>> 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.

(electronic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Jeffrey Snover. He is the technical fellow and chief architect for Azure Storage and Cloud Edge at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE, I should say, Jeffrey, you're a CUBE alum. >> Yes, I enjoyed the last time. So can't wait to do it again this time. >> Well we're excited to have you. So before the camera's were rolling, we were talking about PowerShell. You invented PowerShell. >> Yeah, I did. >> It was invented in the early 2000's, it took a few years to ship, as you said. But can you give our viewers an update of where we are? >> Yeah, you know, it's 2018, and it's never been a better time for PowerShell. You know, basically the initial mission is sort of complete. And the mission was provide sort of general purpose scripting for Windows. But now we have a new mission. And that new mission is to manage anything, anywhere. So we've taken PowerShell, we've open sourced it. It's now running, we've ported it to macOS and Linux. There's a very large list of Linux distributions that we support it on, and it runs everywhere. And so, now, you can manage from anywhere. Your Windows box, your Linux box, your Mac box, even in the browser, you can manage, and then anything. You can manage Windows, you can manage Linux, you can manage macOS. So manage anything, anywhere. Any cloud, Azure, or AWS, or Google. Any hypervisor, Hyper-V or VMware, or any physical server. It's amazing. In fact, our launch partners, when we launched this, our launch partners, VMware, Google, AWS. Not Microsoft's traditional partners. >> That's great to hear. It was actually, one of the critiques we had, at the key note this morning, was partnerships are critically important. But felt that Satya gave a little bit of a jab towards, the kind of, the Amazon's out there. When we talk to customers, we know it's a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world. You know, you work all over the place, with your solutions that you had. There's not, like, Azure, Azure Stack, out to The Edge. The Edge, it is early, it's going to be very heterogeneous. So connect the dots for us a little. You know, we love having the technical fellows on, as to, you go from PowerShell, to now this diverse set of solutions that you work on today. >> Yeah, exactly. So basically, from PowerShell, they asked me to be the chief architect for Windows Server. Right, because if you think about it, an operating system is largely management, right? And, so, that's what I did, resource management. And, so, I was the chief architect for that, for many years, and we decided that, as part of that, we were developing cloud-inspired infrastructure. So, basically, you know, Windows Server had grown up. You know, sort of focused in on a machine. Azure had gone and needed to build a new set of infrastructure for the cloud. And we looked at what they were doing. And they say, hey, that's some great ideas. Let's take the ideas there, and put them into the general purpose operating system. And that's what we call our software-defined data center. And the reason why we couldn't use Azure's directly is, Azure's, really, design center is very, very, very large systems. So, for instance, the storage stamp, that starts at about 10 racks. No customer wants to start with 10 racks. So we took the inspiration from them and re-implemented it. And now our systems can start with two servers. Our Azure Stack systems, well, so, then, what we decided was, hey, this is great technology. Let's take the great cloud-inspired infrastructure of Windows Server, and match it with the Azure services themselves. So we take Azure, put it on top of Windows Server, package it as an appliance experience, and we call that Azure Stack. And that's where I have been mostly focused for the last couple of years. >> Right, can you help us unpack a little bit. There's a lot of news today. >> Yes. >> You know, Windows 2019 was announced. I was real interested in the Data Box Edge solution, which I'm sure. >> Isn't that crazy? >> Yeah, really interesting. You're like, let's do some AI applications out at the Edge, and with the same kind of box that we can transport data. Because, I always say, you got to follow customers applications and data, and it's tough to move these things. You know, we've got physics that we still have to, you know, work on until some of these smart guys figure out how to break that. But, yeah, maybe give us a little context, as to news of the show, things your teams have been working on. >> Yeah, so the Data Box Edge, big, exciting stuff. Now, there's a couple scenarios for Data Box Edge. First is, first it's all kind of largely centered on storage and the Edge. So Storage, you've got a bunch of data in your enterprise, and you'd like it to be in Azure. One flavor of Data Box Edge is a disk. You call us up, we send you a disk, you fill up that disk, you send it back to us, it shows up in Azure. Next. >> A pretty big disk, though? >> Well, it can be a small disk. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah, no, it can be a single SSD, okay. But then you can say, well, no, I need a bunch more. And so we send you a box, the box is over there. It's like 47 pounds, we send you this thing, it's about 100 terabytes of data. You fill that thing up, send it to us, and we upload it. Or a Data Box Heavy. Now this thing has a handle and wheels. I mean, literally, wheels, it's specially designed so that a forklift can pick this thing up, right? It's like, I don't know, like 400 pounds, it's crazy. And that's got about a petabyte worth of storage. Again, we ship it to you, you fill it up, ship it back to us. So that's one flavor, Data Box transport. Then there's Data Box Edge. Data Box Edge, you go to the website, say, I'd like a Data Box Edge, we send you a 1u server. You plug that in, you keep it plugged in, then you use it. How do you use it? You connect it to your Azure storage, and then all your Azure storage is available through here. And it's exposed through SMB. Later, we'll expose it through NFS and a Blob API. But, then, anything you write here is available immediately, it gets back to Azure, and, effectively, it looks like near-infinite storage. Just use it and it gets backed up, so it's amazing. Now, on that box, we're also adding the ability to say, hey, we got a bunch of compute there. You can run IoT Edge platforms. So you run the IoT Edge platform, you can run gateways, you can run Kubernetes clusters on this thing, you can run all sorts of IoT software. Including, we're integrating in brainwave technology. So, brainwave technology is, and, by the way, we'll want to talk about this a little bit, in a second. It is evidence of the largest transformation we'll see in our industry. And that is the re-integration of the industry. So, basically, what does that mean? In the past, the industry used to be, back when the big key players were digital. Remember digital, from DEC? We're all Massachusetts people. (Rebecca laughs) So, DEC was the number one employer in Massachusetts, gone. IBM dominant, much diminished, a whole bunch of people. They were dominant when the industry was vertically integrated. Vertically integrated meant all those companies designed their own silicone, they built their own boards, they built their own systems, they built their OS, they built the applications, the serviced them. Then there was the disintegration of the computer industry. Where, basically, we went vertically integrated. You got your chips from Intel or Motorola. The operating system, you got from Sun or Microsoft. The applications you got from a number of different vendors. Okay, so we got vertically integrated. What you're seeing, and what's so exciting, is a shift back to vertical integration. So Microsoft is designing its own hardware, right? We're designing our own chips. So we've designed a chip specially for AI, we call it a brainwave chip, and that's available in the Data Box Edge. So, now, when you do this AI stuff, guess what? The processing is very different. And it can be very, very fast. So that's just one example of Microsoft's innovation in hardware. >> Wow, so, I mean. >> What do you do with that? >> One of the things that we keep hearing so much, at this conference, is that Microsoft products and services are helping individual employees tap into their own creativity, their ingenuity, and then, also, collaborate with colleagues. I'm curious about where you get your ideas, and how you actually put that into practice, as a technical fellow. >> Yeah. >> How do you think about the future, and envision these next generation technologies? >> Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those things, honestly, where your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength. So my weakness is, I can't deal with complexity, right. And, so, what I'm always doing is I'm taking a look at a very complex situation, and I'm saying, what's the heart of it, like, give me the heart of it. So my background's physics, right? And so, in physics, you're not doing, you're looking for the F equals M A. And if you have that, when you find that, then you can apply it over, and over, and over again. So I'm always looking at what are the essential things here. And so that's this, well, you see a whole bunch of confusing things, like, what's up with this? What's with this? That idea of there is this narrative about the reintegration of the computer industry. How very large vendors, be it Microsoft, or AWS, are, because we operate at such large scales, we are going to be vertically integrated. We're developing our own hardware, we do our own systems, et cetera. So, I'm always looking for the simple story, and then applying it. And, it turns out, I do it pretty accurately. And it turns out, it's pretty valuable. >> Alright, so that's a good set up to talk about Azure Stacks. So, the value proposition we heard, of course, is, you know, start everything in the cloud first, you know, Microsoft does Azure, and then lets, you know, have some of those services in the same operating model in your data center, or in your hosting service provider environment. So, first of all, did I get that right? And, you know, give us the update on Azure Stack. I've been trying to talk to customers that are using it, talking to your partners. There is a lot of excitement around it. But, you know, proof points, early use cases, you know, where is this going to be pointing towards, where the future of the data center is? >> So, it's a great example. So what I figured out, when I thought about this, and kind of drilled in, like what's really, what really matters here? What I realized was that what the gestalt of Azure Stack is different than everything we've done in the past. And it really is an appliance, okay? So, in the past, I just had a session the other day, and people were asking, well, when are you going to, when is Azure Stack going to have the latest version of the operating system? I said, no, no, no, no, no. Internals are internal, it's an appliance. Azure Stack is for people who want to use a cloud, not for people who want to build it. So you shouldn't be concerned about all the internals. You just plug it in, fill out some forms, and then you use it, just start using it. You don't care about the details of how it's all configured, you don't do the provisioning, we do all that for you. And so that's what we've done. And it turns out that that message resonates really well. Because, as you probably know, most private clouds fail. Most private clouds fail miserably. Why? And there's really two reasons. There's two flavors of failure. But one is they just never work. Now that's because, guess what, it's incredibly hard. There are so many moving pieces and, guess what, we learned that ourselves. The numbers of times we stepped on the rakes, and, like, how do you make all this work? There's a gazillion moving parts. So if any of your, you have a team, that's failed at private cloud, they're not idiots. It's super, super, super hard. So that's one level of failure. But even those teams that got it working, they ultimately failed, as well, because of lack of usage. And the reason for that is, having done all that, they then built a snowflake cloud. And then when someone said, well, how do I use this? How do I add another NIC to a VM? The team that put it together were the only ones that could answer that. Nope, there was no ecosystem around it. So, with Azure Stack, the gestalt is, like, this is for people who want to use it, not for people who want to build it. So you just plug it in, you pick a vendor, and you pick a capacity. This vendor, four notes, this vendor 12 or 16 notes. And that's it. You come in, we ask you what IP range is, how do I integrate with your identity? Within a day, it's up and running, and your users are using it, really using it. Like, that's craziness. And then, well what does it mean to use it? Like, oh, hey, how do I ad a NIC to a VM? It's Azure, so how does Azure do it? I have an entire Azure ecosystem. There's documentation, there's training, there's videos, there's conferences. You can go and put on a resume, I'd like to hire someone with Azure skills, and get someone, and then they're productive that day. Or, and here's the best part, you can put on your resume, I have Azure skills, and you knock on 10 doors, and nine of them are going to say, come talk to me. So, that was the heart of it. And, again, it goes back to your question of, like, the value, or what does a technical fellow do. It's to figure out what really matters. And then say, we're all in on that. There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of customers like, I must have my security agent on there. It's like, well, no, then you're not a good candidate. What do you mean? I say, well, look, we're not going to do this. And they say, well you'll never be able to sell to anyone in my industry. I said, no, you're wrong. They say, what do you mean, I'm wrong? I say, well, let me prove it to ya, do you own a SAN? They say, well, of course we own a SAN. I said, I know you own a SAN. Let me ask you this, a SAN is a general purpose server with a general purpose operating system. So do you put your security and managing agents on there? And they said, no, we're not allowed to. I said, right, and that's the way Azure Stack is. It's a sealed appliance. We take care of that responsibility for you. And it's worked out very, very well. >> Alright, you got me thinking. One of the things we want to do is, we want to simplify the environment. That's been the problem we've had in IT, for a long time, is it's this heterogeneous mess. Every group did their own thing. I worry a multi-cloud world has gotten us into more silos. Because, I've got lots of SAS providers, I've got multiple cloud providers, and, boy, maybe when I get to the Edge, every customer is going to have multiple Edge applications, and they're going to be different, so, you know. How do you simplify this, over time, for customers? Or do we? >> Here's the hard story, back to getting at the heart of it. Look, one of the benefits of having done this a while, is I've stepped on a lot of these rakes. You're looking at one of the biggest, earliest adopters of the Boolean cross-platform, Gooey Framework. And, every time, there is this, oh, there's multiple platforms? People say, oh, that's a problem, I want a technology that allows me to bridge all of those things. And it sound so attractive, and generates a lot of early things, and then it turned out, I was rocking with this Boolean cross-breed platform. I wrote it, and it worked on Mac's and Windows. Except, I couldn't cut and paste. I couldn't print, I couldn't do anything. And so what happens is it's so attractive, blah, blah, blah. And then you find out, and when the platforms aren't very sophisticated, the gap between what these cross-platform things do, and the platform is not so much, so it's like, eh, it's better to do this. But, over time, the platform just grows and grows and grows. So the hard message is, people should pick. People should pick. Now, one of the benefits of Azure, as a great choice, is that, with the other guys, you are locked to vendor. Right, there is exactly one provider of those API's. With Azure, you can get an implementation of Azure from Microsoft, the Azure Public Cloud. Or you can get an implementation from one of our hardware vendors, running Azure Stack. They provide that to you. Or you can get it from a service provider. So, you don't have to get, you buy into these API's. You optimize around that, but then you can still use vendor. You know, hey, what's your price for this? What's your price for that, what can you give me? With the other guys, they're going to give you whatcha give ya, and that's your deal. (Rebecca laughs) >> That's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for coming on theCUBE again. It was great talking to you. >> Oh, that was fast. (Rebecca laughs) Enjoyed it, this was great. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, stay tuned to theCUBE. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> 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)