate for the customer. What's more important in my view, is negotiation strategies, how you place that bet, how you architect your Cloud strategy. >> And I mean Dave, just quickly, I remember four years ago you and I interviewed Brad Anderson with Microsoft, and we were poking him on licensing. I don't hear that discussion about Microsoft as much, of course we always want it cheaper, and everything like that, but Microsoft's done a great job. In the Cloud communities, they're known as participating in those communities, and giving customers- >> Well that's our take, what's your take? >> No, I love it. And I think what I'm seeing is customers are hedging their bets. So you do, and it is a bet. You do have to not go all in with somebody, with any Cloud provider, but you got to put your chips with some proprietary platforms. And what I'm seeing is that multi-Cloud that we're all talking about is really becoming the reality. I can think of very few customers that I've worked with who have had Azure as their single public Cloud. And really that's how they avoid that z-series down the road, right? Where you're locked-in, you got one provider that platform. They're saying, look, I'm going to deploy on the best service in the best public Cloud for that application instance, as Stu mentioned. That's happening. >> Horses for courses, as they say in England. >> Karl: There you go. >> So we're here at VEEAMON. Your relationship with Veeam, they've obviously partnered up with you guys in a big way. Your thoughts on the partnership? >> Yeah, love working with these guys. I'm very fortunate in that I get to work with some of the best that we have, and everything from the relationship that we have on a marketing level, an engineering level, a field level, they're really ingrained in our ecosystem at all levels. Just a very, very easy partner to work with, very responsive to their customer needs. And that's what we look for. We want to work with the partners that customers love. So I'm just thrilled to be part of this relationship. >> Karl, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I think you embody the new open Microsoft, and you guys are making great progress. Congratulations and thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you Dave, it was a pleasure. Stu, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. VEEAMON live from Chicago, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Is about what our youth is, and who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> Narrator: Congratulations, Reggie Jackson. You are Cube alumni. (gentle music) Live from Silicon Valley it's The Cube covering Google Cloud Next '17. (upbeat music) >> Hi, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Google Next 2017 happening in San Francisco. We're shooting live from our 4,500 square foot here in Palo Alto in the heart of SiliconANGLE. Happy to welcome back to the program, I guess we haven't had him for a little while, but one that we know quite well, Ron Bianchini who's the CEO of Avere. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so Ron, for our audience, why don't you give us the update? What's happening with Avere the company itself, and what brings you guys, which I think of you, no offense, you guys are infrastructure company I think of on there. How does cloud fit into the whole discussion you guys are having, and your customers? >> That's great, great segue. So, we started out as an infrastructure company and really what Avere learned to do, our whole IP, actually let me start this way. We started in 2008. Think about where the world was in 2008. People were trying to figure out how to get flash into the data center. And what we did is we came up with a storage system, a NAS server, that knew about two types of storage. It knew that there was very high performance nearby precious flash storage, but that big bulk storage, much cheaper, 1/10 the price disk was a high latency away. And we're able to take that solution, and we started out in the data center, we went after very high performance applications, but showed how you could do it at very low cost. >> It's great, nine years later, I mean, storage is infinite and free, right? >> That's right. The good news for us is the world is very much in the same place. The cost delta between flash and disk has stayed at 10 to one. Both have gotten a lot less expensive, but that difference between the two has stayed. It turns out a solution that knows how to use local high performance flash and store big bulk data at high latency away is an ideal solution for the cloud. And really what we're helping customers now is we're helping customers that are in the data center, in the Enterprise data center, we're helping them adopt cloud. And it works two ways. We support the gateway model where you can keep your compute on-prem and put your big bulk storage in the cloud, and we enable that model without seeing any delta, any change in performance or availability. But we also do the opposite of that, we enable customers to put their compute out in the cloud, and now the big bulk capacity could either stay in the cloud or could be on-prem. So really, I think about us as an enterprise data center play, just like you said, but now we're helping customers take baby steps and slowly adopt the cloud. >> All right, so terms I heard from Google this week, they talked about building the planetary scale computer. They talked about Google Spanner which gives us global, the time synchronization across the globe, the things that those of us with storage backgrounds, it's like, boy these are big, heavy challenges. >> Ron: Big words, right. >> Talking about some of the things, just physics that we try to figure all that. So, how do you guys fit into that? I mean, doesn't GFS, Google File System, solve all these issues for us? >> Right, great. So, one thing to understand is that enterprise storage uses a very different consistency model than Google Storage. So, there's a theorem called the CAP principle, C-A-P. It's consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. And basically what the CAP principle says is, of those three parameters, pick two, because it's impossible to build a storage system that does all three. And really, GFS is all about availability and partition tolerance, because they have big, scalable solutions. What it doesn't give you is exact consistency, and that's what NAS solutions do. NAS solutions are really the high consistency, still partition tolerant because you have big distributed scale systems, but you don't get that high availability piece. And it turns out, in the enterprise there are times when you need high availability storage, that's what you get from Google's file system, but then there are also times you need high consistency storage, that's what you get from an Avere solution. Imagine a bank account where you deposited a million dollars, and then you withdraw a million dollars from two locations, maybe 10 seconds apart. If you don't have a high consistency model, it might be possible to withdraw money from both places. That's what NAS guarantees. >> Ron, I want to get your viewpoint, I'm sure you talk to a lot of your customers. What's their mindset of cloud today, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with people stop by your booth at Moscone West. >> I think you said it right, Google is proposing big, scalable, huge features that the customers are trying to get access to, but moving everything from the data center into the cloud all at once to get them is a big, scary step. And so really what we enable people to do is to take baby steps. If you want to move a little bit of your capacity to the clouds, or petabytes of storage in the clouds, like one of our Genomics customers does, you could do that. Your compute and a lot of where they start in storage stays on-prem, but now they're leveraging the cloud for big, scalable capacity. Then we have other customers that want access to the compute and the performance of the scaling you can get. We allow them to get access to that as well. >> Any commentary on, I think about just the trend itself. There's no doubt how big cloud is and how fast it's growing. When we look on the data side Diane Green threw out a number that only 5% of the world's data sits in the public cloud, and that's going to shift. We know that there's a lot of compute-heavy workloads that really started out in those environments, or are leveraging that. So, there's a lot of kind of reasons why we haven't had the data there. We are starting to see some rapid acceleration. What do you see happening in the environment? >> I think that's right. I think the 5% number just gives us a window into how big this cloud movement is, how much is still left to be accomplished. We talk about cloud, cloud, cloud, as if it's already happened, but we're only at the cusp of what's possible. And that's really what we see as this next big phase of the cloud is ingest, is cloud adoption, it's migrating applications and storage into the cloud. >> Yeah, you said what, the future's already here, just unevenly distributed. >> That's right. It hasn't quite made it yet. >> You guys are headquartered in Pittsburgh. >> We are. >> I'm out of Boston. I always joke every time I come out here, it's like okay, I'm going to go spend a week in the Valley and in San Francisco, then I'm going to go back to the real world where I'm not seeing autonomous vehicles in front of me. You guys have some cool autonomous cars driving around Pittsburgh these days? >> Ron: We absolutely do. >> And not everybody is fully cloud-native, serverless and everything else like that. What are you seeing in the marketplace, what's interesting you these days? >> There's no doubt that in the future world all data, all applications, everything will be in the cloud unless there's a very important reason to have it nearby. We think with our Genomics customers, it has to start where the patients are. It has to start on-prem, and then it gets migrated to the cloud. But there's no doubt in the future all compute, especially the big, scalable things that we hear Google talk about will be there. The next five, seven years is all about how we get there from here. >> All right, and Ron, as people look at your company what should we be expecting kind of throughout the rest of this year as we look at you growing your future? >> It's all about making it easier to adopt the cloud. You're going to see higher levels of integration with our cloud partners, Google in particular. We do a lot of work with Google. You're going to see big steps as we move forward and make that integration better. >> You're working with the other cloud players, yes this is a Google show, but we want to talk about the environment. Lots of companies I talk to are like, "Look, yes Google's a player," but I talk to plenty of companies that, "Look, 3/4 of my customers are all on Amazon," and that's where a lot of the market is today. So, what's the breadth of the offering that you have to that? >> It is. We support all the three big cloud players, we support Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. What I will say is the Google team is very much focused on the enterprise, just like Avere is. And that actually helps us a lot. It's really helping us knock down customers and really helping get customers moved into the cloud. >> All right, Ron, I'll give you the final word. Takeaways for the week, anything else you want to share before we wrap. >> You know, it's exactly what you said. The cloud is coming, now it's just a matter of how we get there and watching the big momentum shift. >> I think Eric Schmidt said last year we were like kind of meet you were we are. This year it's, come on. It's, now's the time, we need to go. I think we understand how big cloud is going to be, it's one of the generational shifts that we're all going to be watching, and we're in the thick of it. So, thank you, Ron, for joining us, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here. We've got call-ins and people at the show itself doing dial-ins, pulling people in. Really broad community at this event, so stay tuned for lots more coverage, and you're watching The Cube. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)