>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017 brought to you by Veritas. (mid tempo electronic tones) >> Vegas everybody, this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Veritas Vision 2017 at The Aria Hotel. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Eric Kessels is here, he's the CTO for Fairbanks, a partner of Veritas' out of the Netherlands and Carlos Carrero is Senior Principle Product Manager at Veritas and we're going to talk OpenStack. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> We love this topic, I mean five years ago Stu, it was the hottest thing in the planet, OpenStack came out, many people including John Furrier called it a Hail Mary against Amazon, which it kind of was and now the narrative around OpenStack is well, it's kind of, nobody is really doing it, blah, blah, blah. But there are definitely pockets of interest. The developer community is still, you know, passionate about it and service providers are you know, still glomming on to OpenStack. So Carlos, give us the update from Veritas' perspective. What's your interest in OpenStack and your role at Veritas? >> Yeah, so the good thing is what Veritas has been doing with OpenStack and also what Veritas is doing with containers solves emerging problems for emerging technologies and one of the key things is, with our partners Fairbanks, all the things we have been doing to validate the product and to bring the product into market. So for us, Fairbanks is one of the perfect partners because what the value that we bring with that. So they are OpenStack experts and he will go through all the content, you know, what they do, but they really understand about OpenStack. They really identify the issues that customers have with OpenStack and how they collaborate with Veritas to build HyperScale as a product to bring those gaps into a solution and deliver those enterprise class services to customers that-- >> I mean it's the ultimate in true private cloud visions too but Eric, you guys use to be VMware experts and decided to move beyond VMware to OpenStack. What was that journey like? >> Yeah right, so that was about I think five years ago where we did a lot of VMware implementations but we, at some stage we wanted to be a different chapter in the market, so a lot of people knew VMware was more a commodity in the IT so, we started to design a Blue Ocean Strategy for our company and then we went looking in the OpenSource market, which Open Source initiative was feasible for us to move forward with. We're knowledgeable about infrastructure, so then we went into OpenStack and we did a technical validation and we looked on what the attention was is the market. So from that stage we transferred completely our company from being a VMware house to a complete OpenSource company, but it took us a while of course because it was not like a switch of a couple months. I think it took us about three years to make that complete transition from being a VMware shop to being a complete OpenSource company. >> Eric, can you talk to us about your customers? Did they come saying "I want OpenStack" or are they coming saying "You know, I need to digitally transform." What's the conversation you're having with them that leads to your solution and what are your customers doing these days? >> So when we decided for OpenStack, at that stage we had already made a decision that we would move forward for the private cloud decision, so we were not focusing on public cloud initiative for OpenStack. So we think that OpenStack was initially built for private cloud environments. So one thing that we saw is that the VMware login for VMware or for Microsoft was pretty big and customers didn't like that anymore and the costs were pretty high for the VMware licensing. So then we started talking with those customers and say, "Okay hey, there's a different kind of way of running "your workloads in a different kind of environment. "Would you be interested in it if we can "cut the cost 50 percent?" for example. And of course that's always a good trigger to get in contact with our customers and what we see is that our customers are more like enterprise customers. They're not big service providers but just companies like a customer that is running a customer site so that they can do customer, a call center for that, so that's really an enterprise-like company and I just want to add that for them, that they decided to move to OpenStack because they needed to expand their infrastructure with like, with 20 nodes and if they did it with OpenStack, it was one-third of the price in doing that, so. >> So more than 50 percent. So are these cloud service providers predominantly, or? Describe the customers. >> Yeah, we have of course customers that are service providers because they have a huge price pressure on providing virtual machines, so they need to cut costs on their infrastructure and I think that OpenStack is really suitable for that because it's flexible, it is open, you can incorporate your management systems into OpenStack very fairly easily. So for those companies, OpenStack was a really good choice of doing that. And we have also other kind of customers that are, like we have packaging company, so they print the packaging for McDonald's, for example and they have developer departments in their company that want have really fast VMs for developing their own software and if you go by more the traditional route, it takes too long before that all is in place, so they want to have some self-service functionality and that's also what OpenStack can provide, providing self-service for their departments so to make it more easy. >> Carlos, this morning your CEO Bill Coleman said that the future is software defined, multi-cloud and HyperScale. I'm sure you're sitting there, well my product is HyperScale. So maybe, you've launched the product HyperScale at the OpenStack show in Boston. We got to talk with you on The Cube there. Bring us up to speed as to that product and how it fits into really the portfolio of you from Veritas. Especially I'm kind of curious, the multi-cloud world as opposed to this is very specifically and on premises, you know, type offer. >> So we talked in Boston. In Boston we launched the 1.0 version, last week we launched the 1.1 version. We're going to launch the next one together with Red Hat. It is one of the key things we're doing together working with them and as Bill mentioned, you know it's multi-cloud and it's software-defined. So if you understand the architecture for HyperScale, for OpenStack, HyperScale for containers, it's really pure software. So what that means is that it's the hardware of your choice, we don't have any locking. As Eric mentioned there's no locking into any specific platform, that's one of the key things. But also the architecture we're building is the perfect thing for your private cloud because in a multi-cloud environment you still have to have something in house, so that's the private cloud. With all the data management capabilities that we have with Veritas, we can move the data however we want. So typically and that's the challenge you have with OpenStack, you get the locking, you get a closed environment, how do you move the data? We've got things already with net backup where we can just move the data from the data plane, move workloads somewhere else, do the recover and allow customers to just one click and recover that workloads wherever they want. So that's a perfect thing in all, the 360 Data Management that we got with Veritas. >> So what do you hear from customers around the function? I mean obviously we hear about the V-tax. People don't want to pay the VMware tax. But Eric, you're talking about when you started the conversations with your customers, what if you could save 50 percent? You must've had conversations with customers who said "Well, but I like the functionality of VMware. "I like V-Motion, I like the recovery capabilities and "they're doing a good job of adding capabilities and stuff." So where are we, CTO perspective, in terms of the functionality of OpenStack private clouds versus sort of where VMware is. >> That's a good question because the reason that we get in contact with Veritas for this kind of functionality is because the customer will start running work loads on their OpenStack environment and in the beginning, they don't worry about backups. They don't worry about quality of service and then they get into production and then they get problems with performance. They kept, "Hey, I need to have a backup, how do I do it? And oh, we don't have a backup. So these kind of gaps that were really not good resolved in OpenStack and these were the gaps that HyperScale filled in. So then on functional comparison with VMware, we took away those concerns and have a real good comparison on the functional level between OpenStack and VMware. >> I think that it was interesting. Last week we launched in the OpenStack Benelux Days. I had a keynote presenting HyperScale and I was talking about quality of service and backup data protection really, so focused on that, right? After that we had a panel with three customers and the moderator asks the three customers, "What is your biggest challenge now "you've got OpenStack, what do you need?" And the first answer was backup and the moderator said, "What do you mean, there is no backup?" And the answer for 400 people in the room, he said "No, you got Freezer but that's a project." Well now we can get it from Veritas. So that's the thing is that you need to move those workloads, you need data protection and they saw the demo where with one click, you can recover your workloads and the third customer mentioned that it is quality of service and that's a customer that Eric has been working already, they are already working on installing a HyperScale and they need quality of service because they have a workload and running on the cloud and they have to make sure they get the performance that they need for some critical workloads. And again it's a solved problem that again all the work, what we did together with Fairbanks validate and what needs they have is coming all together now. >> Eric, one of the knocks on OpenStack has been I want simplicity and OpenStack, it's got all these pieces, how do I put it together? Oh it's all software, wait backup, I didn't even think of that. How does Fairbanks help? What does kind of your stack look like and how much is it you can just roll this out and how much is it The customers actually? Some customers like that flexibility. Service providers, oh I've got my management layer and things like that. What's kind of the typical environment? And give us some of the variables. >> So based on of course the journey that we made and of course there were a good projects and bad projects, that's the learning curve that we also needed to do but we managed to build a best practice for OpenStack, so we now can do an implementation of OpenStack in less than two weeks because we know the components, we know what you should do and what you don't have to do and so we have a good starting point about an environment where you have 11 nodes in total as a good starting point for having a production environment for OpenStack and then with HyperScale included, then you need two add to data nodes additionally because then it's necessary for the copy that you need to have. But a 10 or 11 node configuration is from our perspective a very good starting point where you start with different customers with different sizes of course. >> Do you deploy the OpenStack distribution? Does the customer have preference on that? I know Veritas has a couple of options, so. >> So we have a preference for a canonical distribution because it's very open. I think the good thing from canonical is that the function set that they provide as an OpenSource product is exactly the same if you want to add that with the managed service from canonical to it and I think that the real cool thing about canonical is their way of deploying OpenStack because it leverages a really consistent way of deploying OpenStack. So for us it's very important that when we deploy OpenStack, that the result is the same on every customer's side and that's what the tools from Canonical provide us with. >> So I want to ask you about what you just said about you could do an OpenStack deployment in two weeks. I can hear some cloud guy going, "Oh I'll just go to Amazon and speed it up." So I wonder if you could address that and as well, how does that compare for instance to a VMware installation of a deployment of a private cloud? Those two examples. >> I think that when you look at the private cloud from VMware, I think for the installation it takes about the same time I think. But that's all about the knowledgeability of the partner that's doing the installation. Because that's the journey that we had so they can do the implementation fast and that they can rely on that environment because as you know in OpenStack, in the beginning there was a little bit of doubt about if it was production ready or not. And to take that away, it must be a solid implementation and that they can rely on that and then they can make sure that they can put their really important workloads also on top of OpenStack instead of making a decision, yeah, should I run it on that or not? >> So from your standpoint, it's parity in terms of just deployment ease and functionality, we could debate that all day long. What about the public cloud example? How do you respond to somebody who says "Oh, we'll just spin it up in AWS or Azure." >> Yeah, I think the public cloud is still a good thing. It's not a bad thing to have public cloud because I think in most companies you have a hybrid cloud environment, so you will have firmware and maybe you have a public cloud and a private cloud in one company. But it all depends a little bit on the type of workloads that you're going to run inside of that environment. So I think there are workloads that you should, that you can't run on a public cloud. >> Eric, does Fairbanks get involved with how they manage that, you know, kind of hybrid or multi-cloud environment? We know Carlos wants to jump in with the Veritas answer. >> Yeah, we get the question a lot of course because we know the infrastructure, how it works and as you probably know, there are a lot of cloud orchestration products in the market that can do the multi-cloud management. But to be honest, at this moment there is not one real good product that handles all the clouds correctly and managing all the bits and pieces that you need to have for an infrastructure. So, we're still looking on that to find the one that can do that. >> Yeah, what's on your wish list? What are you looking for from the ecosystem? >> I think it's really good to have, that there is no difference anymore about the type of workloads that you can run on different kind of environments. So that you choose based on functionality, what you are going to run on that. Now you see there's a lot about a focus on virtual machines but actually it all goes about the application because that's the, on the end that's something what needs to be run on that environment and having that manageability to manage the application. I think that's more important than managing the infrastructure underneath it. >> How about jumping in with the multi-cloud commentary? >> Well I think it's the customer's choice and what we do as a company is being able to give them the choice is that we don't care and that's in our DNA really. With that in the past as Mike Farmer explained today is that we didn't care about two apparatuses at the beginning, now we don't care if you are using OpenStack containers and what you want to run those. So that is the way we're building products nowadays with Veritas is that user choice. So we don't care about that anymore. >> All right Carlos, Eric, thanks very much for coming to The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you >> All right, you're welcome. >> Okay, keep it right there. My buddy Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision. Hashtag VtasVision. This is The Cube, be right back. (mid tempo electronic tones)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack foundation, RedHat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program to the program, Carlos Carrera, who's a senior principal product manager with Veritas. Carlos, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you very much. >> Stu: Alright. >> Great to be here. >> So, so many of the things we talk to here in OpenStack and the Cloud World, is relatively short-lived. The average lifetime of the average Cloud deployment, is like 1.7 years. You've been at Veritas at little bit longer with that, had an opportunity to have a conversation with you about some of your history, so we're going to have to take the abbreviated format of that, but give us a little bit about, you know, your time at Veritas, some of the ebbs and flows of your career. >> Yeah, well, again, thank you for having me here. It's great. Having 16 years with Veritas, as I mentioned before to you, you know, back in 1994, 1995 we created the first file system and volume manager, right. A lot of things happened since then, right. At that point in time, the software defined storage store was not yet there. Back, many years ago, we got some piece of software, running on top of any kind of hardware and we were able to help customers to move workloads from one place to another. In a very agnostic point of view, right. And then we move into clouds and now, three years ago, we started looking into what do we do with OpenStack clouds, because this is going to define... It's going to need something very new, something different. So today, this week, we are very happy because we finally announced hyper scale for open stack, which is a software defined storage solution that has been built for an OpenStack clouds. >> When I look at the industry these days, the term lately is storage services. How we're doing things in software more, open stack is the open source infrastructure piece. You guys are the hipster player in this space. You were doing software defined storage and software services not attached to everything else beforehand so it sounds like openstack's a natural fit. Tell us a little bit more about how Veritas fits into that. >> Well, I think that again, it was a perfect fit but we had to review what we was doing. Okay, because again, I've been many years... I was working with traditional legacy architectures in the past. We had to work class defined system that today can work with 128 notes. But we revisit... Is this what we really need to the new OpenStack clouds, are they going to scale? And as you said is that what I need the storage services. So what do we have to rethink? What do we have to do to provide those storage services to the OpenStack clouds? So three years ago, we had this, we call open flame project that today is Hyperscale. It has been building from scratch. New product, what we call emerging product at Veritas, and finally we got separated from Semantec, and we got all the visibility on the storage gain. And using all the knowhow that we have in history, as I say, we're a very big startup, right? But now, emerging with new products, we need new solutions that have been designed for OpenStack from scratch. >> Could you drill down on the product itself? Is this file block object storage? Is this sitting on top of servers. Laid off in a server-based way? How does it interact with OpenStack drivers? That sort of thing. >> Yeah, that's a good question. So it is senior storage. What we provide is block storage for OpenStack. Something key, it is based on commodity hardware of your choice, so you decided what is the hardware that you want to use. Really, it's 86 servers that you can choose in the market, whatever you want. And one of the key differentiators is that we provide block storage, but we separate the compute plane and the data plane. And this is an architectural decision we had to take three years ago. We said we cannot scale, we cannot provide the storage services that you need in a single layer of storage. Because that is what most of the software defined storage solutions on the market are doing today. And then they're having problems with things like noisy neighbor. They have problems with things like the scalability, like the quality of service, and of course they're having problems with protection. How do I protect my cloud environments with OpenStack? And we as a net pack of company, we have our leading net backup solution, we hear that from our customers. That it is not that we're bringing another solution that is going to bring another noisy neighborhood, so we really have to separate two layers. Compute plane, where you have your first copy, and the data plane, where you use cheaper and deeper storage to keep the second, third copy, and do all the data mining operations. >> That's interesting what you just said there too. Two copies, so you do have a copy that's close to the compute. But then you have another. >> Correct. Because, again, if you take a look to what you have in the market, typically it's one-size-fits-all. So, do you need three copies for everything? And today, you have emerging technologies. You can have things like mySQL, where you need high performance, or you can have things like Cassandra where you need nine copies of them, because the application itself is giving you the resiliency. So if you use a standard solution that for each OpenStack instance, you have three copies, that means you have three copies, three copies, three copies. So nine copies. And it's not only the number of copies. It's that when you make a write, you're writing nine times. And you're writing on the single layer. So we said, we have to separate that. The first thing is that what is the workload? Stop thinking about the storage. Stop thinking this is a pool of SSDs or a pool of HCDs, and then start thinking about the workload. And then we connected that very well with OpenStack because OpenStack, you have the definition of flavors, right? That is how many CPUs do you need? How much memory? But also we extend those flavors to say what do you need in terms of storage? What is the resiliency level that you need? What is the number of copies? What is the minimum performance that you need? What is the maximum performance? It's not only about solving the noisy neighbor with the maximum performance? About limiting, it's about guaranteeing that you are going to have a minimum number of IOs per second. At the end, what you can get, you can have a mySQL running with high performance needs with web servers of the same box without fighting each other. >> Carlos, can you speak a little bit about how customers consume this, how do they buy it, how's it priced? How do you get it to market? We've taught before with Veritas. Storage used to always be in an appliance or an array or things like that and the software cloud world's a little bit differently. How does that fit? >> So today's software only? So you make that decision about what hardware to use. We try to simplify the go to market model. So it's based on subscription. You just pay for the max capacity that you have. And you only pay for what you have at the compute plane. So I think a simple model that we could find to go in the open source projects, and being able to attach to that. >> Okay, could you speak to... When you talk about go to market from a partnership standpoint, it's a big market out there. Veritas, well-known name for many years but what partners are involved in this? Any certifications that are needed? We're working with our typical partners that have some expertise with OpenStack and helping with them. We are now also working with hardware providers. We are working with Supermicro and creating reference architectures with them. So we can have at the end, we have to explain to the customers what they can get from different hardware. So we're working with them. And we're also working with new partners. For example, yesterday with us on the stage, we have Verbanks. Verbanks is an OpenStack ambassador in Netherlands. They have been working with us from the very beginning of the project, on the validation. They understand OpenStack. They understand the issues and they have been doing all the validation with us about, yes guys, this is the right thing. You have to do it from the very beginning. Is this product tuned specifically for OpenStack or will it be available for other kind of private cloud applications. >> We have available for OpenStack, we're going to have it. We'll announce, I think we'll watch with you also, guys, we announced the beta version for Containers. At the end, it's the same thing. It's how do you provide persistent storage for Containers? Ninety percent of the product is all the same. It's that compute plane. It's the data plane. How can I protect my workload from the data plane? Because again, it doesn't matter if it's Container. If it's OpenStack, when I have to protect it, how do I do it? How can I read my data without affecting the performance? And that's where we have the value with the data plane. And, of course, our integration with net backup, our leader of backup solutions in the market, where just with a single click, I'm going to connect OpenStack with NetBackup, and define how my workloads are going to be protected, when and how? >> Here at the show, OpenStack Summit, how has it been working with the community? Sometimes, in the open source world, vendors have to have a certain kind of conversation with that open source community to show that they understand their needs and what they need out of the relationship. How has the week been then? >> So yeah, that's a very good question. And that goes to something that we want to announce hopefully at the end of the year. The first version that we announced this week is based on canonical Ubuntu OpenStack. At the end of the year, we are going to have RedHat, and in our DNA is to be agnostic to the pass, any hardware. And of course now, it's any kind of OpenStack distribution. So we will work with any of them. And something that we want to announce at the end of the year is to have a community edition, for Hyperscale. So again, that is our offering to the community. They can both provide-- >> And would that community edition itself be open source, or just available for the community? >> It would be available for that. >> John: For the community. >> We keep our IP. >> Great. As we get towards the end of the event, I'm sure you've had plenty of interesting customer conversations. Any one, I'm sure you can't mention names, but any interesting anecdote or just a general feel of the community? >> I feel that my anecdote for yesterday, when I had to work presentation, we had a customer on the room. We had been working on a POC with them. We have been very, very helpful customer. We finished. "Do you have any questions?" This guys stands up, went to the microphone and I was thinking, what is he going to ask? He knows everything about the product. And he said, he guys, you are doing the right thing. This is great. I'm fantastic, you are bringing a lot of value here. So I was like, wow. >> In my understanding, it was a big brand name customer who actually said where he was from, which is great validation, something we've heard all week is there's that sharing here with the community, so financial companies who, in the past, wouldn't have done that, TelCos who do that in the past, great to see. Give me the final word, Carlos. >> Yeah, the thing, again, is as you said validation is a key thing. I've been a lot of years in the company. I got this project eight months ago, and all the things I've been doing is validation, talking to customers to I don't know how many analysts I've been talking to in this week. And I love Dan said, yeah, you guys are doing the right thing. This is that direction that we have to move, so happy that finally, emerging again from Veritas, being back here with the community on OpenStack. >> Well, the speed of change, constant learning on new things and helping customers move forward. Big theme we've seen in the show. Carlos Carrera. I appreciate you joining us here. For John and Stu, thanks for watching The Cube here at OpenStack Summit. (mid-tempo electronic music)