>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our ongoing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con 2020 North America. Of course, it's virtual like everything else is in 2020 but we're excited to be back. It's a terrific show, and we're excited our next guest. So let's introduce him. And we've got Sam Warner, the VP of offering manager and business line executive for storage for IBM. Sam. Great to see you. >>Great to be here. >>And also joining us is Brent Compton. He's a senior director of data services for Redhead. Great. See you, Brent. >>Thank you. >>So let's let's jump into it. Cloud Native. Everything's about cloud native. Everything's about containers. Everything is about kind of container ization and flexibility. But then there's this thing in the back and called storage. We actually have toe keep this stuff and record this stuff and have data protection for this stuff in business resiliency love to jump into it, so lets you know where does storage fit within a container world? And how is the growth of containers and the adoption containers really had you rethink the way that you think about storage and how clients you think about stories saying, Let's start with you >>e mean, it's a great question. And first off, I'm really excited about another cube con. Uh, we did Europe now, uh, doing North America so very excited to be, you know, seeing all the you know, all the news and all the people talking about the advancements around kubernetes. And we're very excited about it now. You asked a very good question. Important question. We're seeing an acceleration of digital transformation, and the people that are going through this digital transformation are using containers to now modernize the rest of their infrastructure. The interesting thing about it, though, is those initiatives are being driven out of the application teams. The business lines in an organization, and a lot of them don't understand that there's a lot of complexity to this storage piece here. So the storage teams I talked to are all of a sudden getting these initiatives thrown on them or a kind of halfway their strategy. And they're scratching their heads, trying to figure out now how they can support these applications with persistent storage. Because that's not where containers started. They started with micro services, and now now they're in a quandary. They have to deliver a certain S L. A to their customers, and they're trying to figure out how they do it in this new environment, which in a lot of cases, has been designed outside of their scope. So they're seeing issues with data protection. Some of the kind of core things that they've been dealing with for years are now. They're now having to solve all over again. So that's what we're working on helping them with reinventing how storage is deployed to help them deliver the same level of security, availability and everything they have in the past. Uh, in these new environments, >>right? So, yeah, e say you've been involved in this for a long time. You know, you've worked in hyper converge. You've worked in big data. You know, the evolution of big data continues to change, as ultimately we want to get people the information to make good decisions, but we've gone through a lot of integrations over the years. So how is it different? You know? Now how is it different with containers? What can we finally do you as a as an architect that we couldn't do before? >>Infrastructure is code. That's, I think, one of the fundamental differences of the storage admin of yesteryear versus storage admin of today today, Azaz Sam mentioned As people are developing and deploying applications, those applications need to dynamically provisioned the infrastructure dynamically provisioned what they need from compute dynamically provisioned what they need from storage dynamically provisioned network paths and so that that that element of infrastructure is code. A dynamically provisioned infrastructure is very different from well from yesterday, when applications or teams needed to. Well, when they needed storage, they would you know, they would file a ticket and typically wait. Now they make an a p A. Now they make an A p. I call and storage is dynamically provisioned and provided to their application. >>But what what I think hard to understand for the layman. And maybe it's just me, right? I It's very easy to understand dynamic infrastructure around, um compute right, I'm Pepsi. I'm running it out for the Super Bowl. I need I know how much people are gonna hit by hit my site and it's kind of easy to understand. Dynamic provisioning around networking again for the same example. What's less easy to understand its dynamic provisioning for storage? It's one thing to say, you know, there's a there's a pool of storage resource is that I'm going to dynamically provisioned for this particular after this particular moment. But one of the whole things about the dynamic is not only is it available when you need it, but I could make it big, and conversely, I could make it smaller go away. I get that for servers, and I kind of get that for networking, supporting an application and that example I just talked about. But we can't It doesn't go away a lot of the time for storage, right? That's important data that's maybe feeding another process. There's all kinds of rules and regulations, So when you talk about dynamic infrastructure for storage, it makes a lot of sense for grabbing some to provision for some new application. But it's >>hard to >>understand in terms of true dynamics in terms of either scaling down or scaling up or turning off when I don't particularly need that much capacity or even that application right now, how does it work within storage versus No, just servers or I'm grabbing them and then I'm putting it back in the pool. >>Let me start on this one, and then I'm gonna hand it off to Brent. Um, you know, let's not forget, by the way, that enterprises have very significant investments in infrastructure and they're able to deliver six nines of availability on their storage. And they have d are worked out in all of their security, encryption, everything. It's already in place, and they're sure that they can deliver on their SLS. So they want to start with that. You have to leverage that investment. So first of all, you have to figure out how to automate that into the environment, that existing sand, and that's where things like uh, a P I s the container storage interface CS I drivers come in. IBM provides that across your entire portfolio, allowing you to integrate your storage into a kubernetes environment into an open shipped environment so that it can be automated, but you have to go beyond that and be able to extend that environment, then into other infrastructure, for example, into a public cloud. So with the IBM flash system, family with our spectrum virtualized software were actually able to deploy that storage layer not only on Prem on our award winning a race, but we can also do it in the cloud. So we allow you to take your existing infrastructure investments and integrate that into your communities environment and using things like danceable, fully automated environment. I'll get into data protection before we're done talking. But I do want Brent to talk a bit about how container native storage comes into that next as well. On how you can start building out new environments for, uh, for your applications. >>Yeah, What the two of you are alluding to is effectively kubernetes services layer, which is not storage. It consumes storage from the infrastructure, Assam said. Just because people deploy Kubernetes cluster doesn't mean that they go out and get an entirely new infrastructure for that. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on premises, they have servers. If they're deploying their kubernetes cluster on AWS or an azure on G C P. They have infrastructure there. Uh, what the two of you are alluding to is that services layer, which is independent of storage that can dynamically provisioned, provide data protection services. As I mentioned, we have good stuff to talk about their relative to data protection services for kubernetes clusters. But that's it's the abstraction layer or data services layer that sits on top of storage, which is different. So the basics of storage underneath in the infrastructure, you know, remain the same, Jeff. But the how that storage is provisioned and this abstraction layer of services which sits on top of the storage storage might be IBM flash system array storage, maybe E m c sand storage, maybe a W S E B s. That's the storage infrastructure. But this abstraction layer that sits on top this data services layer is what allows for the dynamic interaction of applications with the underlying storage infrastructure. >>And then again, just for people that aren't completely tuned in, Then what's the benefit to the application developer provider distributor with that type of an infrastructure behind And what can they do that they just couldn't do before? >>Well, I mean Look, we're, uh, e I mean, we're trying to solve the same problem over and over again, right? It's always about helping application developers build applications more quickly helps them be more agile. I t is always trying to keep up with the application developer and always struggles to. In fact, that's where the emergency cloud really came from. Just trying to keep up with the developer eso by giving them that automation. It gives them the ability to provision storage in real time, of course, without having open a ticket like friends said. But really, the Holy Grail here is getting to a developed once and deploy anywhere model. That's what they're trying to get to. So having an automated storage layer allows them to do that and ensure that they have access to storage and data, no matter where their application gets it >>right, Right, that pesky little detail. When I have to develop that up, it does have to sit somewhere and and I don't think storage really has gotten enough of of the bright light, really in kind of this app centric, developer centric world, we talk all the time about having compute available and and software defined networking. But you know, having this software defined storage that lives comfortably in this container world is pretty is pretty interesting. In a great development, I want to shift gears a >>little bit. Just one thing. Go >>ahead, >>plus one to Sam's comments. There all the application developer wants, they want an A P I and they want the same a p I to provision the storage regardless of where their app is running. The rest of the details they usually don't care about. Sure. They wanted to perform what not give him an A p I and make it the same regardless of where they're running the app. >>Because not only do they want to perform, they probably just presume performance, right? I mean, that's the other thing is that the best in class quickly becomes presumed baseline in a very short short period of time. So you've got to just you just got to just deliver the goods, right? They're gonna get frustrated and not be productive. But I wanted to shift gears up a little bit and talk about some of the macro trends. Right? We're here towards the end of 2020. Obviously, Cove It had a huge impact on business and a lot of different ways. And it's really evolved from March, this light switch moment. Everybody work from home, too. Now, this kind of extended time, that's probably gonna go on for a while. I'm just curious some of the things that you've seen with your customers not so much at the beginning, because that was that was a special and short period of time. But mawr, as we've extended and and are looking to, um, probably extended this for a while, you know, What is the impact of this increased work from home increase attack surface? You know, some of these macro things that we're seeing that cove it has caused and any other kind of macro trends beyond just this container ization that you guys were seeing impacting your world. Start with you, Sam. >>You know, I don't think it's actually changed what people were going to do or the strategy. What I've seen it do is accelerate things and maybe changed the way they're getting their, uh and so they're actually a lot of enterprises were running into challenges more quickly than they thought they would. And so they're coming to us and asking us to help them. Saw them, for example, backing up their data and these container environments as you move mission critical applications that maybe we're gonna move more slowly. They're realizing that as they've moved them, they can't get the level of data protection they need. And that's why actually we just announced it at the end of October. Updates to our modern data protection portfolio. It now is containerized. It could be deployed very easily in an automated fashion, but on top of that, it integrates down into the A P. I layer down into CSE drivers and allows you to do container where snapshots of your applications so you could do operational recovery. If there's some sort of an event you can recover from that you can do D R. And you can even use it for data migration. So we're helping them accelerate. So the biggest I think requests I'm getting from our customers, and how can you help us accelerate? And how can you help us fix these problems that we went running into as we tried to accelerate our digital transformation? >>Brent, Anyone that you wanna highlight? >>Mm. Okay. Ironically, one of my team was just speaking with one of the cruise lines, um, two days ago. We all know what's happened them. So if we just use them as an example, I'm clearly our customers need to do things differently now. So plus one to Sam's statement about acceleration on I would add another word to that which is agility, you know, frankly, they're having to do things in ways they never envisioned 10 months ago. So there need to cut cycle times to deploy effectively new ways of how they transact business has resulted in accelerated poll for these types of infrastructure is code technologies. >>That's great. The one that jumped in my mind. Sam, is you were talking. We've we've had a lot of conversations. Obvious security always comes up on baking security and is is a theme. But ransomware as a specific type of security threat and the fact that these guys not only wanna lock up your data, but they want to go in and find the backup copies and and you know and really mess you up so it sounds like that's even more important to have the safe. And we're hearing, you know, all these conversations about air gaps and dynamic air gaps and, you know, can we get air gaps and some of these infrastructure set up so that we can, you know, put put those backups? Um, and recovery data sets in a safe place so that if we have a ransomware issue, getting back online is a really, really important thing, and it seems to just be increasing every day. We're seeing things, you know, if you can actually break the law sometimes if you if you pay the ransom because where these people operate, there's all kind of weird stuff that's coming out of. Ransomware is a very specific, you know, kind of type of security threat that even elevates, you know, kind of business continuity and resiliency on a whole nother level for this one particular risk factor. When if you're seeing some of that as well, >>it's a great point. In fact, it's clearly an industry that was resilient to a pandemic because we've seen it increase things. Is organized crime at this point, right? This isn't the old days of hackers, you know, playing around this is organized crime and it is accelerating. And that's one thing. I'm really glad you brought up. It's an area we've been really focused on across our whole portfolio. Of course, IBM tape offers the best most of the actual riel air gapping, physical air gapping We could take a cartridge offline. But beyond that we offer you the ability to dio you know, different types of logical air gaps, whether it's to a cloud we support. In fact, we just announced Now the spectrum protect. We have support for Google Cloud. We already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud. So we give you the ability to do logical air gapping off to those different cloud environments. We give you the ability to use worm capability so you can put your backups in a vault that can't be changed. So we give you lots of different ways to do it. In our high end enterprise storage, we offer something called Safeguarded copy where we'll actually take data off line that could be recovered almost instantly. Something very unique to our storage that gives you, for the most mission critical applications. The fastest path recovery. One of things we've seen is some of our customers have done a great job creating a copy. But when the event actually happens, they find is gonna take too long to recover the data and they end up having to pay the ransom anyway. So you really have to think through an Indian strategy on we're able to help customers do a kind of health checks of their environment and figure out the right strategy. We have some offerings to help come in and do that for our customers. >>Shift gears a little bit, uh, were unanswerable fest earlier this year and a lot of talk about automation. Obviously, answer was part of the Red Hat family, which is part of the IBM family. But, you know, we're seeing Mawr and Mawr conversations about automation about, you know, moving the mundane and the air prone and all the things that we shouldn't be doing as people and letting people doom or high value stuff. When if you could talk a little bit about the role of automation, that the kind of development of automation and how you're seeing that, you know, impact your deployments, >>right? You want to take that one first? >>Yeah, sure. Um, s o the first is, um when you think about individual kubernetes clusters. There's a level of automation that's required there. I mean, that's the fundamental. I mean, back to the infrastructure is code that's inherently. That's automation. To effectively declare the state of what you want your application, your cluster to be, and that's the essence of kubernetes. You declare what the state is, and then you pass that declaration to kubernetes, and it makes it so. So there's the kubernetes level automation. But then there's, You know what happens for larger enterprises when you have, you know, tens or hundreds of kubernetes clusters. Eso That's an area of Jeff you mentioned answerable. Now that's an area of with, you know, the work, the red hats doing the community for multi cluster management, actually in the community and together with IBM for automating the management of multiple clusters. And last thing I'll touch on here is that's particularly important as you go to the edge. I mean, this is all well and good when you're talking about, you know, safe raised floor data center environments. But what happens when you're tens or hundreds or even thousands of kubernetes clusters are running in an oil field somewhere? Automation becomes not only nice to have, but it's fundamental to the operation. >>Yeah, but let me just add onto that real quick. You know, it's funny, because actually, in this cove it era, you're starting to see that same requirement in the data center in the core data center. In fact, I would say that because there's less bodies now in the data center, more people working remotely. The automation in need for automation is actually actually accelerating as well. So I think what you said is actually true for the core data center now as well, >>right? So I wanna give you guys the last word before before we close the segment. Um, I'm gonna start with you, Brent. Really, From a perspective of big data and you've been involved again in big data for a long time. As you look back, it kind of the data warehouse era. And then we had kind of this whole rage with the Hadoop era, and, you know, we just continue to get more and more sophisticated with big data processes and applications. But at the end of the day, still about getting the right data to the right person at the right time to do something about it. I wonder if if you can, you know, kind of reflect over that journey and where we are now in terms of this mission of getting, you know, the right data to the right person at the right time so they could make the right decision. >>I think I'll close with accessibility. Um, that Z these days, we you know, the data scientists and data engineers that we work with. The key problem that they have is is accessibility and sharing of data. I mean, this has been wonderfully manifest. In fact, we did some work with the province of Ontario. You could look that stop hashtag house my flattening eso the work with them to get a pool of data. Scientists in the community in the province of Ontario, Canada, toe work together toe understand how to track co vid cases s such so that government could make intelligent responses and policy based on based on the fax so that that need highlights the accessibility that's required from today's, you know, yesteryear. It was maybe, uh, smaller groups of individual data scientists working in silos. Now it's people across industry as manifest by that That need accessibility as well as agility. They need to be able to spin up an environment that will allow them to in this case, um, to develop and deploy inference models using shared data sets without going through years of design. So accessibility on back to the back to the the acceleration and agility that Sam talked about. So I'll close with those words >>That's great. And the consistent with the democratization of two is another word that we're here, you know, over and over again in terms of, you know, getting it out of the hands of the data scientists and getting it into the hands of the people who are making frontline business decisions every day. And Sam for you, for your clothes. I love for you Thio reflect on kind of the changing environment in terms of your requirements for the types of workloads that you now are, you know, looking to support. So it's not just taking care of the data center and relatively straightforward stuff. But you've got hybrid. You've got multi cloud, not to mention all the media, the developments in the media between tape and obviously flash, um, spinning, spinning drives. But you know, really, We've seen this huge thing with flash. But now, with cloud and the increased kind of autumn autonomy ization of of units to be able to apply big batches in small batches to particular workloads across all these different requirements. When if you could just share a little bit about how you guys are thinking about, you know, modernizing storage and moving storage forward. What are some of your what are some of your your priorities? What are you looking forward to, uh, to be able to deliver, You know, basically the stuff underneath all these other applications. I mean, applications basically is data whether you I and some in some computer on top. You guys something underneath the whole package? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, first of all, you know, back toe what Brent was saying, Uh, data could be the most valuable asset of an enterprise. You could give an enterprising, incredible, uh, competitive advantage as an incumbent if you could take advantage of that data using modern analytics and a I. So it could be your greatest asset. And it can also be the biggest inhibitor to digital transformation. If you don't figure out how to build a new type of modern infrastructure to support access to that data and support these new deployment models of your application. So you have to think that through. And that's not just for your big data, which the big data, of course, is extremely important and growing at incredible pace. All this unstructured data, You also have to think about your mission critical applications. We see a lot of people going through their transformation and modernization of S a p with move toe s four Hana. They have to think about how that fits into a multi cloud environment. They need to think about the life cycle of their data is they go into these new modern environments. And, yes, tape is still a very vibrant part of that deployment. So what we're working on an IBM has always been a leader in software defined storage. We have an incredible portfolio of capabilities. We're working on modernizing that software to help you automate your infrastructure. And sure, you can deliver enterprise class sls. There's no nobody's going to alleviate the requirements of having, you know, near perfect availability. You don't because you're moving into a kubernetes environment. Get a break on your downtime. So we're able to give that riel enterprise class support for doing that. One of the things we just announced that the end of October was we've containerized our spectrum scale client, allowing you now toe automate the deployment of your cluster file system through communities. So you'll see more and more of that. We're offering you leading modern native protection for kubernetes will be the first to integrate with OCP and open ship container storage for data protection. And our flashes from family will continue to be on the leading edge of the curve around answerable automation and C s I integration with who are already so we'll continue to focus on that and ensure that you could take advantage of our world class storage products in your new modern environment. And, of course, giving you that portability between on from in any cloud that you choose to run in >>exciting times. No, no shortage of job security for you, gentlemen, that's for sure. All right, Well, Brent, Sam, thanks for taking a few minutes and, uh, is great to catch up. And again. Congratulations on the success. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Alrighty, Sammy's Brent. I'm Jeff, You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con North America 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.