(upbeat music) >> Live From Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami everybody this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Two days of wall to wall coverage of VeeamON 2019. They selected the Fontainebleau Hotel in hip, swanky Miami. Tad Brockway is here he's the corporate VP of Azure Storage, good to see you! >> Yeah great to see you thank you for having me. >> So you're at work for a pretty hip company, Microsoft Azure is where all the growth is, 70 plus percent growth, and you doing some cool stuff with storage. So let's get into it. Let's start with your role and kind of your swim lane if you will. >> So our team is responsible for our storage platform that includes our disc service for IAS virtual machines, our scale our storage we call Azure blob storage. We have support for files as well with a product called Azure Files, we support SMB based files, NFS based files, we have a partnership with NetApp, we're bring Azure NetApp files is what we call it, we're bringing NetApp on tap into our data centers delivering that as a first priority service we're pretty excited about that. And then a number of other services around those core capabilities. >> And that's really grown over the last several years, optionality is really the watch word there right, giving customers as many options, file, block, object, etc. How would you summarize the Azure Storage strategy? >> I like that point, optionality and really flexibility for customers to approach storage in whatever way makes sense. So there may be customers, there are customers who are developing brand new cloud base taps, maybe they'll go straight to object storage or blobs. There are many customers who have data sets and work loads on-prem that are NFS based and SMB based, they can bring those assets to our cloud as well. We're the only vendor in the industry that has a server side implementation of HDFS. So for analytics workloads we bring file system semantics for those large scale HDFS workloads. We bring them into our storage environment so that the customer can do all of the things that are possible with a file system hierarchy's for organizing their data, use ACl's to protect their data assets and that's a pretty revolutionary thing that we've done but to your point though, optionality is the key and being able to do all of those things for all of those different access types, and then being able to do that for multiple economic tiers as well from hot storage all the way down to our archive storage tier. >> And I short changed you on your title cause your also responsible for media and edge, so that includes Azure stack is that right? >> Right so we have Azure stack as well within our area and DataBox and DataBox edge, DataBox edge and Azure stack are our edge portfolio platforms. So the customers can bring cloud based applications right into their on-prem environments. >> Peter you were making a point this morning about the cloud and it's distributed nature, can you make that point I'd love to hear Tad's reaction and response. >> So Tad we've been arguing in our research here Wikibon SiliconANGLE for quite some time. The common parlance the common concept of cloud, move everything to the center was wrong. We've been saying this for probably four or five years, and we believe very strongly that the cloud really is a technology for further distributing data, further distributing computing so that you can locate data approximate to the activity that it's going to support. But do so in a way that's coherent, comprehensive, and quite frankly confident. That's what's been missing in the industry for a long time so if you look at it that way, tell us a little bit about how that approach, that thinking informs what you're doing with Azure and specifically one of the other challenges is how does then data services impact that? So maybe we'll come to that in a second I'm sure. >> Great insight by the way, I agree that the assumption had been that everything is going to move to these large data centers in the cloud and I think that is happening for sure, but what we're seeing now is that there's a greater understanding of the longer term requirements for compute and that there are a bunch of workloads that need to be in proximity to where the data is being generated and to where it's being acted upon, and there are tons of scenarios here. Manufacturing is an example where we have one of our customers who's using our DataBox edge product to monitor an assembly line as parts come out of the assembly line our DataBox edge device is used with a camera system attached to it, AI inferencing to detect defects in the assembly line, and then stop the assembly line with very low latency where a round trip to the cloud and back to do all the AI inferencing and then do the command and control to stop the assembly line that would just be too much round trip time so in many different verticals we're seeing this awareness that there are very good reasons to have compute and storage on-prem, and so that's why we're investing in Azure stack and DataBox edge in particular. Now you asked well how does data factor in to that, because it turns out in a world of IoT and basically an infinite number of devices over time, more and more data is going to be generated. That data needs to be archived somewhere so that's where public cloud comes in and all the elasticity and the scale economies of cloud. But in terms of processing that data you need to be able to have a nice strong connection between what's going on in the public cloud and what's going on on-prem, so the killer scenario here is AI. Being able to grab data as it's being generated on-prem, write it into a product like DataBox edge, DataBox edge is a storage gateway device so you can map your cameras in the use case I mentioned or for other scenarios you can route the data directly into a file share, an NFS, blob, or SMB file share, drop into DataBox edge, then DataBox edge will automatically copy it over to the cloud, but allow for local processing to local applications as if it were, in fact it is local, running in a hot SSD NVME tier, and the beautiful thing about DataBox edge it includes an FPGA device to do AI inference offloading. So this is a very modern device that intersects a whole bunch oft things all on one very simple, self contained unit. Then the data flows into the cloud where it can be archived permanently in the cloud, and then AI models can be updated using the elastic scale of cloud compute, then those models can be brought back on-prem for enhanced processing over time. So you can sort of see this virtuous cycle happening over time where the edge is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. >> So that's what you mean kind of when you talked about the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge, I was going to ask you you just kind of explained it and you can automate this, use machine intelligence to actually determine where the data should land and minimize human involvement. You talked about driving marginal cost of storing your data to zero, which we've always talked about doing that from the standpoint of reducing or even eliminating labor cost through automation, but you've also got some cool projects to reduce the cost for storing a bit. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about some of those projects a little bit. >> Thats right so, and that was mentioned in the keynote this morning and so our vision is that we want for our customers to be able to keep their artifacts that they store on our cloud platform for thousands of years and if you think about sort of the history of humanity that's not outside the question at all, in fact wouldn't it be great to have everything that was ever generated by humankind for the thousands of years of modern or human history. We'll be able to do that with technology that we're developing so we're investing in technology to store data virtually indefinitely on glass, as well as even in DNA, and by investing in those advance types of storage that is going to allow us to drive that marginal cost down to zero over time. >> Epigenetic storage systems. I want to come back to this notion of services though, and where the data's located. From our research what we see is we see as you said, data being proximate or being housed, approximator created and acted upon, but that increasingly businesses want the options to be able to replicate that, replicates a strong word it's a loaded word, but to be able to do something similar in some other location if the action is taking place in that location too. That's what Kubernetes is kind of about, and server list computing and some of these other things are about. But it's more than just the data, it's the data, it's the data services, it's the meditate associated with that , how do you foresee at Microsoft and what role might they play in this notion of a greater federation of data services that make possible a policy driven, back up, restore, data protection architecture that's really driven by what the business needs and where the actions taking place. Is that something you were seeing in a direction that you see it going? >> Yeah absolutely and so I'll talk conceptually about our strategy in that regard and where we see that going for customers, and then maybe we can come back to the Veeam partnership as well cause I think this is all connected up. Our approach to storage, our view is that you should be able to drop all your data assets into a single storage system like we talked about that supports all the different protocols that are required, can automatically tier from very hot storage all the way down to overtime glass and DNA, and we do all of that within one storage system and then the movement across those different vertical and horizontal slices that can all be done programmatically or via policy. So customers can make a choice in the near term about how they drop their data into the cloud but then they have a lot of flexibility to do all kinds of things with it over time, and then with that we layer on the Microsoft whole set of analytics services. So all of our data and analytics products, they layer on top of this disaggregated storage system so there can be late binding of the type of processing that's used including AI to reason over that data relatively to where and how and when the data entered into the platform. So that's sort of modularity, it really future proofs the use of data over the long haul we're really excited about that, and then those data assets can then be replicated to use your term to other regions around the globe as well using our backbone. So the customers can use our network, our network is a customers network, and then the way that docs into the partnership with Veeam is that just as I mentioned in the keynote this morning, data protection is a use case that is just fundamental to enterprise IT. We can make together with customers and with Veeam, we can make data protection better today using the cloud and with the work that Veeam has done in integrating with 0365, the integration from there into Azure storage and then over time customers can start down this path of something that feels sort of mundane and it's just been a part of daily life at enterprise IT, and then that becomes an entry point into our broader longterm data strategy in the cloud. >> But following up on this if we agree that data is not going to be entirely centralized, but it's going to be more broadly distributed and that there is a need for a common set of capabilities around data protection which is a very narrowly defined term today and is probably going to evolve over the next few years. >> I agree with that. >> We think you're going to have a federated model for data protection that provides for local autonomous data protection activities that is consistent with the needs of those local data assets, but under a common policy based framework that a company like Veeam's going to be able to provide. What do you think? >> So first of all a core principle of ours is that while we're creating these platforms for large data sets to move into Azure the most important thing is that customers own their own data. So there's this balance that has to be reached in terms of cloud scale and the federated nature of cloud and these common platforms and ways of approaching data, while simultaneously making sure that customers and users are in charge of their own data assets. So those are the principles that we'll use to guide our innovation moving forward and then I agree I think we're going to see a lot of innovation when it comes to taking advantage of cloud scale, cloud flexibility and economics but also empowering customers to advantage of these things but do it on their terms. I think the futures pretty bright in that regard. >> And the operative term there is their terms. Obviously Microsoft has always had a large on-prem install base and the software estate, and so you've embraced hybrid to use that term, with your strategies. You never sort of run away from it, you never said everything's going to go into the cloud, and that's now evolving to the edge. And so my question is what are the big gaps, not necessarily organizationally or process wise, but from a technology standpoint that the industry, generally in Microsoft specifically, have to fill to make that sort of federated vision a reality. >> I mean we're just at the early stages of all this for sure in fact as we talked about this morning, the notion of hybrid which started out with use cases like backup is rapidly evolving toward a more sort of modern enduring view. I think in a lot of ways hybrid was used as this kind of temporary stop along a path to cloud, and back to our earlier discussion for by some I guess, maybe there's a debate you all are having there. But what we're seeing is the emergence of edge is being and enduring location for compute and for data, and that's where the concept of intelligent edge comes in. So the model that I talked about earlier today is about extending on-prem data assets into the cloud, where as intelligent edge is taking cloud concepts and bringing them back to the edge, in an enduring way. So it's pretty neat stuff. >> And a big part of that is much of the data if not most of the data, the vast majority even might stay at the edge permanently and of course you want to run your models up in the cloud. >> That's right, at least for realtime processing. >> Right you just don't have the time to do the round trip. Alright Tad I'll give you the last word on Azure, direction, your relationship with Veeam, the conference, take your pick. >> Yeah well I thank you, thanks great to be here. As I mentioned earlier today the partnership with Veeam and then this conference in particular is great because I really love the idea of solving a very real and urgent problem for customers today, and then helping them along that journey to the cloud so that's one of the things that makes my job a great one. >> Well we talk about digital transformation all the time on theCUBE it's real, it's not just a buzz word, it can happen without the cloud but it's not all in the central location, it's extending now to other locations. >> It reflects your data assets. >> And where your data wants to live. So Tad thanks very much for coming to theCUBE it was great to have you. >> Thanks guys! >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is VeeamOn 2019 and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Jennifer Meyer, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at NetApp. And welcoming to theCUBE Alok Arora, Senior Director of Cloud Data Services and the Product Owner for NetApp Cloud Advisor, which we'll talk about today. So guys, the keynote this morning, one of the things that George Kurian, your CEO, whose going to be on the program I think next with Stu and me, talked about the four pillars of digital transformation, and one of them was hybrid and multi-cloud is now the de facto architecture. Jennifer, from a cloud marketing, product marketing stand point, how is NetApp engaging with your customers, both your install base enterprise customers and engaging with new customer to help them evolve a successful multi-cloud strategy? >> Well what's funny about that is it's not really even up to us, it's up to the customer and where they're at today, meeting them there and then taking them kind of to that destination that's interesting or important for them. And what we know today is that not only are customers in the cloud because they want to be close to innovation, that's one of our big themes, inspiring innovation with the cloud, but they've got their hands in multiple clouds. And studies show that at least 80-81% of customers are doing multi-cloud with two or more public clouds, and I think that's really interesting, you know I think that in some cases it's because their end uses, or their customers, have chosen a cloud that they want to go with and so they're trying to service those needs where they exist, but also maybe they realize that they want to subscribe or consume services in one cloud versus what's available in another cloud, and so it's not our job really to tell them where to go, it's to make sure we've got a consistent seamless amount of services to give these customers to consume, wherever they may be, in whichever public cloud. >> Yeah, well I like what you said, meeting them where they are, cause I think in some ways we're giving customers a little bit of credit that this was actually planned for as to how they got to where they are, you know I'm sure if we took that 81% that say they know they're multi-cloud, if we go with the other 19%, most of them are probably multi-cloud and just don't realize it. >> Jennifer: Absolutely. >> Because just like we had an IT in the old day, I have an application, a business unit, or somebody drives something, and oh my gosh, that's how we ended up with silos, we ended up breaking those things apart. >> Or shadow IT, right? You've got a lot of developers that know exactly what tools they want. >> We had a good discussion with Anthony Lye and Ted Brockway talking about Azure and some unique functionality that NetApp's looking to drive into that partnership with Microsoft. I wonder if we could step back, if you could help us understand kind of the cloud portfolio of NetApp, people that just know NetApp as "Oh it's, that's that filer company that I've probably "got a lot of products from." The multi-cloud has been evolving, for quite a few years now, so I want to help understand the breadth and depth of the offering. >> That's right and I think you know we always think about it almost like a four layer stack, in terms of our strategy and what we're doing to bring more of these innovative data services to our install base to your point, but also our net new buyers, folks that are coming to us through Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, or AWS, and so it really does start with our legacy and our foundation of, in this case, cloud storage, and the data services, or the advanced data management that's built upon those storage protocols. So of course it's NFS, NSMB, but when you think about being able to offer that, and compliment what's available in the public clouds today, because that's why they've chosen to partner with NetApp. On top of that we are delivering advanced services in those public clouds that have never been available before, things like automatic snapshots, or rapid cloning, and backup, and tiering, and I think it's really important because what it does is it extends our customers' experience from On-prem into the public cloud, without having to sacrifice a thing. >> Alok, it's a tough thing that customers are trying to figure out. When I look at it and talk to customers, they've got an application portfolio. What are they modernizing? What are they starting from fresh? And then they've got all the other stuff that they have, how is NetApp helping with what they do? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think that's a great point. So you talked about the offerings that we have with multi-cloud and that creates all the options for future state architecture, I can build there, however, in order to understand how do I get there I need to understand where I am today, right? So we start looking at your current state footprint, we look at our customer's current state footprint. Understand how it is architected. How it is designed, how it is serving up the applications. Because it can be really a tedious job to get started, to get to the cloud and building the roadmap. So what Cloud Advisor does is it leverages active IQ data to get that inside for us and be leveraging data science, machine learning, to give them a guidance as to how they can get there. What should be their migration approach. How should they build a transition strategy. Because a lot of times they would call the consultants to help with the transition strategy, at the end they get a PowerPoint, which is not very actionable. We started this grounds up, we understand their detail you know, how the stuff, the bits and bites, are organized so we start giving them an actionable strategy they can execute upon. So that's really Cloud Advisor geared for accelerating that journey to the cloud that our customers should be taking to. >> How are you guys helping customers to start embracing emerging technologies, IoT devices, we had Ducati on this morning, a MotoGP bike is basically an IoT device, but in terms of, Jennifer you talked about this, and Alok you reinforced it, you are basically co-developing in partnership with your customers, it's about where they, helping them understand where they are, what they can do today. How are some of the services helping them to be able to harness the power of AI, say for example, to work with data authority to use that data for actionable business insight, and outcomes? >> Yeah it's interesting you talk about the IoT, I think NetApp saw that 20 years ago. I mean ASAP is our original IoT, that is what we get billions of data points from our customers. Controllers, millions of controllers worldwide, and we build on that mirror data, and we apply the artificial intelligence in there. We actually start looking at classifying their applications so that, if they have a strategy driven by the application, as you were saying, hey there is a director from a BU, from majority point of view, we want to take these applications in the cloud. How do you figure out what application are? Where does the data live? How does it governed? We figure that out by that IoT data, by that artificial intelligence and also making sure that these applications, no work loads are left behind because applications can be complicated they talk to each other. So when you start thinking about taking one part of the application, you also want to make sure the other parts that make that application whole also go to the cloud. And that is where we're leveraging Artificial Intelligence to cluster these applications and recommending the customer that: "Hey don't make, don't leave these workloads behind "because otherwise you're going to have a failed strategy." So we warn them upfront to make sure they're successful when they start making the executions. >> I think another piece to that too is just the fact that for many years we've had workloads just trapped On-prem. They haven't had a place to go into the public cloud without a ton of refactoring or rearchitecting, right. You'd have to rewrite them for objectory. You'd have to do a lot of manual labor and things just to make it happen. In most cases it hasn't been worth it. And so when you looked at the fact that about 80% of On-prem files where in NFS V3 protocol, there wasn't really a place in the public cloud to match that and so by even just delivering Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and AWS or Azure NetApp Files which is the version for Azure, we're able to give customers an, a way to free up that trapped set of workloads, put those into the public hub, so that it then can be available to all of those advanced services that live on those public clouds to do things like Big Data Analytics or to do developing, you know, applications and services of their own and for their own benefit. >> You Know. >> Yeah I think that's a great point because >> He's so excited.| >> Sorry. >> Because when you start looking at building your strategy you want to have confidence in your strategy. >> Jennifer: right. >> So, with your protocols and all that discovery. We also not only give you the option that NetApp offers but show you what are the other options you have within Hyperscalers and how would your workload perform with NetApp technology. So you can move with confidence, right. So that's the good part of about Cloud Advisor to make sure you're moving with confidence not just, you know, with a blind spot with you. >> You know one of the transitions we've been watching is really the ascendancy with the developer in DevOps. And I've talked to the SolidFire team for many years, I see them at some of the shows that we've been covering. In the Keynote this morning George Kurian said that Kubernetes and Istio are the multi-Cloud control plane. Jennifer I'm wondering if you can help explain the StackPointCloud acquisition. >> Jennifer: (agrees) >> Some people that might not have the context of about what NetApp and SolidFire, even before the acquisition were doing. You know, we're being like: "Wait I don't understand, you know." >> Sure. >> Kubernetes is something That you know Google and you know, Red Hat and others are doing. >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> And we even learned what the abbreviation for is was. >> Stu: K8s. >> It's like we're all hip. Absolutely. >> Absolutely, just because. >> It's all about concatenate long words together. So it, it's really interesting because when I talked about that four layer strategy, right the third layer. So it's you know cloud storage at the bottom. Then it's the advanced capabilities and data management above that. But the one that's next is orchestration and integration. And there's really a few things that live in there. You know, the, our cloud orchestration sort of technology is really what we got from our Qstack acquisition. Our teams in Iceland and what they've been able to do largely to underpin a lot of what we've seen with cloud volume service today. But certainly right in there is NetApp Kubernetes service, which as you now know, is from our StackPoint intellectual property. And so back on September 18th, when we announced this acquisition it was really to kind of give our developers and our DevOps folks a way to finally start solving for some of that data gravity that I think we've been periled by over the last few years. And what we now know is Kubernetes is the operating system of the clouds, right. It is the clear winner of container orchestration among things so it made a lot of sense to pair that kind of multi-cloud orchestration again given our strategy to be where our customers want to be with some of our cloud orchestration technology from our Qstack acquisition and make sure that with Trident and some of the ways that we're able to deliver finally persistent storage to those containers. I mean this is like a match made in heaven. Right, we're going to give people the way to make sure that they know that containers are a femoral and data is not. So let's help them do kind of all the things that they want to do in the clouds if they want to do them. >> I think I read on line that, was the StackPointCloud acquisition based on after actually NetApp used it internally. >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit more about that. Because I think the NetApp on that up story is probably something that could be leverage, you're a marketer, as a differentiator when customers have so much choice. >> Well and I feel like it's a story that every vendor should be forced to tell. If you're not willing to use your own IP and technology what is that saying to your customers. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> So it is true and a lot of our developer teams, if you've hear of Jonsi Stefansson and Anthony Lye's team, that is how this sort of came about as we were looking for a way to sort of do it ourselves. And we thought man through all this investigation there's something here. There's something that we shouldn't hold to ourselves and we should share with the rest of the world. And so at one point we need to get those guys on with you as well so they can tell a little bit more about their story. >> So proof is always in the pudding. Can you give uan example of one of your favorite customer stories. We'll start with you Alok. Who have really embraced the clouds, first of all helped you develop the optimal cloud services are now really achieving big business benefits with the cloud services NetApp is developing. >> Yeah so, several of the customers as we talked to you and specially for Cloud Advisor, as we were looking at their journey as they were starting to think about how much money they were spending upfront to figure out a strategy, they had a strategy driven by a data center that was, were the lease was coming up, and so they had to plan to evacuate that data center into the cloud from there they need to figure out what applications they're running there obviously the virtualization also was there, so that had to be configured in the cloud. So we started thinking about in that use case that we need to provide these triggers and strategy points to our customers. At the same time the other shift that we saw was that these guys were not just talking amongst the infrastructure teams, they had to talk to the application owners and they had to have conversations with CFO's to talk about the economics of the clouds. So we made sure that when we build this that give them the tools that enable them to talk to various stakeholders. Give them the application footprint that is running there. Give them the economics. What it is going to cost to run these applications and workloads that they have identify too when they're in the cloud. So give them the data point that they can go and talk to their CFO. So with that really it starts shaping a product that will meet their needs and meet the needs of all of our customers. >> Lisa: Jennifer, favorite customer example. >> Oh, it's easy this week because it's all about WuXi NextCODE and I don't know if you picked up on any of their story cause we've plastered it around our conference this week because we're so proud of, not only what they're doing as a mission which is very impressive in terms of genomics sequencing and the scale at which they're doing it but the fact that they've based their foundation now on NetApp Cloud Volume services is huge. And really what they came to us and said is: "Look, we are trying to sequence all of these genomes "in parallel and our benchmark is really to look at about "a hundred thousand individuals at once." When they were trying to do that on their own, using there own self-managed storage in the cloud, they could never complete it. It would either fail or they would have some sort of a problem where they just couldn't get it to work. And with NetApp Cloud Volume Service they were able to complete in about 45 minutes. And so what their finding is again with this extreme performance, with the ability to scale and most importantly the tie it back to our discussion, it's multi-cloud, they themselves are multi-cloud because of their big pharma and hospitals that they serve. They have customers in every one of those public clouds and so we are able to help them where ever they need us to be. And that's very exciting. >> It's also one of those great examples that everybody understands. Genomic sequencing related to healthcare, you know disease predictions and things like that. So it's a story that resonates well. >> Jennifer: Sure. >> But something that you just said sort of reminded me of one of the four principles that George Kurian talked about this morning. And speed is the new scale. And this sounds like a customer who's achieving that in spades. >> Well it's so fun because I think for a long time we've been really fast On-prem and I think people have just sort of come to expect a certain level of it's good enough in the public cloud and what we're showing them in droves again on AWS GCP or with Azure is that you should expect more. Particularly for high-performance computing workloads or things that you really just, if you're moving your SAP workloads to the cloud and speed is, there is no option it has to be fast. We are showing people now possibilities that they didn't ever dream of before because of this extreme performance through things like Cloud Volumes Service. >> It's really too bad you guys aren't excited about this. (laughs) >> I know how much longer do you have? >> (laughs) Jennifer, Alok, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me. And talking about how customers are really helping NetApp become a data authority that they need to be to help customers become data driven. We appreciate your time. >> It's our pleasure. >> Have a great time at the rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018, from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we're live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay, in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the day is Stu Miniman. We're welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE, we've got Anthony Lye SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. >> Hello, thank you very much. >> Fresh from the keynote stage. And we've also got a Tad Brockway, the head of product Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, Tad, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So guys, this is day one, keynote this morning, it was standing room only, 5,000 plus people here, Jean English was on your CMO of NetApp and said, most ever customers and partners under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony, about what you guys are doing, and how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft? >> Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships, Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. It's transformation based on, very reliable infrastructure. So you get all the forward looking values of Azure, complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. >> Yeah, it's a great way to-- >> So a year ago, at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things. One of them being Azure NetApp files. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Tell us about, a year later, where you are with that? I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow, give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into, one year in? >> Well, let me give you my perspective and then Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public Cloud, that they now feel that Azure has distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build the service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, "You manage it." But I think together, we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone, we just wanted storage to be there, and we wanted to give people performance guarantee. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers, we have a backlog that's growing by the day, and customers who have been onboarded onto the system, have rave things to say about it. You'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize the year? >> Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort, and that's the thing that makes this, customers don't care about how something is implemented, they care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies, from an engineering standpoint, that there's nothing like this in the industry today. As we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally, what we're doing is, we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we're wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure. So we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability, all the way down to the switch level, where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure Public Cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customers VMs, directly into ONTAP, very low latency, very high bandwidth. So all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem, and then bringing that into the Public Cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision that app volumes in a way that is fundamentally unique, it fits with the whole Cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is Cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of ONTAP. >> I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today Hybrid Multi Cloud. But Microsoft it's been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong Hybrid strategy. When I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the Stack. If today, and Azure Stack, you've got Storage Spaces Direct, you've got a Cloud first strategy. So I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions, put it in the environment, can you help connect, where does that this ONTAP solution fit in there? Because, some people would say, "Well, come on Microsoft, "wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions?" Why do you turn to NetApp? >> So, it's true, I guess, the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is, it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. That involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud, as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over, that's just not realistic. So, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp, and then our partnership together to meet customers where they are, help them evolve. So scenarios like Hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack and some of the other things that we're doing there with Data Box, and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of Cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets, and then take advantage of the Cloud. That fits with the whole model of what we're doing with ONTAP as well. >> Anthony, we would love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the Cloud but we see Microsoft, the Cloud is the starting point, we start in the public Cloud, and then that pushes out to the edge. >> Yeah, I think, I would make two points, I think, just to reinforce what Tad said, that there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you cannot underestimate the importance of what Dave Hitz really started. I mean, ONTAP does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way, it allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance throughput characteristics. And we've been able to take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So, NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle Database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology, I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads, that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is, I personally agree very much with Tad, but I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by Cloud. What I mean by that is, the Cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and it's sort of it's own access control lists, security models, those will end up getting pushed back to IT. So I think you're going to see a Cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined Cloud. >> Yeah, I buy that. >> And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT, and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. >> So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off, that this is really kind of an engineering partnership, when if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft, have massive install basis of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously, customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT, from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, I will start with you? >> Well, so I would say, my favorite line about Cloud was, actually a line Marc Benioff quoted which was, what Clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission, in many cases, and ideas that would never get through the business case, can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. So what used to be a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new Cloud buyer. To the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. >> Yeah, no, I agree. I think, it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop. This combination, there really is nothing like it in the industry, it's really unique. >> At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here, and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit excited, going to go through some sort of Cloud certification. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to scale up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certification. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? >> Yeah, I think we've sort of, in many ways made, ONTAP, very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP that their skill set now translates into the Cloud compensations. One of the things we'll say, on stage tomorrow is, Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for workloads, strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. It's awesome to be onstage with Tad, we provide a critical service, but Microsoft has how many services now, in Azure? >> Tad: Oh, Gosh, hundreds. >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. And as a developer, I feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure, you can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services. What Microsoft has is a scale so vast, I mean, how many data centers will you be at, by the end of the year? >> Well, we're in 54 regions today, and then each region has multiple data centers. >> Anthony: Hundreds. >> So anyway, we're all over the planet. >> So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution, you guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for-- >> Azure NetApp files. >> Azure NetApp files, any Sneak Peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes like, reducing costs, or speed of transactions, that are going to be here tomorrow? >> You should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think, you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure Netapp files can. I think he's also going to say that as well as benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve. That we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that two dimensional flexibility. >> Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out, if you're not, watch it on their live stream. Tad, Anthony, thanks so much for joining-- >> Thank you, very much. >> Stu and me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. >> Perfect, thank you. >> From Stu Miniman and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018, stick around we'll be back after a short break.