>> Narrator: Live, from New Orleans, It's the Cube covering Veeamon 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Bayou everybody, this the Cube, the leader in LIVE tech coverage. My name is Dave Velanted. I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is VeeamON 2017, two days of wall to wall coverage from the CUBE. Harley Carter is here as a solution architect at Scania. We're going to have a case study on transportation. Talk to the customers, we love when we get the practitioners on, we can pick your brain about what's really happening. Harley welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> How's the conference going, what do you think of VeeamON? >> It's good. I'd say for us Veeam is becoming sort of more of a strategic part of our business now. We rely on it more and more, so I'm excited to be here and learn some of the new features, what's coming. >> Great, we'll come back to that. And I want to ask you to set up your business a little bit. Tell us about your business, you know, Scania, transportation company. Huge company, actually. Many many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees. What's your business all about, what are the drivers in your business that are driving technology? >> Yeah so our business set up, so I work for Scania in the UK. And we act as the main sort of wholesaler for the UK. And we also own half of the retail network in the UK. So we have sort of two-pronged attack really. So we're responsible for bringing the vehicles into the country and shipping them out to our distributors. And then we also sell directly to the customer as well. So you know, those two main bits of focus for us. And I think like most other companies at the moment, we're finding that more and more or our services are changing to be in digital services. We sort of position ourselves in the market as the premium product. We're considerably more expensive than some of the competitors, and then in order to back that up, we have to give the full service and we have to give great service to the customers, and great backup services. So we're moving to more and more supporting services around the trucks. So for example we sell our telematics packages, driver training packages, and more a lot of those are more digital than they used to be. We're really an engineering company anymore. >> Okay so the priority really is to drive new sources of value through digital, as opposed to-- I mean, a lot of times when we ask that question we hear, do more with less, cut costs, that sort of table stakes is what I'm referring to. >> We're past that stage now and we're having to add more and more and more value to the customer to keep up our sort of proposition as the premium brand. >> So telematics as an example. You're saying you're embedding telematics into your products and providing all the telematic services? >> So it comes with sort of a full telematics package, and then depending on the customer needs, if they're a large fleet customer or you know we have some sort of small, people who own their own truck, drivers. They can subscribe to different levels of the package and it gives them a lot more information about their driving habits. And say for fleet customers, they can track vehicles. One of the biggest costs for our large fleet customers is fuel for the vehicles, and you know we sell telematics and training packages which helps them reduce their fuel consumption. And so it adds a lot of monetary value for them as well as just increased uptime for the vehicle. >> So that's cloud based service, obviously. Okay and so you've got to product the data, digital's all about data, that's one thing that's clear. Digital transformation, it gets really fuzzy, but it's data. (laughs) So you got to protect the data. So you have to architect a solution around that. So paint a picture of your environment. If we had to draw a schematic, what would it look like? Could you describe sort of the, we got the telematics piece, but what other sort of apps are you supporting? What's the infrastructure look like? And very importantly, how are you protecting the data? >> So our infrastructure, we're pretty much, I'd say 95% virtualized these days. We're all VMware, and we do have a small hype for the environment of Citrix VDI. The actual server and applications is all in VMware. And we have a main data center at our head office in Milton Keynes, which is to say a bit north of London. So pretty much everything is hosted internally within that data center. Then we have a Lacerte location facility which is about 30 miles away, we rent rack space in another data center. So historically we were purely onsite, and then more recently we started to try and move to keeping things available across the two data centers. And you know Veeam helps us with that, the actual backups and recoveries and replication between the data centers. >> What are the key apps that you're sort of managing? >> We have pretty much everything I guess. We have Sequel databases, we use Microsoft Dynamics, CRM. We have lots and lots of internal web apps and Windows applications that have been developed internally. We have small Sharepoint installation. So we're mostly Microsoft based, but within the Microsoft stack we've probably got most of the products, in one place or another. >> You mentioned the word availability. What does that mean to your business? You know how critical is it for you to be always on? >> From the retail side, the customer facing side, most of our depos do operate 27 seven. So they will have customs coming in and out, all day every day, you know all night. 365 days of the year, so. The actual retail systems have to be online all the time. As we mentioned, some of the more sort of online systems now for customers, obviously they're designed a lot like systems are. The customers can access them wherever they are, whatever they need. Those have to be online all the time. Then as we support the retail network with a lot of backend systems, we provide IT services for some of our independent dealers as well. So you know if they sign up to be this kind of dealer, they use some of our central systems. So we have to support those employees, the actual Scania employees. A lot of those aren't 27 seven, but still, from early to late in the evening, there are people working all the time. >> And what do you see from an IT standpoint? You've got your customers, some of those have other customers there. Speak a little bit kind of to the role of IT that it plays in driving the business forward. >> Yeah, I think it's becoming more and more realized that IT is a business driver rather than (laughs) the cost that we were probably seen as, historically. >> It's still bloody expensive. >> It is. There's no getting around that. Someone's got to pay for it, but at least people are seeing the benefits. But we are, as we said, trying to create new services and things for the customers. So we're having to insure that we have the infrastructure in place that we can roll out new products and services go to market quicker. The agility that's being mentioned all the time now for the digital transformations. So it's making sure that we're in a good position to be able to react to business demands and to supply the business with whatever they need, when they need it. >> You said that VM is becoming more strategic to your operations. Do you have any key metrics that you could share with you know your peers in the industry? You know what did you get by deploying it, to sleep easier, you know? (talking over each other) You know, be able to do other things. What are some of the key results? >> I guess some of the main benefits for us is that is simple to use. More and more has been added to the product all the time, but it's simple to set up and it does just work. So you know with the solutions we've had before, we were never 100% confident that, should a disaster happen, that we would really be able to rely on everything. We do test, but. >> Maybe he tested it, but didn't test it as much. Now do you run regular tests on it? >> We do run regular tests, and there's some of the built in tools within VM give us those options, sort of automated options, like shore back up and shore replica. So we get automatic verification that the backups have actually worked, and that we can restore machines and data from them. So definitely takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. Which as you say helps us sleep easier. >> How would you describe your data protection strategy? Do you offer-- So presuming data protection is a service and you've got different service levels for different workloads, different applications, right? So how do you approach architecting that generally and specifically, where does Veeam fit? >> So Veeam for us does cover pretty much the whole range of it. So we use it for backups. >> Dave: That's your primary data protection platform? >> That is basically it, yes. So we do have actual storage based replication between the data centers. So I guess we have that level, but as far as actual recovery in a disaster, then we do rely on Veeam a lot. So we use it with disk backups, tape backups. We use pretty much all the features that we can to leverage out investment as much as possible. >> Is it essentially a perpetual incremental, you know once you seed the base? >> We do use it in that mode. So we have perpetual incrementals which backup to our main site. Those copies for those backups then get copied over to the disaster recovery site, the core location center. And then the copies at that site then get taken off to tape as well. And then also the DR center, it uses like the grandfather son backup schemes. So we have shorter term retention that's duplicated across both sites, long term attention the Colo sites, and then also tape backups. >> And when you sit down-- Well do you sit down with a line of business to determine sort of the value of the data that you're protecting? Do you sort of provide that estimate? Do you speak in terms of RPO and RTO to the business, or do you talk in different terms? Like on a scale of one to 10 how important is this data? Or how much money do you have to spend? Or do you not do charge backs? Help us understand how you decide-- >> We don't do charge backs, so we probably don't go into as much detail as if we did. But there's been more of a company wide business continuity project going on recently, so we had to have those conversations with pretty much all the business areas. >> Dave: You have, you said? >> Yeah, so how important is it? How long can you live without it? What are your backup plans should the system be unavailable? Of course if you ask people how often they want it backed up, how much can they afford to lose, everyone says nothing. But then they think about it a bit more, and it comes to, exactly, it comes to more realistic estimates. >> Okay but so do you guys, you guys are responsible for providing that level of service based on the result of that survey, if I can call it that. And it's your job to make sure that you're constantly refreshing that service level. And then living up to it. And so you're able to offer, if I understand it correctly, a very high degree of granularity? >> Yeah we have a few different options. I mean, when we roll in new products and new services, we have a default, if you know what I mean. So you know by default it will back up this often. We'll keep this many copies, we'll replicate it this often. But then, as you say, we discuss with the business, is that acceptable, you know, does it need to be that often? Does it need to be more? So we can tailor quite simply, and then you know there are a lot of different options in Veeam and lots of different ways of doing basically the same thing. But it makes it simple for us. We don't have invest a huge amount of time tailoring solutions to different applications. A couple of tick boxes and change a few numbers and we're basically there. >> Does security considerations come into the discussion of backup at all? >> It does. I mean I guess with some of the more recent attacks and things we've had to start thinking about it a bit more. You know like a separate networks, and you know trying to go into the technicalities of air gapping some of the actual backups, more than we did in the past. I don't know, I don't think we're 100% there yet with that side of things, but it's definitely higher on the agenda than it used to be. >> And how 'about cloud. We've heard some announcements today, we've heard sort of a strategy, that it's sort of on prim, on prim to cloud, cloud to on prim, cloud to cloud. Where are you with cloud and how are you using-- >> At the moment we are entirely on prim. There are a couple of Sass apps that we use, but we don't actually have any VMs or anything in the cloud at all. And it's been more historical than anything. Our parent company have a very heavy R&D focus, so all the actual research on the trucks happens in Sweden. And they've been quite anti-cloud I guess, sort of IP concerns. >> So your telematics offering is your cloud? >> Harley: It is, yeah yeah. >> Oh okay, so you're a cloud service provider. Everybody's becoming a cloud service provider or a software company, it's all part of the digital transformation I guess, right? So last question is, again, we come back to the show. Things you've learned, you know what brought you here. Some of the take aways. >> Yeah so, as I said it is becoming quite a strategic part of our infrastructure solution. So one of the things for me here was to learn what's next. So you know we like to stay up to speed and try and plan as far ahead as we can. What other new features can we use, what options does it give us. So we're interested to hear some of the options this morning. The lot about CDP, that sounded quite interesting. That again gives another different option that we don't have today. So for some of the more critical services, we could look at that as well as the sort of ray based replication that we have at the moment. And again it's good to talk to different customers, you know a lot of people have the same experiences and are going through the same issues, so it's always good to talk to different people. And just you know try to soak up as much information as I can while I'm here. >> Harley thanks very much for coming on the CUBE, appreciate it. All right keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with out next guest right after this short break.