>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois It's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2018 Brought to you by Veeam. >> Dave: Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the Noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is our second year at VeeamOn, #VeeamOn. Alan Stern is here. He's the technical solutions architect at Cisco. Alan, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Alan: Great to be here. It's a real honor and privilege, so I'm excited. >> It's a great show. It's smallish. It's not as big as Cisco Live which will be at the next month but it's clean, it's focused. Let's start with your role at Cisco as a solutions architect. What's your focus? >> So my focus is really on three areas of technology. Data protection being one of them, software defined storage or object storage, and then the Hadoop ecosystem. And I work with our sales teams to help them understand how the technology is relevant to Cisco as a solutions partner, and also work with the partners to help them understand how Cisco-- the benefit of working with Cisco is advantageous to all of us in order to help our customers come to solutions that benefit their enterprise. So your job as a catalyst and a technical expert-- so you identify workloads, use cases, and figure out how can we take Cisco products and services and point them there and add the most value for customers. That's really your job. >> To some degree, yeah, I mean in a lot of these solutions, this is an area that our executive team has said, "Hey this is something we can go help our customers with" and then it's handed down to my team and my job is then to make it happen. Along with a lot of other people. >> So let's look at these. Data protection is obviously relevant at VeeamOn. What role does Cisco play in the data protection matrix? >> So Cisco provides an optimal platform for great partners like Veeam to land these backups. It's critical, it's funny we often talk about backup, and what we should be talking about is restore. Cause nobody backs up just for the sake of backing up. But how do I restore quickly, and having that backup on premise on an optimized platform where Cisco has done all of the integration work to make sure everything is going to work is critical to the customer's success. Because as we know maintenance windows and downtime are a thing of the past. They don't exist anymore. We live in an always-on enterprise and that's really where folks like Veeam are focused. >> For you younger people out there, we used to talk about planned downtime which is just-- what? What is that? Why would anybody plan for downtime? It's ridiculous. >> Stu: Alan, what if we can unpack that a little. I think back and the data center group, you and Cisco launched UCS, the memory that it had was really geared for virtualization and I could see why Veeam and Cisco would work well together because some unique architecture that's there. This is a few years ago now that UCS has been on the market, What's the differentiation and maybe bring us inside some of the engineering work that happened between Cisco and Veeam in some of these spaces. >> So we take our engineers and lock them in with Veeam engineers into a lab and they go in and deploy the solution, they turn all the various nerd knobs to get the platform optimized. Primarily we talk about our S3260 which in a 4U space holds about 672 terabytes of storage and they optimize it and then publish a document that goes with it. We call them Cisco-validated designs. And these designs allow the customer to deploy the solution without having to go through the hit-or-miss of "what happens when I turn "this nerd knob or that nerd knob, "alter this network configuration or that one" and to get the best performance in the shortest possible time. >> Those CVDs are critical, but field knows them, they trust them, can you speak a bit to -- the presence that you have having Veeam in your pricebook, what that means, to kind of take that out to the broad Cisco ecosystem. Yeah, and it's more than just having it on the pricelist. It's the integrated support, so that the customer knows that if there's a problem they're not going to end up in a finger-pointing solution of Cisco saying "Call Veeam" or Veeam saying "Call Cisco." They have a solution and we're in lockstep so that there aren't going to be the problems. The CVD insures that problems are kept to a minimum. Cisco has fantastic support, Veeam has great support. They were talking this morning about the net promoter score being 73 which is unbelievably good. So that in the event that there is a problem, they know they're going to get to resolution incredibly quickly and they're going to get their environment restored as quickly as possible. >> So when I think about the three areas of your focus, data protection, object storage, and Hadoop ecosystem, there's definitely intersection amongst those. We talked a little bit about data protection. The object store piece, the whole software defined, is a trend that's taking off, we were talking earlier about some of the trade-offs of software defined. Bill Philbin was saying, "Well if I go out "and put it together myself when there's "a problem, I've got to fix it myself." So there's a trade-off there. I don't know if you watch Silicon Valley, Stu but the box. Sometimes it's nice to have an appliance. What are you seeing in terms of the trends toward software defined-- What's driving that? Is it choice, is it flexibility? What are the trade-offs? >> It's a couple of things. The biggest thing that's driving it is just the explosion of data. Data that's born in the cloud-- It's probably pretty good to store with one of the cloud providers. But data that's born in your data center or that is extremely proprietary and sensitive; customers are increasingly looking to say "You know what, I want to keep that onsite." and that's in addition to the regulatory issues that we're going to see with GDPR and others. So they want to keep it on site, but they like the idea of the ease of use of cloud and the nature of object storage and the cost-- the cost model for object storage is great. I take a X86 based server like UCS and I overlay a storage software that's going to give me that resiliency through erasure coding or replication. And now I've got a cost model that looks a lot like the cloud, but it's on premise forming. So that also allows me, I'm putting archival data there, I can store it cheaply and bring it back quickly. Because the one challenge with the cloud is my connectivity to my cloud provider is finite. >> Just a quick follow-up on that, I know Scality's a partner or there are other options for optic storage. >> Sure, both Scality and Swiftstack are on our global pricelist like Veeam. We also work with some other folks like IBM cloud object store, Cohesity, which sort of fits in between space, as well as, we're doing some initial work with Cloudy. >> Think about the hadoop ecosystem. That brings in new challenges, I mean A lot of Hadoop is basically software defined file system. And it's also in a distributed-- The idea of bringing five megabytes of computing to a petabyte of data. So it's leave the data where it is. So that brings new challenges with regard to architectures, protecting that data, talk about that a little bit. >> The issue with Hadoop is data has gravity. Moving lots of data around is really inefficient. That's where MapReduce was born. The data is already there. I don't have to move it across the network to process it. Data protection was sort of an afterthought. You do have replication of data, but that was really for locality, not so much for data protection. >> Or recovery to your earlier. >> But even with all of that the network is still critical. Without sounding like an advertisement for Cisco, we're really the only server provider that thought about the network as we're building the servers and as we're designing the entire ecosystem. Nobody else can do that. Nobody has that expertise. And a number of hardware features that we have in the products give us that advantage like the Cisco virtual interface card. >> That's a true point, you managed your heritage so of course that's where you started. So what advantage does that give you and one of the things we talked about in theCUBE a lot is, Flash changed everything. We used to just use spinning disks to persist and we certainly didn't it for performance. Did unnatural acts to try to get performance going. So, in many respects, Flash exposed some of the challenges with network performance. So how has that affected the market, technology, and Cisco's business? >> We're in this period of shift on Flash. Because if you think about it, at the end of the day, the Flash is still sitting on a PCI bus, it's probably ISCSI with a SATA interface. >> You got the horrible storage stack >> We move the bottleneck away from the disk drive itself, now to the bus. Now we're going to solve a lot of that with NBME and then it will come to the network. But the network's already ahead of that. We're looking at-- We have 10 gig, 40 gig, we're going to see 100 gig ethernet. So we're in pretty good shape in order to survive and really flourish as the storage improves the performance. We know with compute, the bottlenecks just move. You know, I think this morning you said Whack-a-Mole. >> Thinking about the next progression in the Whack-a-Mole, what is the next bottleneck? Is it the latency to the cloud, is it-- I mean if it's not the network, because it sounds like you're prepared for NVMe. Is it getting outside the data center? Is the next bottleneck? >> I think that's always going to be the bottleneck I use analogies like roads. We think about a roadway inside my network it's sort of the superhighway but then once I go off, I'm on a connector road. And gigabit ethernet, multi-gigabit, some folks will have fiber in the metropolitan area, but at some point they're going to hit that bottleneck. And so it becomes increasingly important to manage the data properly so that you're not moving the data around unnecessarily. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the cloud here. at the Veeam show we're talking about beyond just the data center virtualization. Talking about a multi-cloud world. I had the opportunity to go to Cisco Live Barcelona, interviewed Rowan Trollope, he talked heavily about Cisco's software strategy, living in that multi-cloud world, maybe help connect the dots for us as to how Cisco and Veeam go beyond the data center and where Cisco lives beyond that. >> So beyond the data center, we really believe the multi-cloud world is where it's going to happen. Whether the cloud is on-prem, off-prem, multiple providers, software, and servers, all of those things and both Cisco and Veeam are committed to giving that consistent performance, availability, security. Veeam, obviously, is an expert at the data management, data availability. Cisco, we're going to provide some application availability and performance through apt dynamics, we have our security portfolio in order to protect the data in the cloud and then the virtualized networking features that are there to again insure that the network policy is consistent whether you're on prem in Cloud A, Cloud B, or the Cloud yet to be developed. >> So we'll come back backup, which is the first of the three that we talked about. What's Cisco's point of view, your point of view, on how that's evolving from one -- think about Veeam started out as a virtualization specialist generally but specifically for Veeamware. Now we've got messaging around the digital economy, multi-cloud, hyperavailability, etc. What does that mean from a customer's standpoint? How is it evolving? >> Well, it's evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined. Everything is connected now, and that data -- that's the value. The data that the customer has is their crown jewels. What Veeam has done really well is yeah they start off as a small virtualization player, but as they've seen the market grow and evolve, they've made adaptations to really be able to expand and stay with their customers as their needs have morphed and changed. And in many ways, similar to Cisco. We didn't start in the server space, we saw an opportunity to do something that nobody else was doing, to make sure the network was robust and well-built and the system was well managed, and that's when we entered the space. So I think it's two companies that understand consistency is critical and availability is critical. And we both evolved with our customers as the markets and demands of the business had changed. >> Last question: What are some of the biggest challenges you're working on with customers that get you excited, that you say, "Alright I'm really going to "attack this one" Give me some color on that. >> I think the biggest challenge we're seeing today is a lot of customers are-- their infrastructure because of budgets, hasn't been able to evolve fast enough and they have legacy platforms and legacy software on those platforms in terms of availability that they've got to make the migration to. So helping them determine which platform is going to be best, which platform is going to let them scale the way they need, and then which software package is going to give them all the tools and features that they need. That's exciting because you're making sure that that company is going to be around tomorrow. >> Well that's a great point. And we've been talking all day Stu, about some of the research that we've done at WikiBon the day before, quantified in a Fortune1000, they leave between one and a half and 2 billion dollars over a three to four year period on the table because of poorly architected, or non-modern infrastructure and poorly architected availability, and backup and recovery procedures. It's a hard problem because you can't just snap your fingers and modernize and the CFO's going "How we going to pay for this" We've got this risk, this threat, We're sort of losing soft dollars, but at the end of the day they actually come down they do affect the bottom line. Do you agree that-- I said last question I lied. Do you agree that CXOs are becoming aware of this problem and ideally will start to fund it? >> Absolutely, because we talked earlier about the days of planned downtime are gone. Let a CXO have a minute of downtime and look at the amount of lost revenue that he sees and suddenly you've got his/her attention. >> Great point. Alan we've got to run. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE >> My pleasure. Great to meet you both. >> Thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017, #VtasVision. Jyothi Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas. Jyothi, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. I'm an officially an alum, now? >> A CUBE alum, absolutely! >> Two times! Three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge, you know, we give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. >> Five or six times, you'll be doing the interviews. >> I'm going to be following you guys around, then, for the next three events. >> So, good keynote this morning. >> Jyothi: Thank you. >> Meaty. There was a lot going on. Wasn't just high-level concepts, it was a lot of high-level messaging, but then, here's what we've done behind it. >> No, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. The world forgets that Veritas has only been out of Symantec, what, 20 months? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year. That was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, 'cause that's what Carlyle, our board, wants for us to do is invest in innovation and engineering, and build real products. So we took our time, 18 to 20 months to build these products out, and we launched them. And they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. >> Jyothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focused it on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you? You know, a lot of places you could've gone. Why Veritas, why now? >> Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years, and how the journey of IT, as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. That was one. Two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even midmarket customers have some sort of a Cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background, coming from other larger companies is, Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder, you know what I mean? It's just charge this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep holding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But, we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. It was refreshing, and I still remember the first interview with Veritas, and they were talking about, "Oh, we want to help move customers' data "into Azure and AWS and Google," and my brain from previous storage vendors is going, "Hang on a minute. "How are you going to make money "if you're just going to move all of this data "to everyone else?" But that's what is right for the customer. >> Okay, so, how are you going to make money? >> Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's a journey, it's not just a destination. Most customers are asking us, "On average, we adopt three clouds," is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average, they have about three separate clouds. What they say is, "Jyothi, our struggle is to move "an entire virtual business service "from on-prem to the Cloud." And once we've moved it, let's say Cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to Cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money, and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from Cloud A, anyway. If you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from Cloud A to Cloud B, and guess what. We can move it back onto on-prem on the fly. That's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. >> Let's see. The portfolio is large. Help us boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have 20 minutes, so how do we think about that in 15, 20 minutes? >> I'll focus on three tenets. Our 360 data management wheel, if you saw at the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last, but definitely not the least, storage. You want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. Visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already in the Cloud, somewhere. They have zero visibility, almost. Like, "What applications should I move into the Cloud? "If I have moved these applications, "are they giving me the right value? "Because I've invested heavily in the Cloud "to move these applications." They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. All that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the Cloud, then they lost half the battle even before they moved to the Cloud. That's one. We're giving complete visibility with the Info Map connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. >> That's matching the workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics, is that right? >> Absolutely. You could be a Vmware user, you're only interested in VM-based data that you want to move, and you want role-based access into that data, and you want to protect only that data and back it up into the Cloud. We give you that granularity. It's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to have policy-driven actions on that data. >> Jyothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, it's very heterogeneous, very siloed. You take that multi-cloud environment, most customers we talk to, if they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying. It's usually because, well, that group needed this, and somebody needed this, and it's very tactical. So, how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? >> That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, because we were going both top-down and bottoms-up in the customer's organization, and trying to find where's our sweet spot. What we figured is, it's not a one-strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time, we are talking to the CIOs, we are talking to the CXOs, and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want. We're coming top-down with our products, because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, he may not jump out of his seat the first thing. "Visibility's not what I care about, "the ease of use of this backup job "is what I care about, day one." But if you talk to the CIO, and I tell him, "I'll give you end-to-end visibility "of your entire infrastructure. "I don't care which cloud you're in." He'll be like, "I'm interested in that, "'cause I may not want to move 40% of this data "that I'm moving to Cloud A today. "I want to keep it back, or just delete it." 'Cause GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. Doesn't matter which company the data's present in. The citizen can go to that company and say, "You have to delete my data." How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? >> It's in 20 places in 15 different databases. Okay, so that's one. You had said there were three areas that you wanted to explore. >> The second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. Over the years, we had storage lock-ins. I'm not going to name names, but historically, there are lots of storage vendors that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage, or to the company, and they just get caught up in that stacked refresh every three years, and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen. You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider, and you get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data, and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit, or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore, I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as it did just to move the data into the Cloud in the first place. With VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks, if you watched the demo onstage. Literally, with a few mouse clicks, you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications, and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from Cloud A to Cloud B. >> Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. There's many reasons why with lock-in, you mentioned, kind of familiarity. But if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? >> It goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. If you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it, if we are able to tell them, "These are the 10 petabytes that you need to move, "based on what Information Map is telling you." They'll only move those 10 petabytes, so the workload comes down drastically, because they're able to visualize what they need to move. >> Stu: Third piece of storage? >> Third piece of storage. A lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched the software to find storage solution. Back in the VOS days, Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, we had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will, that was just a software layer. It would work with literally SAN/DAS, anything that's out there in the market, it would just be that file system that would work. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team. Like, for example, Abhijit, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. We are extending that beyond just a file system. We're going file, block, and object, just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware, so the customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently, though, is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage vendors, we wrote the storage ground-up. We wrote the code ground-up. We could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So, metadata standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters in it. It's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata, so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product. I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and FitBits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the Cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now, with all the Apple Watches and FitBits out there. What if the storage could predictively, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictively you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch, because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y? Combining all of the data and your history, based on the last month or last three months, I can tell you, "Jyothi, you should probably go see the doctor "or do something about it." So that's predictive, and it can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you paid millions of dollars for. >> So that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, Stu, have tried it, and they tried to make it the product, and it really isn't a product, it's a byproduct. And so, is that something I could buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap, or, what's the reaction been from customers? >> The reaction has been great, both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this. Obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have HyperScale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. That has its own roadmap. You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. Those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow, and we're going to go deep into that. Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem, object-based storage which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. It's just one single, software-defined, highly-intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. >> And the line on Veritas, the billboards, no hardware agenda. Ironic where that came from. Sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about, and when do you decide to do that? >> Great question. You know, it's all about choice. It's the cliched thing to say, I know, but Veritas, most people don't know this, has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do. We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to midmarket customers, or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. Their agility, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else, and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on, and it just works, and I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. This is for those people. Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to back up. >> To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software of course is, I want it to be fast, I want it to be simple, I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kinds of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked-in to start with? >> Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up. When you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer, and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years. It's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud-first world, where people are in the DevOps situation, where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day? That just doesn't work. We wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed onto any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, there were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations. When they tried to software-define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge, 'cause it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first. We test it on multiple hardware systems, and we keep fine-tuning it. Our ideal situation is to sell the software, and if the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. >> One of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix. Whether it was cloud, somebody's data store, that really is your focus, and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, basically, it's a TAM expansion strategy. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TAM expansion strategy, as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them. We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying, we go from the box and dropboxes of the world all the way to Dell EMC, even, with Info Map, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar-per-terabyte or dollar-per-petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. >> All right, Jyothi, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It's good to see you again. >> Jyothi: No, it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (fast electronic music)