(bright music) >> Okay, we're back. With Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah, thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest, modern, simple power protect data manager software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, you know, 1700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers. And they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions, they want us to help them modernize, and they want us as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX data storage services. >> Okay, so three pieces, let's dig to that. It's interesting appliance, everybody wants software but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works, and performs great." So what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is, that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property. Components that we've taken, that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities, we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy-to-use and easy-to-scale interface for customers. >> So the premise that I've been putting forth for, you know, months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So I'm interested in your perspective on Cyber Recovery, your specific news that you have there? >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance. We are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And Cyber Recovery, especially, when it comes to cloud deployments, it's an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our Cyber Recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major Clouds. And it really provides customers the flexibility to cure their data no matter if they're running, you know, on premises, in a Colo, at the edge in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a Cyber Recovery vault. That really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection, or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always involve my favorite Matt Baker here, It's not a zero-sum game, but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay so my other question, Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service it's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX Solutions, since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being, you know, providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so what we're announcing specifically is, that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is, you know, specify their base capacity, they specify their performance tier, they tell us do they want a one-year term, or a three-year term? And we take it from there. We get them up and running, so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX console. >> Okay, so you're keeping a simple, like, I think large, medium, small, you know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this, Jeff, maybe you can- >> So, I'll start and then, pitch me, you know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here so... >> Awesome. >> So first I'd say we offer innovative Multi-cloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis at all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> 80%? >> 80%. >> That's a big number. Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We, we are that one stop shop that I talked about. Whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software we have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX solution as well. So really we can provide solutions that helps support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives, Edge core to cloud. The other thing that we're here, as a big differentiator for Dell and Jeff touched on this a little bit earlier, is our intelligent cyber resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and Cyber Recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber-attacks, it can help customer speed time to recovery and really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber-attack and fast recovery should a cyber-attack occur. And you know, if you look at customer adoption of that solution specifically in the clouds, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So I think it's fair to say that your, I mean your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator whenever I talk to, you know your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera that an end-to-end capability that that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is, in a lot of respects, you're shifting, you know, the client's burden to your R&D, and now, they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax, but that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure, Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So we have unmatched capabilities, going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio, we have, you know, we're a leader in every category that we participate and we have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale, we have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we have the trusted market leader, no if and or buts. We're a number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC. And we were just named, for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah. And I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years, it's really becoming an adjacency and really a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for (indistinct). >> Thank you, sir. Thanks, Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment, I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell and collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music) >> In our data driven world. Protecting data has never been more critical, to guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages. You need a cyber resilient multi-cloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place, because the threat of cyber-attack are imminent. >> PowerProtects Data manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted we chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been on strategic partner with Dell Technologies, for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale, and grow as we've transition from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> Got installed it by myself, learn it by myself, with very intuitive >> While restoring a machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast. We can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Data Manager offers innovation such as Transparent Snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights and to protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the Transparent Snapshots. >> With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extreme important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager. >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection and cyber security must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now in addition, to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace. Specifically, address these customer concerns. There were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system. Taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall earlier this year, we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX backup services. And then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance. And I asked Dell off camera, really, what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So I heard a number of items Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So we're talking minutes to deploy and of course, that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard, was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market, and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now this is based on Dell benchmarks so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information go to the Data Protection page at Dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and all the videos are available on demand at thecube.net. Check out our series, on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multi-cloud Protection." Made possible by Dell in collaboration with the Cube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Wurden, VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bharadwaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the showcase. >> Great to be here. >> Great. Thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. >> We've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. What's this mean? And the press were not really on board with the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for AWS and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to re:Invent, which is only a couple weeks away Feels like tomorrow. But as we prepare, a lot going on. Where are we with the evolution of the solution? >> I mean, first thing I want to say is October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT. When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy came together to announce this. And I think John, you were there at the time I was there. It was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017 year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we built a service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. In the first years we tried to get across all the regions, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise great features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretched Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN and NSX-T across to AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward, all kinds of integration with AWS Direct Connect, Transit Gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. Along the way, Disaster Recovery, we punched out two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re:Invent, again, with Pat and Andy announcing AWS Outposts and the VMware flavor of that, VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >> That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And this has been the theme for AWS, man, since I can remember from day one, Fred. You guys do the heavy lifting as you always say for the customers. Here, VMware comes on board. Takes advantage of the AWS and just doesn't miss a beat. Continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, vSphere, and these are big workloads on AWS. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >> Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the customers. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to while at VMC. >> That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud. They can have their own supercloud, as we call it, if you take advantage of all the CapEx and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make in performance IaaS and PaaS, all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options in the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered. What are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >> Yeah. I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion. Right from day one we were the early adopters of the AWS Nitro platform. The reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we have been having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software-defined data center, compute storage networking on EC2, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally on AWS EC2 global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us, what customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service. And this was somewhat new to VMware. But we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud in AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the Log4j debacle. Industry was just going through that. Favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying, we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean, these are large banks. Many other customers around the world were super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >> Narayan, that's a great point. The whole managed service piece brings up the security. You kind of teasing at it, but there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero-day vulnerability out there. It happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week. This came out of the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me, we see the value when we talk to customers on theCUBE about this. It was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >> Well, what's interesting about this is that it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like SAP, we'll go end-to-end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies. So from availability and reliability standpoint, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customer resolve that. It works really well. >> On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What are some of the updates? >> Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we work phenomenal backend relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service or any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The key management that we jointly do. All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution, do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with the VMware Cloud in AWS. We're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >> You had mentioned, I've got list here of some of the innovations. You mentioned the stretch clustering, getting the geos working, advanced network, Disaster Recovery, FedRAMP, public sector certifications, Outposts. All good, you guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in? What's on the list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of accomplishments? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action as cloud continues to scale and modern applications cloud native. You're seeing more and more containers, more and more CI/CD pipelining with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? >> Absolutely. And I think as a five year old service offering, innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explore. First of all, our new platform i4i.metal. It's isolate based. It's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally and separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSx with NetApp ONTAP, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well. And the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex Storage. VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex Compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware Cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, top of ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in the industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud DR solution. A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Northstar. Our ability to have layer four through layer seven, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers is sort at the heart of our (faintly speaking). >> The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better faster, networking more options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the resource-defined versus hardware-defined? Because this is what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource-defined versus hardware-defined. What does that mean? >> Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware-defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software-defined data centers. And so that's been super successful. But customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally. Lower the cost even more. And so this is the part where resource-defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request before fiber machines, five containers. It's size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. That's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other. They can go back to that host based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >> It's cloud flexibility right there. I like the name. Fred, let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind, let's get into some of the, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on theCUBE is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level services. That adoption next level happens and because it's in the cloud. So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple use cases? >> Sure. Well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that like you said, as there's more and more bits, you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the i4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with Textract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >> Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? 'Cause you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where it's being rolled out 'cause you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening in with customers? >> I mean, it's been phenomenal. The customer adoption of this and banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production-grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS Markit, big conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology. And the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B. The lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe, but constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap. >> It's great to see. I mean, the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. Congratulations. >> One of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. >> It's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issue is another one. You see that constraints. I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security. I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013 and at that time people were saying, the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on-premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot, the stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? >> I absolutely agree. It's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P1. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >> And Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to end with a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a new modern shift. We're seeing another inflection point. We've been documenting it. It's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is, what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for the better and what's still the same thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >> I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique, that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about, that's elastic. You could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that. That's my take, Narayan. >> You got a lot of platform to compete on. With Amazon, you got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side. What's your answer to that question? >> I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly (faintly speaking). I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing, we are at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we have invested in Kubernetes, the means to an end, but we're so much more beyond that's happening in industry and I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >> Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's higher level services with large scale infrastructure. At your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen and Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> This is theCUBE and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation, VMware Cloud on AWS. Jointly engineered solution bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Prior to the pandemic, organizations were largely optimized for efficiency as the best path to bottom line profits. Many CIOs tell theCUBE privately that they were caught off guard by the degree to which their businesses required greater resiliency beyond their somewhat cumbersome disaster recovery processes. And the lack of that business resilience has actually cost firms because they were unable to respond to changing market forces. And certainly, we've seen this dynamic with supply chain challenges. And there's a little doubt we're also seeing it in the area of cybersecurity generally, and data recovery specifically. Over the past 30 plus months, the rapid adoption of cloud to support remote workers and build in business resilience had the unintended consequences of expanding attack vectors, which brought an escalation of risk from cybercrime. While security in the public cloud is certainly world class, the result of multicloud has brought with it multiple shared responsibility models, multiple ways of implementing security policies across clouds and on-prem. And at the end of the day, more, not less, . But there's a positive side to this story. The good news is that public policy, industry collaboration and technology innovation is moving fast to accelerate data protection and cybersecurity strategies with a focus on modernizing infrastructure, securing the digital supply chain, and very importantly, simplifying the integration of data protection and cybersecurity. Today, there's heightened awareness that the world of data protection is not only an adjacency to, but is becoming a fundamental component of cybersecurity strategies. In particular, in order to build more resilience into a business, data protection people, technologies and processes must be more tightly coordinated with security operations. Hello, and welcome to "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host today. In this segment, we welcome into theCUBE two senior executives from Dell who will share details on new technology announcements that directly address these challenges. Jeff Boudreau is the President and General Manager of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG, and he's going to share his perspectives on the market and the challenges he's hearing from customers. And we're going to ask Jeff to double click on the messages that Dell is putting into the marketplace and give us his detailed point of view on what it means for customers. Now, Jeff is going to be joined by Travis Vigil. Travis is the Senior Vice-President of Product Management for ISG at Dell Technologies, and he's going to give us details on the products that are being announced today and go into the hard news. Now, we're also going to challenge our guests to explain why Dell's approach is unique and different in the marketplace. Thanks for being with us. Let's get right into it. (upbeat music) We're here with Jeff Boudreau and Travis Vigil, and we're going to dig into the details about Dell's big data protection announcement. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming in. >> Good to see you. Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. Alright, let's start off Jeff, with the high level. You know, I'd like to talk about the customer, what challenges they're facing? You're talking to customers all the time. What are they telling you? >> Sure, as you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers, specifically listening, learning, understanding their use cases, their pain points within their specific environments. They tell us a lot. No surprise to any of us that data is a key theme that they talk about. It's one of their most important assets. They need to extract more value from that data to fuel their business models, their innovation engines, their competitive edge. So, they need to make sure that that data is accessible, it's secure and its recoverable, especially in today's world with the increased cyber attacks. >> Okay, so maybe we could get into some of those challenges. I mean, when you talk about things like data sprawl, what do you mean by that? What should people know? >> Sure, so for those big three themes, I'd say, you have data sprawl, which is the big one, which is all about the massive amounts of data. It's the growth of that data, which is growing at unprecedented rates. It's the gravity of that data and the reality of the multicloud sprawl. So stuff is just everywhere, right? Which increases that surface as attack space for cyber criminals. >> And by gravity, you mean the data's there and people don't want to move it. >> It's everywhere, right? And so when it lands someplace, think Edge, Core or Cloud, it's there. And it's something we have to help our customers with. >> Okay, so it's nuanced 'cause complexity has other layers. What are those layers? >> Sure. When we talk to our customers, they tell us complexity is one of their big themes. And specifically it's around data complexity. We talked about that growth and gravity of the data. We talk about multicloud complexity and we talk about multicloud sprawl. So multiple vendors, multiple contracts, multiple tool chains, and none of those work together in this multicloud world. Then that drives their security complexity. So, we talk about that increased attack surface. But this really drives a lot of operational complexity for their teams. Think about we're lacking consistency through everything. So people, process, tools, all that stuff, which is really wasting time and money for our customers. >> So, how does that affect the cyber strategies and the, I mean, I've often said the Cisco, now they have this shared responsibility model. They have to do that across multiple clouds. Every cloud has its own security policies and frameworks and syntax. So, maybe you could double click on your perspective on that. >> Sure. I'd say the big challenge customers have seen, it's really inadequate cyber resiliency and specifically, they're feeling very exposed. And today as the world with cyber attacks being more and more sophisticated, if something goes wrong, it is a real challenge for them to get back up and running quickly. And that's why this is such a big topic for CEOs and businesses around the world. You know, it's funny. I said this in my open. I think that prior to the pandemic businesses were optimized for efficiency, and now they're like, "Wow, we have to actually put some headroom into the system to be more resilient." You know, are you hearing that? >> Yeah, we absolutely are. I mean, the customers really, they're asking us for help, right? It's one of the big things we're learning and hearing from them. And it's really about three things. One's about simplifying IT. Two, it's really helping them to extract more value from their data. And then the third big piece is ensuring their data is protected and recoverable regardless of where it is going back to that data gravity and that very, you know, the multicloud world. Just recently, I don't know if you've seen it, but the Global Data Protected, excuse me, the Global Data Protection Index. >> GDPI. >> Yes. Jesus. >> Not to be confused with GDPR. >> Actually, that was released today and confirms everything we just talked about around customer challenges. But also it highlights at an importance of having a very cyber, a robust cyber resilient data protection strategy. >> Yeah, I haven't seen the latest, but I want to dig into it. I think this, I've done this many, many years in a row. I'd like to look at the time series and see how things have changed. All right. At a high level, Jeff, can you kind of address why Dell, from your point of view is best suited? >> Sure. So, we believe there's a better way or a better approach on how to handle this. We think Dell is uniquely positioned to help our customers as a one stop shop, if you will, for that cyber resilient multicloud data protection solution and needs. We take a modern, a simple and resilient approach. >> What does that mean? What do you mean by modern? >> Sure. So modern, we talk about our software defined architecture. Right? It's really designed to meet the needs not only of today, but really into the future. And we protect data across any cloud and any workload. So, we have a proven track record doing this today. We have more than 1,700 customers that trust us to protect more than 14 exabytes of their data in the cloud today. >> Okay, so you said modern, simple and resilient. What do you mean by simple? >> Sure. We want to provide simplicity everywhere, going back to helping with the complexity challenge. And that's from deployment to consumption, to management and support. So, our offers will deploy in minutes. They are easy to operate and use, and we support flexible consumption models for whatever the customer may desire. So, traditional subscription or as a service. >> And when you talk about resilient, I mean, I put forth that premise, but it's hard because people say, "Well, that's going to cost us more. Well, it may, but you're going to also reduce your risk." So, what's your point of view on resilience? >> Yeah, I think it's something all customers need. So, we're going to be providing a comprehensive and resilient portfolio of cyber solutions that are secure by design. And we have some unique capabilities and a combination of things like built in immutability, physical and logical isolation. We have intelligence built in with AI part recovery. And just one, I guess fun fact for everybody is we have, our cyber vault is the only solution in the industry that is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor that meets all the needs of the financial sector. >> So it's interesting when you think about the NIST framework for cybersecurity. It's all about about layers. You're sort of bringing that now to data protection. >> Jeff: Correct. Yeah. >> All right. In a minute, we're going to come back with Travis and dig into the news. We're going to take a short break. Keep it right there. (upbeat music) (upbeat adventurous music) Okay, we're back with Jeff and Travis Vigil to dig deeper into the news. Guys, again, good to see you. Travis, if you could, maybe you, before we get into the news, can you set the business context for us? What's going on out there? >> Yeah. Thanks for that question, Dave. To set a little bit of the context, when you look at the data protection market, Dell has been a leader in providing solutions to customers for going on nearly two decades now. We have tens of thousands of people using our appliances. We have multiple thousands of people using our latest modern, simple PowerProtect Data Manager Software. And as Jeff mentioned, we have, 1,700 customers protecting 14 exabytes of data in the public clouds today. And that foundation gives us a unique vantage point. We talked to a lot of customers and they're really telling us three things. They want simple solutions. They want us to help them modernize. And they want us to add as the highest priority, maintain that high degree of resiliency that they expect from our data protection solutions. So, that's the backdrop to the news today. And as we go through the news, I think you'll agree that each of these announcements deliver on those pillars. And in particular, today we're announcing the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance. We are announcing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Enhancements, and we are announcing enhancements to our APEX Data Storage Services. >> Okay, so three pieces. Let's dig to that. It's interesting, appliance, everybody wants software, but then you talk to customers and they're like, "Well, we actually want appliances because we just want to put it in and it works." >> Travis: (laughs) Right. >> It performs great. So, what do we need to know about the appliance? What's the news there? >> Well, you know, part of the reason I gave you some of those stats to begin with is that we have this strong foundation of experience, but also intellectual property components that we've taken that have been battle tested in the market. And we've put them together in a new simple, integrated appliance that really combines the best of the target appliance capabilities we have with that modern, simple software. And we've integrated it from the, you know, sort of taking all of those pieces, putting them together in a simple, easy to use and easy to scale interface for customers. >> So, the premise that I've been putting forth for months now, probably well over a year, is that data protection is becoming an extension of your cybersecurity strategies. So, I'm interested in your perspective on cyber recovery. Your specific news that you have there. >> Yeah, you know, we are in addition to simplifying things via the appliance, we are providing solutions for customers no matter where they're deploying. And cyber recovery, especially when it comes to cloud deployments, is an increasing area of interest and deployment that we see with our customers. So, what we're announcing today is that we're expanding our cyber recovery services to be available in Google Cloud. With this announcement, it means we're available in all three of the major clouds and it really provides customers the flexibility to secure their data no matter if they're running on-premises, in Acolo, at the Edge, in the public cloud. And the other nice thing about this announcement is that you have the ability to use Google Cloud as a cyber recovery vault that really allows customers to isolate critical data and they can recover that critical data from the vault back to on-premises or from that vault back to running their cyber protection or their data protection solutions in the public cloud. >> I always invoke my favorite Matt Baker here. "It's not a zero sum game", but this is a perfect example where there's opportunities for a company like Dell to partner with the public cloud provider. You've got capabilities that don't exist there. You've got the on-prem capabilities. We could talk about Edge all day, but that's a different topic. Okay, so my other question Travis, is how does this all fit into APEX? We hear a lot about APEX as a service. It's sort of the new hot thing. What's happening there? What's the news around APEX? >> Yeah, we've seen incredible momentum with our APEX solutions since we introduced data protection options into them earlier this year. And we're really building on that momentum with this announcement being providing solutions that allow customers to consume flexibly. And so, what we're announcing specifically is that we're expanding APEX Data Storage Services to include a data protection option. And it's like with all APEX offers, it's a pay-as-you-go solution. Really streamlines the process of customers purchasing, deploying, maintaining and managing their backup software. All a customer really needs to do is specify their base capacity. They specify their performance tier. They tell us do they want a one year term or a three year term and we take it from there. We get them up and running so they can start deploying and consuming flexibly. And as with many of our APEX solutions, it's a simple user experience all exposed through a unified APEX Console. >> Okay, so it's, you're keeping it simple, like I think large, medium, small. You know, we hear a lot about T-shirt sizes. I'm a big fan of that 'cause you guys should be smart enough to figure out, you know, based on my workload, what I need. How different is this? I wonder if you guys could address this. Jeff, maybe you can start. >> Sure, I'll start and then- >> Pitch me. >> You know, Travis, you jump in when I screw up here. >> Awesome. >> So, first I'd say we offer innovative multicloud data protection solutions. We provide that deliver performance, efficiency and scale that our customers demand and require. We support as Travis said, all the major public clouds. We have a broad ecosystem of workload support and I guess the great news is we're up to 80% more cost effective than any of the competition. >> Dave: 80%? >> 80% >> Hey, that's a big number. All right, Travis, what's your point of view on this? >> Yeah, I think number one, end-to-end data protection. We are that one stop shop that I talked about, whether it's a simplified appliance, whether it's deployed in the cloud, whether it's at the Edge, whether it's integrated appliances, target appliances, software. We have solutions that span the gamut as a service. I mentioned the APEX Solution as well. So really, we can provide solutions that help support customers and protect them, any workload, any cloud, anywhere that data lives. Edge, Core to Cloud. The other thing that we hear as a big differentiator for Dell, and Jeff touched on on this a little bit earlier, is our Intelligent Cyber Resiliency. We have a unique combination in the market where we can offer immutability or protection against deletion as sort of that first line of defense. But we can also offer a second level of defense, which is isolation, talking about data vaults or cyber vaults and cyber recovery. And more importantly, the intelligence that goes around that vault. It can look at detecting cyber attacks. It can help customers speed time to recovery. And really provides AI and ML to help early diagnosis of a cyber attack and fast recovery should a cyber attack occur. And if you look at customer adoption of that solution, specifically in the cloud, we have over 1300 customers utilizing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. >> So, I think it's fair to say that your portfolio has obviously been a big differentiator. Whenever I talk to your finance team, Michael Dell, et cetera, that end-to-end capability, that your ability to manage throughout the supply chain. We actually just did an event recently with you guys where you went into what you're doing to make infrastructure trusted. And so my take on that is you, in a lot of respects, you're shifting the client's burden to your R&D. now they have a lot of work to do, so it's not like they can go home and just relax. But that's a key part of the partnership that I see. Jeff, I wonder if you could give us the final thoughts. >> Sure. Dell has a long history of being a trusted partner within IT, right? So, we have unmatched capabilities. Going back to your point, we have the broadest portfolio. We're a leader in every category that we participate in. We have a broad deep breadth of portfolio. We have scale. We have innovation that is just unmatched. Within data protection itself, we are the trusted market leader. No if, ands or buts. We're number one for both data protection software in appliances per IDC and we were just named for the 17th consecutive time the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. So, bottom line is customers can count on Dell. >> Yeah, and I think again, we're seeing the evolution of data protection. It's not like the last 10 years. It's really becoming an adjacency and really, a key component of your cyber strategy. I think those two parts of the organization are coming together. So guys, really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming. >> Thank you, sir. >> Dave. >> Travis, good to see you. All right, in a moment I'm going to come right back and summarize what we learned today, what actions you can take for your business. You're watching "The Future of Multicloud Data Protection" made possible by Dell in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Right back. >> Advertiser: In our data-driven world, protecting data has never been more critical. To guard against everything from cyber incidents to unplanned outages, you need a cyber resilient multicloud data protection strategy. >> It's not a matter of if you're going to get hacked, it's a matter of when. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day. >> It is important to have a cyber security and a cyber resiliency plan in place because the threat of cyber attack are imminent. >> Advertiser: PowerProtect Data Manager from Dell Technologies helps deliver the data protection and security confidence you would expect from a trusted partner and market leader. >> We chose PowerProtect Data Manager because we've been a strategic partner with Dell Technologies for roughly 20 years now. Our partnership with Dell Technologies has provided us with the ability to scale and grow as we've transitioned from 10 billion in assets to 20 billion. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can enjoy exceptional ease of use to increase your efficiency and reduce costs. >> I'd installed it by myself, learn it by myself. It was very intuitive. >> While restoring your machine with PowerProtect Data Manager is fast, we can fully manage PowerProtect through the center. We can recover a whole machine in seconds. >> Instructor: Data Manager offers innovation such as transparent snapshots to simplify virtual machine backups, and it goes beyond backup and restore to provide valuable insights into protected data, workloads and VMs. >> In our previous environment, it would take anywhere from three to six hours a night to do a single backup of each VM. Now, we're backing up hourly and it takes two to three seconds with the transparent snapshots. >> Advertiser: With PowerProtect's Data Manager, you get the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe and available whenever you need it. >> Data is extremely important. We can't afford to lose any data. We need things just to work. >> Advertiser: Start your journey to modern data protection with Dell PowerProtect's Data Manager. Visit dell.com/powerprotectdatamanager >> We put forth the premise in our introduction that the worlds of data protection in cybersecurity must be more integrated. We said that data recovery strategies have to be built into security practices and procedures and by default, this should include modern hardware and software. Now, in addition to reviewing some of the challenges that customers face, which have been pretty well documented, we heard about new products that Dell Technologies is bringing to the marketplace that specifically address these customer concerns. And there were three that we talked about today. First, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance, which is an integrated system taking advantage of Dell's history in data protection, but adding new capabilities. And I want to come back to that in a moment. Second is Dell's PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Google Cloud platform. This rounds out the big three public cloud providers for Dell, which joins AWS and Azure support. Now finally, Dell has made its target backup appliances available in APEX. You might recall, earlier this year we saw the introduction from Dell of APEX Backup Services and then in May at Dell Technologies World, we heard about the introduction of APEX Cyber Recovery Services. And today, Dell is making its most popular backup appliances available in APEX. Now, I want to come back to the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance because it's a new integrated appliance and I asked Dell off camera, "Really what is so special about these new systems and what's really different from the competition?" Because look, everyone offers some kind of integrated appliance. So, I heard a number of items. Dell talked about simplicity and efficiency and containers and Kubernetes. So, I kind of kept pushing and got to what I think is the heart of the matter in two really important areas. One is simplicity. Dell claims that customers can deploy the system in half the time relative to the competition. So, we're talking minutes to deploy, and of course that's going to lead to much simpler management. And the second real difference I heard was backup and restore performance for VMware workloads. In particular, Dell has developed transparent snapshot capabilities to fundamentally change the way VMs are protected, which leads to faster backup and restores with less impact on virtual infrastructure. Dell believes this new development is unique in the market and claims that in its benchmarks, the new appliance was able to back up 500 virtual machines in 47% less time compared to a leading competitor. Now, this is based on Dell benchmarks, so hopefully these are things that you can explore in more detail with Dell to see if and how they apply to your business. So if you want more information, go to the Data Protection Page at dell.com. You can find that at dell.com/dataprotection. And all the content here and other videos are available on demand at theCUBE.net. Check out our series on the blueprint for trusted infrastructure, it's related and has some additional information. And go to siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis related to these and other announcements. This is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching "The Future of Multicloud Protection" made possible by Dell, in collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

>>Yeah. Welcome back to a W s reinvent 20 twenty-one. This is the live. In addition, the last year, of course, it was virtual. This is probably the most important hybrid event of the year. Over 20,000 people. We have two sets here at the Cube. My name is David. I'm really excited to have Caroline see more on the vice president of product marketing at Serato, which is now an H p e company. And Daniel, who is the director of worldwide partner Essays at A W s. Folks, welcome to the good to see you. >>Yeah, great to be here. So, >>Caroline, you got some news. Why don't we start their hard news? We always like to start with that. >>First of all, I think I just like to talk a little bit about the acquisition because it has been acquired by H. P. And in September, we announced, um, disaster recovery as a service is part of the Green Lake platform. And so that's really exciting. Both from, uh, customers as well is also H B customers. But the innovation continues here at a W s reinvent, we are announcing a new solution 02 in cloud, which is a disaster recovery for Amazon. Easy to, um, and if I think about the value that it brings to the customers, it's delivering orchestrated disaster. Recovery is delivering that simplicity at scale and scale is very important aspect because it will deliver that from tends to thousands of work clothes and as well, it's helping organizations to drive more operational efficiencies around their processes. So that's sort of a nutshell of the news. The cloud for a W s >>great. Thank you for that. So I wanna ask you, obviously, in lock down, people look to the cloud. Uh, and you know, data protection used to be just back up, and then people realize that recovery is important, but it used to be a bolt on an afterthought. You sort of launch the application of the service. And so we got to protect this thing and whatever and throw it on there that that's unacceptable. Today, if you're not going to run your digital business with a bolt on, So what? Our customers telling you in terms of what they want to see from their data protection portfolios and how are you seeing the ecosystem and a W s helping them to integrate that >>absolutely well to your point, the pandemic has absolutely accelerated a lot of businesses movement into the cloud. So companies that hadn't formerly thought about using cloud technologies are now doing that. And for them, in order to have a very simple and easy and scalable data protection solution, is critical for them to feel comfortable into moving into a W s. And so that's what we're seeing from a lot of customers. Um, and of course, back to your point about recovery with the challenges around ransomware, Um, that is definitely an area where a lot of companies have just done their back up. But they're also testing it and making sure that it's something that they know that they can rely on, um, as they moved there, workloads into the club. >>And speaking of ransomware, I mean, it's just front and center. Anybody can be a ransomware. Today they go in the dark web by ransomware service. They put a stick into a server and then bad things happen. Hopefully that that individual ends up in handcuffs, but not always so when we've seen Ransom's getting paid $40 million ransom's multi-million dollar. And we all know about the fact that our front and center So what are you seeing in terms of the customer base? How How h b n z two helping and where does a W s fit? Maybe you could start off Caroline. >>Great question, because I think from the perspective, we look at it from the need for recovery. Uh, strategy as part of your overarching, um, security and prevention is is one aspect that you always need two prevention. But to us, it's a matter of not if you're going to be attacked. It's when and when that gets through your firewall. And so you need to be able to have a recovery strategy in place that allows you to recover in minutes to set to within seconds of when that when an attack actually happens. And, um, I can give a case in, for example, for there's a company 10 Carter Protective fabric, textiles manufacturing company, MULTI-MILLION business. And they suffered to to a tax crypto attack first time, and they were using more traditional, um, back up to take. And it took him two weeks to recover having been attacked, and they suffered significant data loss, and then they deployed photo photo. Um, unfortunately, a little while later, they were attacked a second time with more sophisticated case of So it continues. Um, but this time the recovery was very different. What happened was that they were able to recover within minutes and they had seconds of data loss. And that is because of r c d p technology C D. P. Being continuous data protection. And that is with our replication and a unique journaling capability that allows you to, uh, set up the different checkpoint. So you have thousands of recovery points and you can recover to a specific recovery point with within seconds of that attack. Very, very powerful. >>I wanna ask you a question and what Caroline was just talking about with the classic metrics in this business r P O R T r P o recovery point objective. Always say, how much data do you want to lose? And people say none. Okay, how much? What kind of budget do you have? So that's always been the trade-off, although, as you mentioned, it's getting a little bit more cost-effective and then recovery time objective. How long does it take you to get back up. Absolutely. So so. Those are some of the concepts that you were talking about. I wanna ask you, Daniel, it feels like an Caroline. You feel like data protection is now becoming. It's certainly a tight adjacent to overall security. It's not security per se sick of it, so but it's but it's becoming. The lines are blurring. How do you see that you have a shared responsibility model? Where does this whole topic fit in? >>Well, I think lots of companies are really finding a lot of value in their data, right. Whereas, you know, perhaps years ago it was less. It was easy to hang on to it, to actually make it valuable to do metrics and analytics on it to do machine learning, perhaps on it. And so, by having, um, products such as the product, you know, they're now able to hang on to that data and make sure that they have it in perpetuity so that they can do what they need to do on it. So, yes, we're seeing, you know, companies that were traditionally storage cos thinking about security, security cos thinking about data, so yes, all of those lines are being blurred for sure. And I think that, you know, as far as the short security model we think of the you know, we think of our partners and ourselves, obviously as extensions. And we're really looking to have the best customer experience that we can >>can I think every company security company, Obviously you impact enterprise care a lot about security A W s. I don't know any company because I don't really care about security. That's that's not my swim land out of business. If you If you had that attitude now. So from from your standpoint, where does it fit inside of you know, you're you're thinking, How are you guys thinking about security and data protection? Back up and recovery? Is it all just coming together or they still kind of separate entities? >>No, you're absolutely right. It is coming together, and what we're seeing is we're having a lot more conversations with ISO's, um so the more the security offices of organizations and I think what's happening is that's where the budget is to. And so you're saying they're sort of the working together on the I T and also the Office of Security to um so we're having more conversations there, and we see that, as I mentioned before, the recovery strategy is a key element of our focus. And what we can do is part of the overarching strategy of an organization. >>So what? How should we think about the cloud? Is it another layer of protection? Um, is it a replacement for tape? Maybe not, but we need as much protection as possible. So how should we think about the cloud in the context of data protection? >>Well, the cloud, Yeah, absolutely. Um can provide an alternative to tape or, um disc, for example, of this year. We also added support for a mutability preserved for A W S. With so we are ensuring in the fact that you know you can be changed so that that's absolutely critical. >>So that's a a right once read only technology. That's a service that you tap. So your integrating zero was integrating with that capability. So that's another layer of protection. That's another layer of protection. And then, of course, you know there's there's gaps, is another part of the strategy. So let's talk strategy for a minute. What's the I know it's not one size fits all, but what are you seeing as best practice strategies for customers to protect themselves against traditional just human error? Cyber attacks? What's the what's the sort of prevailing approach? How should we think about that? >>Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. Those the, you know, the filed elections, the database corruptions, and so our solutions, that is, our continuous data protection. It absolutely is, um, the ability to be able to get that granular level of recovery, which you can do with backups. I'm not saying that backup isn't part of your overall strategy, but if you're actually trying to recover quickly and within seconds to whether it's an attack to whether it's a file deleted, a database corruption, you need that continuous data protection. And that's something that you need to us that we've been delivering since the day that um was formed. So >>that's your secret sauce is it is a very granular ability to dial down based on your r p o. That's requirements based on the application requirements, uh, and then bring in the cloud for things like mutability. Maybe gapping. Maybe Last resort is still the last resort. I don't know. Maybe >>there. So, um, you know, a w s to be a target for disaster recovery. So all back up. >>You talk about that? >>Yeah. So, with what we have enabled is first of all, if you want to, um, my great, your work clothes to a W s. And we're seeing an awful lot of that. We provide that capability. So the mobility aspect, if you are looking at instead of an on premises disaster recovery site, you can use a W S D R site. Um, And if you want to back up to a W s and use, um, cost efficient storage, we support that with cloud tearing and mutability. And as I say today, we're announcing cloud for a W s, which is once you've got your work clothes in a W s. We can protect them now in, um, in a W s itself. So the full spectrum. And then earlier this year, we announced for communities for US work clothes, So we're really trying to ensure that we can protect any A W s workload wherever it is. >>So I look around here pretty impressive given that we're in the second year of a pandemic here, pretty packed floor. But the ecosystem is just exploding. That's gonna make you feel good. Cos like choosing to partner with a W s leaning in writing to your cloud-native fooling. Maybe give us the update on how you see this partnership. >>Well, I mean, just to Caroline's earlier point, you can see how Xero is continuing to innovate, right? And that's really key. So, um, having a cloud-native solution and then also having a solution that works for us. We're seeing a lot of companies thinking about containers thinking about server lists. And so, you know, the best partnerships that we have are the ones in which they're innovating with us continuously. And I've known about since I started in 2014. So they've been around for a long time, and they're continuing, um, to do that. And they are working closely with us to do P O. C. D. S. And and to help our customers really get what they need, um, in the data protection space and continuing to innovate, which is >>your customers, they want that they need that your your deep into data protection. Yes. You're scale of cloud But you're not going to have the the capabilities of Stack. So that one plus one hopefully is greater than to How do you where can we find out more information about you know, the new solutions? What's the what's the call to >>action culture as well? A couple of things. We've, uh we just We just launched deserted for a W s hands-on lab. And what that does is allow in your own time in your own environment to be able to try with a W S as a target and back up. Um, so we've just launched that and that enables you to see how it works with a W S. We also have for communities, um, lab as well, so you can see how it works with a K s. Uh, coming soon, we're going to have to in cloud lab that you can actually see how to protect your workload in the cloud in a W s. So those are the really the best ways to be able to Well, for a call to action is try. The lab really is >>awesome. Guys, thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Very important topic and keep up the good work. >>Thank you. Thank you. Very well. So >>we're seeing the evolution of data protection rethinking data protection in 2020. No longer is it a Bolton cloud modernization with deep stacks. Fine granularity for your r p o. But also quick recovery protection from Ransomware. It's a whole new world, and we're here to cover it. My name is David. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage. We'll be right back. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Mm, yeah.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of H P S. Green Lake announcement. We've been following Green Lake and the cadence of announcements making. Now we're gonna talk about ransomware, ransomware become a household term. But what people really don't understand is that virtually any bad actor can become a ransomware criminal by going on the dark web hiring a ransomware as a service sticking, putting a stick into a server and taking a piece of the action and that is a really insidious threat. Uh, the adversaries are extremely capable, so we're going to dig into that with Omar assad, who's the storage platform, lead cloud data services at H P E and Deepak verma vice president of product Zito, which is now an H P E company Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. >>Thank you. Welcome. Pleasure to be here. So >>over you heard my little narrative upfront. How does the Xarelto acquisition fit into that discourse? >>Thank you. Dave first of all, we're extremely excited to welcome Sir toe into the HP family. Uh, the acquisition of Puerto expands the Green Lake offerings from H P E uh, into the data protection as a service and ransomware protection as a service capabilities and it at the same time accelerates the transformation that the HP storage businesses going through as it transforms itself into more of a cloud native business, which sort of follows on from the May 4th announcements that you helped us cover. Uh, this enables the HP sales teams to now expand the data protection perimeter and to start offering data protection as a service and ransomware as a service with the best in class technologies uh, from a protection site as well as from ransomware recovery side of the house. And so we're all the way down already trying to integrate uh, you know, the little offerings as part of the Green lake offerings and extending support through our services organization. And the more of these announcements are gonna roll out later in the month. >>And I think that's what you want to see from it as a service offering. You want to see a fast cadence of new services that are not a box by a box that are applying. No, it's services that you want to access. So let's, let's talk about before we get into the tech, can we talk about how you're helping customers deal with ransomware? Maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing. >>First of all, extremely excited to be part of the HP family now. Um, Quick history and that we've been around for about 11 years. We've had about 9000 plus customers and they all benefit from essentially the same technology that we invented 11 years ago. First and foremost, one of the use cases has been continuous data protection. So were built on the CdP platform, which means extremely low RTO S and R P O S for recovery. I'll give you example there um, United Airlines is an application that cost them $1 million dollars for every hour that they're down. They use traditional approaches. That would be a lot of loss with Zito, we have that down two seconds of loss in case and the application goes down. So that's kind of core and fundamental to our plaque. The second uh critical use case that for us has been simplicity. A lot of customers have said we make the difficult, simple. So DRS is a complex uh process. Um, give you an example there. Hcea Healthcare Consolidated four different disaster recovery platforms into a single platform in Puerto and saved about $10 million dollars a year. So it's making that operations of having disaster recovery process is much simpler. Um the third kind of critical use case for us as uh, the environment has evolved as the landscape has involved has been around hybrid cloud. So being able to take customers to the platforms that they want to go to that's critical for us And for our customers an example, there is Kingston technology's so Kingston tried some competitive products to move to Azure, it would take them about 24 hours to recover 30 VMS or so with zero technology. They will get about all their 1000 VMS up in Azure instantaneously. So these are three use cases that were foundational. Built. Built the company in the tech. >>Nice. Thank you. Thank you for that. So simple works well these days, especially with all this complexity we have to deal with. Can we get into the secret sauce a little bit. I mean CdP has been around forever. What do you guys do that? That's different. Maybe you can talk about that. Sure. >>Um it's cdp based, I think we've perfected the technology. It's less about being able to just copy the data. It's more about what you do when things go bump. We've made it simpler with driven economies of scale lower and being platform agnostic. We've really brought that up across to whatever platforms once upon a time it was moving from physical to virtual or even across different virtualization platforms and then being able to move across to whatever cloud platform customer may want or or back >>to cbP continuous data protection by the way for the audience that may not know that go ahead. And >>one of the additional points that I want to add to the box comment over here is the the basics of platform independence is what really drew uh hp technologists into the technology because you know, one of the things we have many, we have the high end platform with the H B electra nine Kv of the electro six kids the midrange platform. Then we have a bunch of file and object offerings on the side. What zero does it University universally applies to all those technologies and along with, you know, as you pair them up with our computer offerings to offer a full stack but now the stack is disaster recovery capable. Natively with the integration of certo, you know, one of the things that, you know, Deepak talked about about the as your migrations that a lot of the customers are talking about cloud is also coming up as a D our use case for a lot of our customers, customers, you know, you know, as we went through thousands of customers interviews one of the, one of the key things that came back was investing in a D our data center which is just waiting there for a disaster to happen. It's a very expensive insurance policy. So absurd. Oh, through its native capabilities allows customers to do is to just use public cloud as a D our target and and as a service, it just takes care of all the format conversions and recoveries and although that's completely automated inside the platform and and we feel that, you know, when you combine this either at the high end of data center storage offering or the middle age offering with this replication, D. R. And ransomware protection built into the same package, working under the same hood, it just simplifies and streamlines the customers deployment. >>Come here a couple of things. So first of all historically, if you wanted to recover to appoint within let's say, you know, 10 seconds, five seconds you have to pay up. Big time. Number one. Number two is you couldn't test your D. R. It was too risky. So people just had it in, they had a checkbox on compliance but they actually couldn't really test it because they were afraid they were going to lose data. So it sounds like you're solving both of those problems or >>or you know we remember the D. R. Test where it was a weekend. It was an event right? It was the event and at the end of july that the entire I. T. Organizing honey >>it's not gonna be home this weekend. Exactly what >>we've changed. That is a click of a button. You can D. R. Test today if you want to you can have disaster recovery still running. You can D. R. Test in Azure bring up your environment an isolated network bubble, make sure everything's running and bring it and bring it down. The interesting thing is the technology was invented back when our fear in the industry was losing a data center was losing power was catastrophic, natural disasters. But the technology has lent itself very well to the new threats which which are very much around ransomware as you mentioned because it's a type of disaster. Somebody's going after your data. Physical servers are still around but you still need to go back to a point in time and you need to do that very quickly. So the technology has really just found itself uh appealing to new challenges. >>If a customer asks you can I really eliminate cyber attacks, where should I put my my if I had 100 bucks to spend. Should I spend it on you know layers and defense should I spend it on recovery. Both, what would you tell them? >>I think it's a balanced answer. I think prevention is 100% impossible. Uh It's really I'd say spend it in in thirds. You want to spend a third of it and and prevention a third of it maybe in detection and then a third of it in uh recovery. So it's really that balancing act that means you can't leave the front door open but then have a lot of recovery techniques invested in. It has to be it has to be a balance and it's also not a matter of if it's a matter of when so we invest in all three areas. Hopefully two of them will work to your advantage. >>You dave you you should always protect your perimeter. I mean that that goes without saying but then as you invest in other aspects of the business, as Deepak mentioned, recovery needs to be fast and quick recovery whether from your recovering from a backup disaster. Are you covering from a data center disaster a corrupted file or from a ransomware attack. A couple of things that zero really stitches together like journal based recovery has been allowed for a while but making journal based recovery platform independent in a seamless fashion with the click of a button within five seconds go back to where your situation was. That gives you the peace of mind that even if the perimeter was breached, you're still protected, you know, five minutes into the problem And, and that's the peace of mind, which along with data protection as a service, disaster recovery as a service and now integrating this, you know, recovery from ransomware along with it in a very simple, easy to consume package is what drew us into the >>more you can do this you said on the use the cloud as a target. I could use the cloud as an air gap if I wanted to. It sounds like it's cloud Native, correct? Just wrap your stack in kubernetes and shove it in the cloud and have a host and say we're cloud to No, really I'm serious. So >>absolutely, we we looked at that approach and that that's where the challenge comes in, Right? So I give you the example of Kingston technology just doesn't scale, it's not fast enough. What we did was developed a platform for cloud Native. We consume cloud services where necessary in order to provide that scalability. So one example in Azure is being able to use scale set. So think about a scenario where you just declare a disaster, you've got 1000 VMS to move over, we can spin up the workers that need to do the work to get 1000 VMS spin them down. So you're up and running instantaneously and that involves using cloud Native uh tools and technologies, >>can we stay on that for a minute, So take take us through an example of what life was like would be like without zero trying to recover and what it's like with Puerto resources, complexity time maybe you could sort of paint a picture. Sure. >>Let me, I'll actually use an example from a customer 10 Kata. They uh develop defensive fabrics, especially fabric. So think about firefighters, think about our men and women abroad that need protective clothing that developed the fibers behave. They were hit by ransomware by crypto locker. That this was before zero. Unfortunately it took they took about a two week uh data loss. It took them weeks to recover that environment, bring it back up and the confidence was pretty low. They invested in, they looked at our technology, they invested in the technology and then they were hit with a different variant of crypto locker immediately. The the IT administrators and the ITS folks there were relieved right, they had a sense of confidence to say yes we can recover. And the second time around they had data loss of about 10 seconds, they could recover within a few minutes. So that's the before and after picture giving customers that confidence to say yep, a breach happened, we tried our best but now it's up to recovery and I can recover without having to dig tapes out from some vault and hopefully have a good copy of data sitting there and then try that over and over again and there's a tolerance right before a time before which business will not be able to sustain itself. So what we want to do is minimize that for businesses so that they can recover as quickly as possible with as little data loss as possible. >>Thank you for that. So, Omar, there's a bigger sort of cyber recovery agenda that you have as part of, of green lake, I'm sure. What, what should we expect, what's next? Where do you want to take this? >>So uh excellent question point in the future day. So one of the things that you helped us, uh you know, unveil uh in May was the data services. Cloud console. Data services. Cloud console was the first uh sort of delivery as we took the storage business as it is and start to transform into more of a cloud native business. We introduced electra uh which is the cloud native hardware with the customers buy for persistent storage within their data center. But then data services, cloud console truly cemented that cloud operational model. Uh We separated the management from, from the devices itself and sort of lifted it up as a sas service into the public, public cloud. So now what you're gonna see is, you know, more and more data and data management services come up on the data services. Cloud console and and zero is going to be one of the first ones. Cloud physics was another one that we we talked about, but zero is the is the true data management service that is going to come up on data services, cloud console as part of the Green Lake services agenda that that HP has in the customer's environ and then you're gonna see compliance as a service. You're going to see data protection as a service. You're gonna see disaster recovery as a service. But the beautiful thing about it is, is choice with simplicity as these services get loaded up on data services, clown console. All our customers instantly get it. There's nothing to install, there's nothing to troubleshoot uh, there's nothing to size. All those capabilities are available on the console, customers go in and just start consuming Xarelto capabilities from a management control plane, Disaster recovery control plan are going to be available on the data services, cloud console, automatically detecting electro systems, rian Bear systems, container based systems, whichever our customers have deployed and from there is just a flip of a button. Another way to look at it is it sort of gives you that slider that you have data protection or back up on one side, you've got disaster recovery on one side, you've got ransomware protection on on the extreme right side, you can just move a slider across and choose the service level that you want without worrying about best practices, installation, application integration. All of that just takes control from the data services, cloud concepts. >>Great, great summary because historically you would have to build that right now. You can buy it as a service. You can programmatically, you know, deploy it and that's a game changer. Have to throw it over the fence to some folks. That's okay. Now, you know, make it make it work and then they change the code and you come back a lot of finger pointing. It's now it's your responsibility. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. We're excited to provide Zito continue provides the desert of customers but also integrate with the Green Green Lake platform and let the rest of Green Lake customers experience some of the sort of technology and really make that available as a service. >>That's great. This is a huge challenge for customers. I mean they do, I pay their ransom. Do not pay the ransom. If I pay the ransom the FBI is going to come after me. But if I don't pay the ransom, I'm not gonna get the crypto key. So solutions like this are critical. You certainly see the president pushing for that. The United States government said, hey, we got to do a better job. Good job guys, Thanks for for sharing your story in the cube and congratulations. Thank >>you. Thank you David. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. Uh this is the, I want to tell you that everything that you're seeing today as part of the Green Lake announcement is going to be available on demand as part of the HP discover more. So you got to check that out. Thank you. You're watching the cube. >>Mhm mm.

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this CUBE video exclusive. This is Dave Vellante, and as I've said many times what people sometimes forget is Oracle's chairman is also its CTO, and he understands and appreciates the importance of engineering. It's the lifeblood of tech innovation, and Oracle continues to spend money on R and D. Over the past decade, the company has evolved its Exadata platform by investing in core infrastructure technology. For example, Oracle initially used InfiniBand, which in and of itself was a technical challenge to exploit for higher performance. That was an engineering innovation, and now it's moving to RoCE to try and deliver best of breed performance by today's standards. We've seen Oracle invest in machine intelligence for analytics. It's converged OLTB and mixed workloads. It's driving automation functions into its Exadata platform for things like indexing. The point is we've seen a consistent cadence of improvements with each generation of Exadata, and it's no secret that Oracle likes to brag about the results of its investments. At its heart, Oracle develops database software and databases have to run fast and be rock solid. So Oracle loves to throw around impressive numbers, like 27 million AKI ops, more than a terabyte per second for analytics scans, running it more than a terabyte per second. Look, Oracle's objective is to build the best database platform and convince its customers to run on Oracle, instead of doing it themselves or in some other cloud. And because the company owns the full stack, Oracle has a high degree of control over how to optimize the stack for its database. So this is how Oracle intends to compete with Exadata, Exadata Cloud@Customer and other products, like ZDLRA against AWS Outposts, Azure Arc and do it yourself solutions. And with me, to talk about Oracle's latest innovation with its Exadata X9M announcement is Juan Loaiza, who's the Executive Vice President of Mission Critical Database Technologies at Oracle. Juan, thanks for coming on theCUBE, always good to see you, man. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to be here. >> All right, let's get right into it and start with the news. Can you give us a quick overview of the X9M announcement today? >> Yeah, glad to. So, we've had Exadata on the market for a little over a dozen years, and every year, as you mentioned, we make it better and better. And so this year we're introducing our X9M family of products, and as usual, we're making it better. We're making it better across all the different dimensions for OLTP, for analytics, lower costs, higher IOPs, higher throughputs, more capacity, so it's better all around, and we're introducing a lot of new software features as well that make it easier to use, more manageable, more highly available, more options for customers, more isolation, more workload consolidation, so it's our usual better and better every year. We're already way ahead of the competition in pretty much every metric you can name, but we're not sitting back. We have the pedal to the metal and we're keeping it there. >> Okay, so as always, you announced some big numbers. You're referencing them. I did in my upfront narrative. You've claimed double to triple digit performance improvements. Tell us, what's the secret sauce that allows you to achieve that magnitude of performance gain? >> Yeah, there's a lot of secret sauce in Exadata. First of all, we have custom designed hardware, so we design the systems from the top down, so it's not a generic system. It's designed to run database with a specific and sole focus of running database, and so we have a lot of technologies in there. Persistent memory is a really big one that we've introduced that enables super low response times for OLTP. The RoCE, the remote RDMA over convergency ethernet with a hundred gigabit network is a big thing, offload to storage servers is a big thing. The columnar processing of the storage is a huge thing, so there's a lot of secret sauce, most of it is software and hardware related and interesting about it, it's very unique. So we've been introducing more and more technologies and actually advancing our lead by introducing very unique, very effective technologies, like the ones I mentioned, and we're continuing that with our X9 generation. >> So that persistent memory allows you to do a right directly, atomic right directly to memory, and then what, you update asynchronously to the backend at some point? Can you double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, so we use persistent memory as kind of the first tier of storage. And the thing about persistent memory is persistent. Unlike normal memory, it doesn't lose its contents when you lose power, so it's just as good as flash or traditional spinning disks in terms of storing data. And the integration that we do is we do what's called remote direct memory access, that means the hardware sends the new data directly into persistent memory and storage with no software, getting rid of all the software layers in between, and that's what enables us to achieve this extremely low latency. Once it's in persistent memory, it's stored. It's as good as being in flash or disc. So there's nothing else that we need to do. We do age things out of persistent memory to keep only hot data in there. That's one of the tricks that we do to make sure, because persistent memory is more expensive than flash or disc, so we tier it. So we age data in and out as it becomes hot, age it out as it becomes cold, but once it's in persistent memory, it's as good as being stored. It is stored. >> I love it. Flash is a slow tier now. So, (laughs) let's talk about what this-- >> Right, I mean persistent memory is about an order of magnitude faster. Flash is more than an order of magnitude faster than disk drive, so it is a new technology that provides big benefits, particularly for latency on OLTP. >> Great, thank you for that, okay, we'll get out of the plumbing. Let's talk about what this announcement means to customers. How does all this performance, and you got a lot of scale here, how does it translate into tangible results say, for a bank? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of ways. So, I mentioned performance is a big thing, always with Exadata. We're increasing the performance significantly for OLTP, analytics, so OLTP, 50, 60% performance improvements, analytics, 80% performance improvements in terms of costs, effectiveness, 30 to 60% improvement, so all of these things are big benefits. You know, one of the differences between a server product like Exadata and a consumer product is performance translates in the cost also. If I get a new smartphone that's faster, it doesn't actually reduce my costs, it just makes my experience a little better. But with a server product like Exadata, if I have 50% faster, I can translate that into I can serve 50% more users, 50% more workload, 50% more data, or I can buy a 50% smaller system to run the same workload. So, when we talk about performance, it also means lower costs, so if big customers of ours, like banks, telecoms, retailers, et cetera, they can take that performance and turn it into better response times. They can also take that performance and turn it into lower costs, and everybody loves both of those things, so both of those are big benefits for our customers. >> Got it, thank you. Now in a move that was maybe a little bit controversial, you stated flat out that you're not going to bother to compare Exadata cloud and customer performance against AWS Outposts and Azure Stack, rather you chose to compare to RDS, Redshift, Azure SQL. Why, why was that? >> Yeah, so our Exadata runs in the public cloud. We have Exadata that runs in Cloud@Customer, and we have Exadata that runs on Prem. And Azure and Azure Stack, they have something a little more similar to Cloud@Customer. They have where they take their cloud solutions and put them in the customer data center. So when we came out with our new X8, 9M Cloud@Customer, we looked at those technologies and honestly, we couldn't even come up with a good comparison with their equivalent, for example, AWS Outpost, because those products really just don't really run. For example, the two database products that Outposts promote or that Amazon promotes is Aurora for OLTP and Redshift for analytics. Well, those two can't even run at all on their Outposts product. So, it's kind of like beating up on a child or something. (laughs) It doesn't make sense. They're out of our weight class, so we're not even going to compare against them. So we compared what we run, both in public cloud and Cloud@Customer against their best product, which is the Redshifts and the Auroras in their public cloud, which is their most scalable available products. With their equivalent Cloud@Customer, not only does it not perform, it doesn't run at all. Their Premiere products don't run at all on those platforms. >> Okay, but RDS does, right? I think, and Redshift and Azure SQL, right, will run a their version, so you compare it against those. What were the results of the benchmarks when you did made those comparisons? >> Yeah, so compared against their public cloud or Cloud@Customer, we generally get results that are something like 50 times lower latency and close to a hundred times higher analytic throughput, so it's orders of magnitude. We're not talking 50%, we're talking 50 times, so compared to those products, there really is kind of, we're in a different league. It's kind of like they're the middle school little league and we're the professional team, so it's really dramatically different. It's not even in the same league. >> All right, now you also chose to compare the X9M performance against on-premises storage systems. Why and what were those results? >> Yeah, so with the on-premises, traditionally customers bought conventional storage and that kind of stuff, and those products have advanced quite a bit. And again, those aren't optimized. Those aren't designed to run database, but some customers have traditionally deployed those, you know, there's less and less these days, but we do get many times faster both on OLTP and analytic performance there, I mean, with analytics that can be up to 80 times faster, so again, dramatically better, but yeah, there's still a lot of on-premise systems, so we didn't want to ignore that fact and compare only to cloud products. >> So these are like to like in the sense that they're running the same level of database. You're not playing games in terms of the versioning, obviously, right? >> Actually, we're giving them a lot of the benefit. So we're taking their published numbers that aren't even running a database, and they use these low-level benchmarking tools to generate these numbers. So, we're comparing our full end-to-end database to storage numbers against their low-level IO tool that they've published in their data sheets, so again, we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but we're still orders of magnitude better. >> Okay, now another claim that caught our attention was you said that 87% of the Fortune 100 organizations run Exadata, and you're claiming many thousands of other organizations globally. Can you paint a picture of the ICP, the Ideal Customer Profile for Exadata? What's a typical customer look like, and why do they use Exadata, Juan? >> Yeah, so the ideal customer is pretty straightforward, customers that care about data. That's pretty much it. (Dave laughs) If you care about data, if you care about performance of data, if you care about availability of data, if you care about manageability, if you care about security, those are the customers that should be looking strongly at Exadata, and those are the customers that are adopting Exadata. That's why you mentioned 87% of the global Fortune 100 have already adopted Exadata. If you look at a lot of industries, for example, pretty much every major bank almost in the entire world is running Exadata, and they're running it for their mission critical workloads, things like financial trading, regulatory compliance, user interfaces, the stuff that really matters. But in addition to the biggest companies, we also have thousands of smaller companies that run it for the same reason, because their data matters to them, and it's frankly the best platform, which is why we get chosen by these very, very sophisticated customers over and over again, and why this product has grown to encompass most of the major corporations in the world and governments also. >> Now, I know Deutsche bank is a customer, and I guess now an engineering partner from the announcement that I saw earlier this summer. They're using Cloud@Customer, and they're collaborating on things like security, blockchain, machine intelligence, and my inference is Deutsch Bank is looking to build new products and services that are powered by your platforms. What can you tell us about that? Can you share any insights? Are they going to be using X9M, for example? >> Yes, Deutsche Bank is a partnership that we announced a few months ago. It's a major partnership. Deutsche Bank is one of the biggest banks in the world. They traditionally are an on-premises customer, and what they've announced is they're going to move almost the entire database estate to our Exadata Cloud@Customer platform, so they want to go with a cloud platform, but they're big enough that they want to run it in their own data center for certain regulatory reasons. And so, the announcement that we made with them is they're moving the vast bulk of their data estate to this platform, including their core banking, regulatory applications, so their most critical applications. So, obviously they've done a lot of testing. They've done a lot of trials and they have the confidence to make this major transition to a cloud model with the Exadata Cloud@Customer solution, and we're also working with them to enhance that product and to work in various other fields, like you mentioned, machine learning, blockchain, that kind of project also. So it's a big deal when one of the biggest, most conservative, best respected financial institution in the world says, "We're going all in on this product," that's a big deal. >> Now outside of banking, I know a number of years ago, I stumbled upon an installation or a series of installations that Samsung found out about them as a customer. I believe it's now public, but they've something like 300 Exadatas. So help us understand, is it common that customers are building these kinds of Exadata farms? Is this an outlier? >> Yeah, so we have many large customers that have dozens to hundreds of Exadatas, and it's pretty simple, they start with one or two, and then they see the benefits, themselves, and then it grows. And Samsung is probably the biggest, most successful and most respected electronics company in the world. They are a giant company. They have a lot of different sub units. They do their own manufacturing, so manufacturing's one of their most critical applications, but they have lots of other things they run their Exadata for. So we're very happy to have them as one of our major customers that run Exadata, and by the way, Exadata again, very huge in electronics, in manufacturing. It's not just banking and that kind of stuff. I mean, manufacturing is incredibly critical. If you're a company like Samsung, that's your bread and butter. If your factory stops working, you have huge problems. You can't produce products, and you will want to improve the quality. You want to improve the tracking. You want to improve the customer service, all that requires a huge amount of data. Customers like Samsung are generating terabytes and terabytes of data per day from their manufacturing system. They track every single piece, everything that happens, so again, big deal, they care about data. They care deeply about data. They're a huge Exadata customer. That's kind of the way it works. And they've used it for many years, and their use is growing and growing and growing, and now they're moving to the cloud model as well. >> All right, so we talked about some big customers and Juan, as you know, we've covered Exadata since its inception. We were there at the announcement. We've always stressed the fit in our research with mission critical workloads, which especially resonates with these big customers. My question is how does Exadata resonate with the smaller customer base? >> Yeah, so we talk a lot about the biggest customers, because honestly they have the most critical requirements. But, at some level they have worldwide requirements, so if one of the major financial institutions goes down, it's not just them that's affected, that reverberates through the entire world. There's many other customers that use Exadata. Maybe their application doesn't stop the world, but it stops them, so it's very important to them. And so one of the things that we've introduced in our Cloud@Customer and public cloud Exadata platforms is the ability for Oracle to manage all the infrastructure, which enables smaller customers that don't have as much IT sophistication to adopt these very mission critical technology, so that's one of the big advancements. Now, we've always had smaller customers, but now we're getting more and more. We're getting universities, governments, smaller businesses adopting Exadata, because the cloud model for adopting is dramatically simpler. Oracle does all the administration, all the low-level stuff. They don't have to get involved in it at all. They can just use the data. And, on top of that comes our autonomous database, which makes it even easier for smaller customers to adapt. So Exadata, which some people think of as a very high-end platform in this cloud model, and particularly with autonomous databases is very accessible and very useful for any size customer really. >> Yeah, by all accounts, I wouldn't debate Exadata has been a tremendous success. But you know, a lot of customers, they still prefer to roll their own, do it themselves, and when I talk to them and ask them, "Okay, why is that?" They feel it limits their reliance on a single vendor, and it gives them better ability to build what I call a horizontal infrastructure that can support say non-Oracle workloads, so what do you tell those customers? Why should those customers run Oracle database on Exadata instead of a DIY infrastructure? >> Yeah, so that debate has gone on for a lot of years. And actually, what I see, there's less and less of that debate these days. You know, initially customers, many customers, they were used to building their own. That's kind of what they did. They were pretty good at it. What we have shown customers, and when we talk about these major banks, those are the kinds of people that are really good at it. They have giant IT departments. If you look at a major bank in the world, they have tens of thousands of people in their IT departments. These are gigantic multi-billion dollar organizations, so they were pretty good at this kind of stuff. And what we've shown them is you can't build this yourself. There's so much software that we've written to integrate with the database that you just can't build yourself, it's not possible. It's kind of like trying to build your own smartphone. You really can't do it, the scale, the complexity of the problem. And now as the cloud model comes in, customers are realizing, hey, all this attention to building my own infrastructure, it's kind of last decade, last century. We need to move on to more of an as a service model, so we can focus on our business. Let enterprises that are specialized in infrastructure, like Oracle that are really, really good at it, take care of the low-level details, and let me focus on things that differentiate me as a business. It's not going to differentiate them to establish their own storage for database. That's not a differentiator, and they can't do it nearly as well as we can, and a lot of that is because we write a lot of special technology and software that they just can't do themselves, it's not possible. It's just like you can't build your own smartphone. It's just really not possible. >> Now, another area that we've covered extensively, we were there at the unveiling, as well is ZDLRA, Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance. We've always liked this product, especially for mission critical workloads, we're near zero data loss, where you can justify that. But while we always saw it as somewhat of a niche market, first of all, is that fair, and what's new with ZDLRA? >> Yeah ZDLRA has been in the market for a number of years. We have some of the biggest corporations in the world running on that, and one of the big benefits has been zero data loss, so again, if you care about data, you can't lose data. You can't restore to last night's backup if something happens. So if you're a bank, you can't restore everybody's data to last night. Suppose you made a deposit during the day. They're like, "Hey, sorry, Mr. Customer, your deposit, "well, we don't have any record of it anymore, "'cause we had to restore to last night's backup," you know, that doesn't work. It doesn't work for airlines. It doesn't work for manufacturing. That whole model is obsolete, so you need zero data loss, and that's why we introduced Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, and it's been very successful in the market. In addition to zero data loss, it actually provides much faster restore, much more reliable restores. It's more scalable, so it has a lot of advantages. With our X9M generation, we're introducing several new capabilities. First of all, it has higher capacity, so we can store more backups, keep data for longer. Another thing is we're actually dropping the price of the entry-level configuration of ZDLRA, so it makes it more affordable and more usable by smaller businesses, so that's a big deal. And then the other thing that we're hearing a lot about, and if you read the news at all, you hear a lot about ransomware. This is a major problem for the world, cyber criminals breaking into your network and taking the data ransom. And so we've introduced some, we call cyber vault capabilities in ZDLRA. They help address this ransomware issue that's kind of rampant throughout the world, so everybody's worried about that. There's now regulatory compliance for ransomware that particularly financial institutions have to conform to, and so we're introducing new capabilities in that area as well, which is a big deal. In addition, we now have the ability to have multiple ZDLRAs in a large enterprise, and if something happens to one, we automatically fail over backups to another. We can replicate across them, so it makes it, again, much more resilient with replication across different recovery appliances, so a lot of new improvements there as well. >> Now, is an air gap part of that solution for ransomware? >> No, air gap, you really can't have your back, if you're continuously streaming changes to it, you really can't have an air gap there, but you can protect the data. There's a number of technologies to protect the data. For example, one of the things that a cyber criminal wants to do is they want to take control of your data and then get rid of your backup, so you can't restore them. So as a simple example of one thing we're doing is we're saying, "Hey, once we have the data, "you can't delete it for a certain amount of days." So you might say, "For the 30 days, "I don't care who you are. "I don't care what privileges you have. "I don't care anything, I'm holding onto that data "for at least 30 days," so for example, a cyber criminal can't come in and say, "Hey, I'm going to get into the system "and delete that stuff or encrypt it," or something like that. So that's a simple example of one of the things that the cyber vault does. >> So, even as an administrator, I can't change that policy? >> That's right, that's one of the goals is doesn't matter what privileges you have, you can't change that policy. >> Does that eliminate the need for an air gap or would you not necessarily recommend, would you just have another layer of protection? What's your recommendation on that to customers? >> We always recommend multiple layers of protection, so for example, in our ZDLRA, we support, we offload tape backups directly from the appliance, so a great way to protect the data from any kind of thing is you put it on a tape, and guess what, once that tape drive is filed away, I don't care what cyber criminal you are, if you're remote, you can't access that data. So, we always promote multiple layers, multiple technologies to protect the data, and tape is a great way to do that. We can also now archive. In addition to tape, we can now archive to the public cloud, to our object storage servers. We can archive to what we call our ZFS appliance, which is a very low cost storage appliance, so there's a number of secondary archive copies that we offload and implement for customers. We make it very easy to do that. So, yeah, you want multiple layers of protection. >> Got it, okay, your tape is your ultimate air gap. ZDLRA is your low RPO device. You've got cloud kind of in the middle, maybe that's your cheap and deep solution, so you have some options. >> Juan: Yes. >> Okay, last question. Summarize the announcement, if you had to mention two or three takeaways from the X9M announcement for our audience today, what would you choose to share? >> I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's the new generation. It's significantly faster for OLTP, for analytics, significantly better consolidation, more cost-effective. That's the big picture. Also there's a lot of software enhancements to make it better, improve the management, make it more usable, make it better disaster recovery. I talked about some of these cyber vault capabilities, so it's improved across all the dimensions and not in small ways, in big ways. We're talking 50% improvement, 80% improvements. That's a big change, and also we're keeping the price the same, so when you get a 50 or 80% improvement, we're not increasing the price to match that, so you're getting much better value as well. And that's pretty much what it is. It's the same product, even better. >> Well, I love this cadence that we're on. We love having you on these video exclusives. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community, so we appreciate you giving us the inside scope on these announcements. Always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. It's always fun to be with you, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>>Mhm >>Welcome to the cube where we're celebrating the EC 2/15 birthday anniversary. My name is Dave Volonte and we're joined right now by Sandy carter, Vice President of AWS. Welcome Sandy, it's great to see you again, >>David. So great to see you too. Thanks for having me on the show today. >>Very welcome. We were last physically together. I think it was reinvent 2019. Hopefully I'll see you before 2022. But first happy birthday to EC two. I mean, it's hard to imagine back in 2006, the degree to which EC two would impact our industry. Sandy, >>I totally agree. You know, I joined a W S about 4.5 years ago in EC two and it's, it's even amazing to see what's just happened in the last 4.5 years. So I'm with you. Nobody really expected the momentum, but EC two has really shone brightly in value to our customers. >>You know, we've done the public sector summit, you know, many times. It's a great event. Things are a little different in public sector as you well know. So talk about the public sector momentum with EC two and that journey. What have you seen? >>Yeah, so it's a great question day. So I had to go back in the time vault. You know, public sector was founded in 2010 and we were actually founded by the amazon process writing a paper setting up a two pizza team, which happened to be six people. And that journey really started with a lot of our public sector customers thinking that we don't know about the cloud. So we might want to do a pilot or just look at non mission critical workloads now public sector and I know you know this day but public sector is more than just government, it has education, not for profit healthcare and now space. But everybody at that time was very skeptical. So we had to really work hard to migrate some workloads over. And one of our very first non mission critical workloads was the U. S. Navy. Um and what they did was the Navy Media Services actually moved images over to EC two. Now today that seems like oh that's pretty easy. But back then that was a big monumental reference. Um and we had to spend a lot of time on training and education to win the hearts and souls of our customers. So back then we had half of the floor and Herndon Washington, we just had a few people and that room really became a training room. We trained our reps, we trained our customers um research drive. A lot of our early adopters accounts like Nasa and jpl. And um then when cloud first came out and governments that started with the U. S. A. And we announced Govcloud, you know, things really picked up, we had migration of significant workloads. So if you think back to that S. A. P. And just moving media over um with the Navy, the Navy and S. A. P. Migrated their largest S A P E R P solution to the cloud in that time as well. Um, then we started international. Our journey continued with the UK International was UK and us was us. Then we added a P. J. And latin America and Canada. And then of course the partner team which you know, is very close to my heart. Partners today are about 73% of our overall public sector business. And it started out with some interesting small pro program SVS being very crucial to that, accelerating adoption. And then of course now the journey has continued with Covid. That has really accelerated that movement to the cloud. And we're seeing, you know, use of ec two to really help us drive by the cute power needed for A I N. M. L. And taking all that data in from IOT and computing that data. And are they are. Um, and we're really seeing that journey just continue and we see no end in sight. >>So if we can stay in the infancy and sort of the adolescent years of public sector, I mean, remember, I mean as analysts, we were really excited about, you know, the the the introduction of of of of EC two. But but there was a lot of skepticism in whatever industry, financial services, healthcare concerns about security, I presume it was similar in public sector, but I'm interested in how you you dealt with those challenges, how you you listen to folks, you know, how did you drive that leadership to where it is today? >>Yeah, you're right. The the first questions were what is the cloud? Doesn't amazon sell books? What is this clown thing? Um, what is easy to, what is easy to stand for and then what the heck is an instance? You know, way back when there was one instance, it didn't even have a name. And today of course we have over 400 instant types with different names for each one. Um and the big challenges you asked about challenges, the big challenges that we had to face. Dave were first and foremost, how do we educate? Um we had to educate our employees and then we had to educate our customers. So we created these really innovative hands on training programmes, white boarding um, sessions that we needed. They were wildly popular. So we really have to do that and then also prove security as you know. So you asked how we listen to our customers and of course we followed the amazon way we work backwards from where we were. So at that time, customers needed education. And so we started there um, data was really important. We needed to make customer or data for government more available as well. So for instance, we first started hosting the Census Bureau for instance. Um and that was all on EC two. So we had lots of early adopters and I think the early adopters around EC two really helped us to remember. I said that the UK was our international office for a while. So we had NIH we had a genomes project and the UK Ministry of Justice as well. And we had to prove security out. We had to prove how this drove a structured GovCloud and then we had to also prove it out with our partners with things like helping them get fed ramped or other certifications. I'll for that sort of thing as well. And so we really lead in those early days through that education and training. Um we lead with pilots to show the potential of the possible and we lead with that security setting those security standards and those compliance certifications, always listening to the customer, always listening to the partner, knowing how important the partners we're going to be. So for example, recovery dot gov was the first government wide system that moved to the cloud. Um the recovery transparency board was first overseeing that Recovery act spending, which included stimulus tracking website. I don't know if you remember that, but they hosted the recovery dot gov On amazon.com using EC two. And that site quickly made information available to a million visitors per hour and at that time, that was amazing. And the cost savings were significant. We also launched Govcloud. You'd asked about GovCloud earlier and that federal cloud computing strategy when the U. S. Government came out with cloud first and they had to consider what is really going to compel these federal agencies to consider cloud. They had Public-sector customers had 70 requirements for security and safety of the data that we came out with Govcloud to open up all those great opportunities. And I think Dave we continue to leave because we are customer obsessed uh you know, still supporting more security standards and compliance sort than any other provider. Um You know, now we lead with data not just data for census or images for the US Navy, but we've got now data in space and ground station and data at scale with customers like Finra who's now doing 100 billion financial transactions. Not just that one million from the early days. So it has been a heck of a ride for public sector and I love the way that the public sector team really used and leveraged the leadership principles. Re invent and simplify dive deep. Be obsessed with the customers start where they are. Um and make sure that you're always always always listening to what they need. >>You know, it's interesting just observing public sector. It's not uncommon, especially because of the certifications that some of the services, you know come out after they come out for the commercial sector. And I remember years ago when I was at I. D. C. I was kind of the steward of the public sector business. And that was a time when everybody was trying to focus in public sector on commercial off the shelf software. That was the big thing. And they want to understand, they wanted to look at commercial use cases and how they could apply them to government. And when I dug in a little bit and met with generals and like eight different agencies, I was struck by how many really smart people and the things that they were doing. And I said at the time, you know, a lot of my commercial clients could learn a lot from you. And so the reason I bring that up is because I saw the same thing with Govcloud because there was a lot of skepticism in various industries, particularly regulated industries, financial services, healthcare. And then when Govcloud hit and the CIA deal hit, people said, whoa CIA, they're like the most security conscious industry or organization in the world. And so I feel as though in a way public sector led that that breakthrough. So I'm wondering when you think about EC two today and the momentum that it has in the government, Are there similar things that you see? Where's the momentum today in public sector? >>You are right on target day? I mean that CIA was a monumental moment and that momentum with ever increasing adoption to the cloud has continued in public sector. In fact today, public sector is one of our fastest growing areas. So we've got um, you know, thousands of startups or multiple countries that were helping out today to really ignite that innovation. We have over 4000 government agencies, 9000 education agencies. Um 2000 public sector partners from all over the globe. 24,000 not for profit organizations. And what I see is the way that they're using EC two um is is leading the pack now, especially after Covid, you know, many of these folks accelerated their journey because of Covid. They got to the cloud faster and now they are doing some really things that no one else is doing like sending an outpost postbox into space or leveraging, you know robots and health care for sure. So that momentum continues today and I love that you were the champion of that you know way back when even when you were with I. D. C. >>So I want to ask you, you sort of touched on some interesting use cases, what are some of the more unusual ones and maybe breakthrough use cases that you see? >>Oh so yeah we have a couple. So one is um I mentioned it earlier but there is a robot now that is powered by IOT and EC two and the robot helps to take temperature and and readings for folks that are entering the hospital in latin America really helped during Covid, one of my favorites. It actually blew the socks off of verne or two and you know that's hard to do is a space startup called lunar outpost and they are synthesizing oxygen on mars now that's, that's driven by Ec two. That's crazy. Right? Um, we see state governments like new york, they've got this vision zero traffic and they're leveraging that to prevent accidents all through new york city. I used to live in new york city. So this is really needed. Um, and it continues like with education, we see university of Illinois and Splunk one of our partners, they created a boarding pass for students to get back to school. So I have a daughter in college. Um, and you know, it's really hard for her to prove that she's had the vaccine or that she's tested negative on the covid test. They came out with a past of this little boarding pass, just like you used to get on an airplane to get into different classes and labs and then a couple of my favorites and you guys actually filmed the Cherokee nation. So the Cherokee nation, the chief of the Cherokee nation was on our silicon um show and silicon angles show and the cube featured them And as the chief talked about how he preserves the Cherokee language. And if you remember the Cherokee language has been used to help out the US in many different ways and Presidio. One of our partners helped to create a game, a super cool game that links in with unity To help teach that next generation the language while they're playing a game and then last but not least axle three d out of the UK. Um, they're using easy to, to save lives. They've created a three D imaging process for people getting ready to get kidney transplants and they have just enhanced that taken the time frame down for months. Now today's that they can actually articulate whether the kidney transplant will work. And when I talked to roger their Ceo, they're doing R. O. L return on life's not return on investment. So those are just some of the unusual and breakthrough use cases that we see powered by E. C. To >>Sandy. I'll give you the last word. Your final closing comments. >>Well, my final closing comments are happy birthday to ec two celebrating 15 years. What a game changer and value added. It has been the early days of Ec two. Of course we're about education like what is the cloud? Why is a bookseller doing it. But um, easy to really help to create a new hub of value Now. We've got customers moving so fast with modernization using a I. M and M. L. Containers survivalists. Um, and all of these things are really changing the game and leveling it up as we increased that business connection. So I think the future is really bright. We've only just begun. We've only just begun with EC two and we've only just begun with public sector. You know, our next great moments are still left to come. >>Well, Sandy, thanks so much. Always Great to see you. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Dave. I really appreciate it. And happy birthday again to E. C. To keep >>It right there were celebrating Ec 2's 15th birthday right back. >>Mhm.

>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this "Cube Conversation." My name is Dave Vellante and you know, containers, they used to be stateless and ephemeral but they're maturing very rapidly. As cloud native workloads become more functional and they go mainstream persisting, and protecting the data that lives inside of containers, is becoming more important to organizations. Enterprise capabilities such as high availability or reliability, scalability and other features are now more fundamental and important and containers are linchpin of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and edge strategies. Now fusing these capabilities together across these regions in an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity of the infrastructure, is where the entire enterprise technology industry is headed. But how do you do that without making endless copies of data and managing versions not to mention the complexities and costs of doing so. And with me to talk about how IBM thinks about and is solving these challenges are Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Storage Channels. For the IBM Storage Division is Sam Werner is the vice president of offering management and the business line executive for IBM Storage. Guys, great to see you again, wish should, were face to face but thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here. >> Thanks Dave, as always. >> All right guys, you heard me my little spiel there about the problem statement. Eric, maybe you could start us off. I mean, is it on point? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we see is containers are going mainstream. I frame it very similarly to what happened with virtualization, right? It got brought in by the dev team, the test team, the applications team, and then eventually of course, it became the main state. Containers is going through exactly that right now. Brought in by the dev ops people, the software teams. And now it's becoming again, persistent, real use clients that want to deploy a million of them. Just the way they historically have deployed a million virtual machines, now they want a million containers or 2 million. So now it's going mainstream and the feature functions that you need once you take it out of the test sort of play with stage to the real production phase, really changes the ball game on the features you need, the quality of what you get, and the types of things you need the underlying storage and the data services that go with that storage,. to do in a fully container world. >> So Sam how'd we get here? I mean, container has been around forever. You look inside a Linux, right? But then they did, as Eric said, go mainstream. But it started out the, kind of little experimental, As I said, their femoral didn't really need to persist them, but it's changed very quickly. Maybe you could talk to that evolution and how we got here. >> I mean, well, it's been a look, this is all about agility right? It's about enterprises trying to accelerate their innovation. They started off by using virtual machines to try to accelerate access to IT for developers, and developers are constantly out, running ahead. They got to go faster and they have to deliver new applications. Business lines need to figure out new ways to engage with their customers. Especially now with the past year we had it even further accelerated this need to engage with customers in new ways. So it's about being agile. Containers promise or provide a lot of the capabilities you need to be agile. What enterprises are discovering, a lot of these initiatives are starting within the business lines and they're building these applications or making these architectural decisions, building dev ops environments on containers. And what they're finding is they're not bringing the infrastructure teams along with them. And they're running into challenges that are inhibiting their ability to achieve the agility they want because their storage needs aren't keeping up. So this is a big challenge that enterprises face. They want to use containers to build a more agile environment to do things like dev ops, but they need to bring the infrastructure teams along. And that's what we're focused on now. Is how do you make that agile infrastructure to support these new container worlds? >> Got it, so Eric, you guys made an announcement to directly address these issues. Like it's kind of a fire hose of innovation. Maybe you could take us through and then we can unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, so what we did is on April 27th, we announced IBM Spectrum Fusion. This is a fully container native software defined storage technology that integrates a number of proven battle-hardened technologies that IBM has been deploying in the enterprise for many years. That includes a global scalable file system that can span edge core and cloud seamlessly with a single copy of the data. So no more data silos and no more 12 copies of the data which of course drive up CapEx and OpEx. Spectrum Fusion reduces that and makes it easier to manage. Cuts the cost from a CapEx perspective and cuts a cost for an OpEx perspective. By being fully container native, it's ready to go for the container centric world and could span all types of areas. So what we've done is create a storage foundation which is what you need at the bottom. So things like the single global namespace, single accessibility, we have local caching. So with your edge core cloud, regardless of where the data is, you think the data's right with you, even if it physically is not. So that allows people to work on it. We have file locking and other technologies to ensure that the data is always good. And then of course we'd imbued it with the HA Disaster Recovery, the backup and restore technology, which we've had for years and have now made of fully container native. So spectrum fusion basically takes several elements of IBM's existing portfolio has made them container native and brought them together into a single piece of software. And we'll provide that both as a software defined storage technology early in 2022. And our first pass will be as a hyperconverged appliance which will be available next quarter in Q3 of 2021. That of course means it'll come with compute, it'll come with storage, come with a rack even, come with networking. And because we can preload everything for the end users or for our business partners, it would also include Kubernetes, Red Gat OpenShift and Red Hat's virtualization technology all in one simple package, all ease of use and a single management gooey to manage everything, both the software side and the physical infrastructure that's part of the hyperconverged system level technologies. >> So, maybe it can help us understand the architecture and maybe the prevailing ways in which people approach container storage, what's the stack look like? And how have you guys approached it? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Really, there's three layers that we look at when we talk about container native storage. It starts with the storage foundation which is the layer that actually lays the data out onto media and does it in an efficient way and makes that data available where it's needed. So that's the core of it. And the quality of your storage services above that depend on the quality of the foundation that you start with. Then you go up to the storage services layer. This is where you bring in capabilities like HA and DR. People take this for granted, I think as they move to containers. We're talking about moving mission critical applications now into a container and hybrid cloud world. How do you actually achieve the same levels of high availability you did in the past? If you look at what large enterprises do, they run three site, for site replication of their data with hyper swap and they can ensure high availability. How do you bring that into a Kubernetes environment? Are you ready to do that? We talk about how only 20% of applications have really moved into a hybrid cloud world. The thing that's inhibiting the other 80% these types of challenges, okay? So the storage services include HA DR, data protection, data governance, data discovery. You talked about making multiple copies of data creates complexity, it also creates risk and security exposures. If you have multiple copies of data, if you needed data to be available in the cloud you're making a copy there. How do you keep track of that? How do you destroy the copy when you're done with it? How do you keep track of governance and GDPR, right? So if I have to delete data about a person how do I delete it everywhere? So there's a lot of these different challenges. These are the storage services. So we talk about a storage services layer. So layer one data foundation, layer two storage services, and then there needs to be connection into the application runtime. There has to be application awareness to do things like high availability and application consistent backup and recovery. So then you have to create the connection. And so in our case, we're focused on open shift, right? When we talk about Kubernetes how do you create the knowledge between layer two, the storage services and layer three of the application services? >> And so this is your three layer cake. And then as far as like the policies that I want to inject, you got an API out and entries in, can use whatever policy engine I want. How does that work? >> So we're creating consistent sets of APIs to bring those storage services up into the application, run time. We in IBM have things like IBM cloud satellite which bring the IBM public cloud experience to your data center and give you a hybrid cloud or into other public cloud environments giving you one hybrid cloud management experience. We'll integrate there, giving you that consistent set of storage services within an IBM cloud satellite. We're also working with Red Hat on their Advanced Cluster Manager, also known as RACM to create a multi-cluster management of your Kubernetes environment and giving that consistent experience. Again, one common set of APIs. >> So the appliance comes first? Is that a no? Okay, so is that just time to market or is there a sort of enduring demand for appliances? Some customers, you know, they want that, maybe you could explain that strategy. >> Yeah, so first let me take it back a second. Look at our existing portfolio. Our award-winning products are both software defined and system-based. So for example Spectrum Virtualize comes on our flash system. Spectrum Scale comes on our elastic storage system. And we've had this model where we provide the exact same software, both on an array or as standalone piece of software. This is unique in the storage industry. When you look at our competitors, when they've got something that's embedded in their array, their array manager, if you will, that's not what they'll try to sell you. It's software defined storage. And of course, many of them don't offer software defined storage in any way, shape or form. So we've done both. So with spectrum fusion, we'll have a hyper-converged configuration which will be available in Q3. We'll have a software defined configuration which were available at the very beginning of 2022. So you wanted to get out of this market feedback from our clients, feedback from our business partners by doing a container native HCI technology, we're way ahead. We're going to where the park is. We're throwing the ball ahead of the wide receiver. If you're a soccer fan, we're making sure that the mid guy got it to the forward ahead of time so you could kick the goal right in. That's what we're doing. Other technologies lead with virtualization, which is great but virtualization is kind of old hat, right? VMware and other virtualization layers have been around for 20 now. Container is where the world is going. And by the way, we'll support everything. We still have customers in certain worlds that are using bare metal, guess what? We work fine with that. We worked fine with virtual as we have a tight integration with both hyper V and VMware. So some customers will still do that. And containers is a new wave. So with spectrum fusion, we are riding the wave not fighting the wave and that way we could meet all the needs, right? Bare metal, virtual environments, and container environments in a way that is all based on the end users applications, workloads, and use cases. What goes, where and IBM Storage can provide all of it. So we'll give them two methods of consumption, by early next year. And we started with a hyper-converged first because, A, we felt we had a lead, truly a lead. Other people are leading with virtualization. We're leading with OpenShift and containers where the first full container-native OpenShift ground up based hyper-converged of anyone in the industry versus somebody who's done VMware or some other virtualization layer and then sort of glommed on containers and as an afterthought. We're going to where the market is moving, not to where the market has been. >> So just follow up on that. You kind of, you got the sort of Switzerland DNA. And it's not just OpenShift and Red Hat and the open source ethos. I mean, it just goes all the way back to San Volume Controller back in the day where you could virtualize anybody's storage. How is that carrying through to this announcement? >> So Spectrum Fusion is doing the same thing. Spectrum Fusion, which has many key elements brought in from our history with Spectrum Scale supports not IBM storage, for example, EMC Isilon NFS. It will support, Fusion will support Spectrum Scale, Fusion will support our elastic storage system. Fusion will support NetApp filers as well. Fusion will support IBM cloud object storage both software defined storage, or as an array technology and Amazon S3 object stores and any other object storage vendor who's compliant with S3. All of those can be part of the global namespace, scalable file system. We can bring in, for example, object data without making a duplicate copy. The normal way to do that as you make a duplicate copy. So you had a copy in the object store. You make a copy and to bring that into the file. Well, guess what, we don't have to do that. So again, cutting CapEx and OpEx and ease of management. But just as we do with our flash systems product and our Spectrum Virtualize and the SAN Volume Controller, we support over 550 storage arrays that are not ours that are our competitors. With Spectrum Fusion, we've done the same thing, fusion, scale the IBM ESS, IBM cloud object storage, Amazon S3 object store, as well as other compliance, EMC Isilon NFS, and NFS from NetApp. And by the way, we can do the discovery model as well not just integration in the system. So we've made sure that we really do protect existing investments. And we try to eliminate, particularly with discovery capability, you've got AI or analytics software connecting with the API, into the discovery technology. You don't have to traverse and try to find things because the discovery will create real time, metadata cataloging, and indexing, not just of our storage but the other storage I'd mentioned, which is the competition. So talk about making it easier to use, particularly for people who are heterogeneous in their storage environment, which is pretty much the bulk of the global fortune 1500, for sure. And so we're allowing them to use multiple vendors but derive real value with Spectrum Fusion and get all the capabilities of Spectrum Fusion and all the advantages of the enterprise data services but not just for our own product but for the other products as well that aren't ours. >> So Sam, we understand the downside of copies, but then, so you're not doing multiple copies. How do you deal with latency? What's the secret sauce here? Is it the file system? Is there other magic in here? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll build a little bit off of what Eric said, but look one of the really great and unique things about Spectrum Scale is its ability to consume any storage. And we can actually allow you to bring in data sets from where they are. It could have originated in object storage we'll cash it into the file system. It can be on any block storage. It can literally be on any storage you can imagine as long as you can integrate a file system with it. And as you know most applications run on top of the file system. So it naturally fits into your application stack. Spectrum Scale uniquely is a globally parallel file system. So there's not very many of them in the world and there's none that can achieve what Spectrum Scale can do. We have customers running in the exabytes of data and the performance improves with scales. So you can actually deploy Spectrum Scale on-prem, build out an environment of it, consuming whatever storage you have. Then you can go into AWS or IBM cloud or Azure, deploy an instance of it and it will now extend your file system into that cloud. Or you can deploy it at the edge and it'll extend your file system to that edge. This gives you the exact same set of files and visibility and we'll cash in only what's needed. Normally you would have to make a copy of data into the other environment. Then you'd have to deal with that copy later, let's say you were doing a cloud bursting use case. Let's look at that as an example, to make this real. You're running an application on-prem. You want to spin up more compute in the cloud for your AI. The data normally you'd have to make a copy of the data. You'd run your AI. They have to figure out what to do with that data. Do you copy some of the fact? Do we sync them? Do you delete it? What do you do? With Spectrum Scale just automatically cash in whatever you need. It'll run there and you get assigned to spin it down. Your copy is still on-prem. You know, no data is lost. We can actually deal with all of those scenarios for you. And then if you look at what's happening at the edge, a lot of say video surveillance, data pouring in. Looking at the manufacturing {for} looking for defects. You can run a AI right at the edge, make it available in the cloud, make that data available in your data center. Again, one file system going across all. And that's something unique in our data foundation built on Spectrum Scale. >> So there's some metadata magic in there as well, and that intelligence based on location. And okay, so you're smart enough to know where the data lives. What's the sweet spot for this Eric? Are there any particular use cases or industries that we should be focused on or is it through? >> Sure, so first let's talk about the industries. We see certain industries going more container quicker than other industries. So first is financial services. We see it happening there. Manufacturing, Sam already talked about AI based manufacturing platforms. We actually have a couple clients right now. We're doing autonomous driving software with us on containers right now, even before Spectrum Fusion with Spectrum Scale. We see public of course, healthcare and in healthcare don't just think delivery at IBM. That includes the research guys. So the genomic companies, the biotech companies, the drug companies are all included in that. And then of course, retail, both on-prem and off-prem. So those are sort of the industries. Then we see from an application workload, basically AI analytics and big data applications or workloads are the key things that Spectrum Fusion helps you because of its file system. It's high performance. And those applications are tending to spread across core ,edge and cloud. So those applications are spreading out. They're becoming broader than just running in the data center. And by the way they want to run it just into the data center, that's fine. Or perfect example, we had giant global auto manufacturer. They've got factories all over. And if you think there isn't compute resources in every factory, there is because those factories I just saw an article, actually, those factories cost about a billion dollars to build them, a billion. So they've got their own IT, now it's connected to their core data center as well. So that's a perfect example that enterprise edge where spectrum fusion would be an ideal solution whether they did it as software defined only, or of course when you got a billion dollar factory, just to make it let alone produce the autos or whatever you're producing. Silicon, for example, those fabs, all cost a billion. That's where the enterprise edge fits in very well with Spectrum Fusion. >> So are those industries, what's driving the adoption of containers? Is it just, they just want to modernize? Is it because they're doing some of those workloads that you mentioned or is there's edge? Like you mentioned manufacturing, I could see that potentially being an edge is the driver. >> Well, it's a little bit of all of those Dave. For example, virtualization came out and virtualization offered advantages over bare metal, okay? Now containerization has come out and containerization is offering advantage over virtualization. The good thing at IBM is we know we can support all three. And we know again, in the global fortune 2000, 1500 they're probably going to run all three based on the application workload or use case. And our storage is really good at bare metal. Very good at virtualization environments. And now with Spectrum Fusion are container native outstanding for container based environments. So we see these big companies will probably have all three and IBM storage is one of the few vendors if not the only vendor that could adroitly support all three of those various workload types. So that's why we see this as a huge advantage. And again, the market is going to containers. We are, I'm a native California. You don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. and the wave is containers and we're riding that wave. >> If you don't ride the wave you become driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say. >> And that is true, another native California. I'm a whole boss. >> So okay, so, I wonder Sam I sort of hinted upfront in my little narrative there but the way we see this, as you've got on-prem hybrid, you got public clouds across cloud moving to the edge. Open shift is I said is the linchpin to enabling some of those. And what we see is this layer that abstracts the complexity, hides the underlying complexity of the infrastructure that becomes kind of an implementation detail. Eric talked about skating to the park or whatever sports analogy you want to use. Is that where the park is headed? >> Yeah, I mean, look, the bottom line is you have to remove the complexity for the developers. Again, the name of the game here is all about agility. You asked why these industries are implementing containers? It's about accelerating their innovation and their services for their customers. It's about leveraging AI to gain better insights about their customers and delivering what they want and proving their experience. So if it's all about agility developers don't want to wait around for infrastructure. You need to automate it as much as possible. So it's about building infrastructure that's automated, which requires consistent API APIs. And it requires abstracting out the complexity of things like HA and DR. You don't want every application owner to have to figure out how to implement that. You want to make those storage services available and easy for a developer to implement and integrate into what they're doing. You want to ensure security across everything you do as you bring more and more of your data of your information about your customers into these container worlds. You've got to have security rock solid. You can't leave any exposures there and you can't afford downtime. There's increasing threats from things like ransomware. You don't see it in the news every day but it happens every single day. So how do you make sure you can recover when an event happens to you? So yes, you need to build a abstracted layer of storage services and you need to make it simply available to the developers in these dev ops environments. And that's what we're doing with spectrum fusion. We're taking, I think, extremely unique and one of a kind storage foundation with Spectrum Scale that gives you single namespace globally. And we're building onto it an incredible set of storage services, making extremely simple to deploy enterprise class container applications. >> So what's the bottom line business impact. I mean, how does this change? I mean, Sam, you I think articulated very well through all about serving the developers versus you know, storage, admin provisioning, a LUN. So how does this change my organization, my business? What's the impact there? >> I've mentioned one other point that we talk about an IBM a lot, which is the AI ladder. And it's about how do you take all of this information you have and be able to take it to build new insights, to give your company and advantage. An incumbent in an industry shouldn't be able to be disrupted if they're able to leverage all the data they have about the industry and their customers. But in order to do that, you have to be able to get to a single source of data and be able to build it into the fabric of your business operations. So that all decisions you're making in your company, all services you deliver to your customers, are built on that data foundation and information and the only way to do that and infuse it into your culture is to make this stuff real time. And the only way to do that is to build out a containerized application environment that has access to real-time data. The ultimate outcome, sorry, I know you asked for business results is that you will, in real time understand your clients, understand your industry and deliver the best possible services. And the absolute, business outcome is you will continue to gain market share and your environment and grow revenue. I mean, that's the outcome every business wants. >> Yeah, it's all about speed. Everybody's kind of, everybody's last year was forced into digital transformation. It was sort of rushed into and compressed and now they get some time to do it right. And so modernizing apps, containers, dev ops developer led sort of initiatives are really key to modernization. All right, Eric, we've got, we're out of time but give us the bottom summary. We didn't talk, actually, we had to talk about the 3,200. Maybe you could give us a little insight on that before we close. >> Sure, so in addition to what we're doing with Fusion we also introduced a new elastic storage system, 3,200 and it's all flash. It gets 80 gigs, a second sustained at the node level and we can cluster them infinitely. So for example, I've got 10 of them. I'm delivering 800 gigabytes, a second sustained. And of course, AI, big data analytic workloads are extremely, extremely susceptible to bandwidth and or data transfer rate. That's what they need to deliver their application base properly. It comes with Spectrum Scale built in so that comes with it. So you get the advantage of Spectrum Scale. We talked a lot about Spectrum Scale because it is if you will, one of the three fathers of spectrum fusion. So it's ideal with it's highly parallel file system. It's used all over in high performance computing and super computing, in drug research, in health care in finance, probably about 80% of the world's largest banks in the world use Spectrum Scale already for AI, big data analytics. So the new 3,200 is an all flash version twice as fast as the older version and all the benefit of Spectrum Scale including the ability of seamlessly integrating into existing Spectrum Scale or ESS deployments. And when Fusion comes out, you'll be able to have Fusion. And you could also add 3,200 to it if you want to do that because of the capability of our global namespace and our single file system across edge, core and cloud. So that's the 3,200 in a nutshell, Dave. >> All right, give us a bottom line, Eric. And we got to go, what's the bumper sticker. >> Yeah, bumper sticker is, you got to ride the wave of containers and IBM storage is company that can take you there so that you win the big surfing context and get the big prize. >> Eric and Sam, thanks so much, guys. It's great to see you and miss you guys. Hopefully we'll get together soon. So get your jabs and we'll have a beer. >> All right. >> All right, thanks, Dave. >> Nice talking to you. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. With COVID-19 hitting, organizations really had to focus on business resiliency, and we've got two great guests here to talk about that topic. Bob Bender's the chief technology officer at Founders Federal Credit Union. And he's joined by Jim Shook, who is the director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the CUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks, Dave, great to see you, thank you. So, Bob, let's start with you, give us a little bit of background on Founders and your role. >> Founders Federal Credit Union is a financial institution that has about 225,000 members, serving them in 30 different locations, located in the Carolinas. I serve as chief technology officer bringing in the latest technology and cyber resilient direction for the company. >> Great. And Jim, talk about your role. Is this a new role that was precipitated by COVID or was this something that Dell has had for a while? Certainly relevant. >> It's actually been around for a while, Dave. The organization invested in this space going back about five years, I founded the cyber security and compliance practice. So really, my role is most of the time in the field with our customers, helping them to understand and solve their issues around the cyber resilience and cyber recovery field that we're talking about. But I also, to do that properly, spend a lot of time with organizations that are interested in that space. So it could be with an advisory partner, could be the FBI, might be a regulator, a particular group like Sheltered Harbor that we've worked with frequently. So it's just really, as you point out, taken off first with ransomware a couple of years ago, and then with the recent challenges from work from home in COVID. So we're really helping out a lot of our customers right now. >> Bob, I've talked privately to a number of CIOs and CSOs and many have said to me that when COVID hit that their business continuance was really much too (voice cuts out) Now, you guys actually started your journey way back in 2017. I wonder if you could take us back a few years and what were the trends that you were seeing that precipitated you to go on this journey? >> Well, I think we actually saw the malware, the horizon there. And I'll take you back a little further 'cause I just love that story is, when we looked at the relationship of Dell EMC, we talked to the 1% of the 1%, who is protecting their environment, their data capital, the new critical asset in our environment. And Dell EMC was the top of the line every time. When we looked at the environment and what it required, to put our assets under protection, again, we turned to Dell EMC and said, where do we need to go here? You look at this Mecklenburg County, you look at the city of Atlanta, you look at Boeing and I hate to use the examples, but some very large companies, some really experienced companies were susceptible to this malware attacks that we just knew ourself it was going to change us. So the horizon was moving fast and we had to as well. >> Well, you were in a highly regulated industry as well. How did that factor into the move? Well, you're exactly right. We had on our budget, our capital budget horizon, to do an air gap solution. We were looking at that. So the regulatory requirements were requiring that, the auditors were in every day talking about that. And we just kept framing that in what we were going to do in that environment. We wanted to make sure as we did this purpose built data bunker, that we looked at everything, talk to the experts, whether that was federal state regulation. You mentioned Sheltered Harbor, there's GDPR. All these things are changing how are we going to be able to sustain a forward look as we stand this environment up. And we also stood up a cyber security operations center. So we felt very confident in our Runbooks, in our incident response, that you would think that we would be ready to execute. I'll share with you that we reached out every which way and a friend called me and was actually in a live ransomware event and asked if I wanted to come on to their site to help them through that incident. We had some expertise on our staff that they did not possess at that time. So going into that environment, spending 30 hours of the last 72 hours of an attack we came back changed. We came back changed and went to our board and our executives and said, "We thought we knew what we were doing." But when you see the need to change from one to 10 servers recovery to 300 in 72 hours, we just realized that we had to change our plan. We turned to the investment we had already made and what we had looked at for some time, and said, "Dell EMC, we're ready to look at that "PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution. "How can you stand this up very quickly?" >> So, Jim, Bob was saying that he looked at the 1% of the 1%, so these guys are early adopters, but anything you can add to that discussion in terms of what you saw precipitate the activity, let's go pre-COVID, certainly ransomware was part of that. Was that the big catalyst that you saw? >> It really was. So when we started the practice, it was following up on the Sony Pictures attack, which only hit Sony in that. But it was unique in that it was trying to destroy an organization as opposed to just steal their data. So we had financial industry really leading the way, the regulators in the financial industry saying, "Gosh, these attacks could happen here "and they would be devastating." So they led the way. And as our practice continued, 2016 became the year of ransomware and became more prevalent, with the attackers getting more sophisticated and being able to monetize their efforts more completely with things like cryptocurrencies. And so as we come around and start talking to Bob, he still was well ahead of the game. People were talking about these issues, starting to grow concerned, but didn't really understand what to do. And Dave, I know we'll get to this a little bit later, but even today, there's quite a bit of disconnect, many times between the business, understanding the risks of the business and then the technology, which really is the business now, but making those pieces fit together and understanding where you need to improve to secure against these risks is a difficult process. >> Well, I think I'd love to come back to Bob and try to understand how you pitch this to the board, if you will, how you made the business case. To Jim's point, the adversaries are highly capable. It's a lucrative business. I always talk to my kids about ROI numerator and denominator. If you can raise the denominator, that's going to lower the value. And that's the business that you're in is making it less attractive for the bad guys. But how did you present this to the board? Was it a board level discussion? >> It was, exactly. We brought Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution to them and said, not only you're experiencing and seeing in the news daily, these attacks in our regions, but we have actually gone out into an environment and watch that attack play out. Not only that is when we stepped away, and we ran through some tabletops with them and we stepped away. And we said, "Are you okay? "Do you know how it got in? "Are you prepared to protect now and detect that again?" Within 30 days, they were hit again by the same ransomware attacks and hackers. So I hate to say this, but I probably fast forwarded on the business case and in the environment, the horizon around me, players, they made my case for me. So I really appreciated that top down approach. The board invested, the executive invested, they understood what was at risk. They understood that you don't have weeks to recover in the financial institution. You're dealing with hundreds of thousand transactions per second so it made my case. We had studied, we had talked to the experts. We knew what we wanted. We went to Dell EMC and said, "I have six months and here's my spend." And that's from equipment hitting our CoLOS and our data centers, standing it up, standing up the Runbooks and it's fully executed. And I wanted an environment that was not only holistic. We built it out to cover all of our data and that I could stand up the data center within that environment. I didn't need another backup solution. I needed a cyber recovery environment, a lifestyle change, if you would say. It's got to be different than your BCP/DR. While it inherits some of those relationships, we fund it with employees separately. We treated the incident response separately, and it is really benefited. And I think we've really grown. And we continue to stress that to educate ourselves not only at the board level, but a bottom up approach as well with the employees. 'cause they're a part of that human firewall as well. >> I think you've seen this where a lot of organizations, they do a checkbox on backup or as I was saying before, DR. But then in this world of digital, when a problem hits, it's like, "Oh-oh, we're not ready." So I wonder Jim, if we can get into this solution that Bob has been talking about the Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, there's a mouthful there. You got the power branding going on. What is that all about? Talk to us about the tech that's behind this. >> It's something that we've developed over time and really added to in our capability. So at its core, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is going to protect your most critical data and applications so that if there is a cyber attack, a ransomware or destructive attack, they're safe from that attack. And you can take that data and recover the most important components of the business. And to do that, we do a number of things, Dave. The solution itself takes care of all these things. But number one is we isolate the data so that you can't get there from here. If you're a bad actor, even an insider, you can't get to the data because of how we've architected. And so we'll use that to update the critical applications and data. Then we'll lock that data down. People will use terms like immutability or retention lock. So we'll lock it down in that isolated environment, and then we'll analyze it. So it's one thing to be able to protect the data with the solution, it's another, to be able to say that what I have here in my data vault, in my air gapped isolated environment is clean. It's good data. And if there was an attack, I can use that to recover. And then of course over time, we've built out all the capabilities. We've made it easier to deploy, easier to manage. We have very sophisticated services for organizations that need them. And then we can do a much lighter touch for organizations that have a lot of their built in capabilities. At its core, it's a recover capability so that if there was an attack that was unfortunately successful, you don't lose your business. You're not at the mercy of the criminals to pay the ransom. You have this data and you can recover it. >> So Bob, talk to us about your objectives going into this. It's more than a project. It really is a transformation of your resiliency infrastructure, I'll call it. What were your objectives going in? A lot of companies are reacting, and it's like, you don't have time to really think. So what are the objectives? How long did it take? Paint a picture of the project and what it looked like, some of the high level milestones that you were able to achieve. >> Well, I think several times Dell EMC was able to talk us off the edge, where it really got complicated. The Foundation Services is just one of your more difficult conversations, one of the top three, definitely, patch management, notification, and how you're going to rehydrate that data, keeping that window very small to reduce that risk almost completely as you move. I think other area this apply is that we really wanted to understand our data. And I think we're on a road to achieving that. It was important that if we were going to put it into the vault, it had a purpose. And if we weren't going to put it in a vault, let's see why would we choose to do that? Why would we have this data? Why would we have this laying around? Because that's a story of our members, 225 stories. So their ability to move into financial security, that story is now ours to protect. Not only do we want to serve you in the services and the industry and make sure you achieve what you're trying to, but now we have that story about you that we have to protect just as passionately. And we had that. I think that was two of the biggest things. I think the third is that we wanted to make sure we could be successful moving forward. And I'll share with you that in the history of the credit union, we achieved one of the biggest projects here, in the last two years. That umbrella of the Cyber Recovery solution protection was immediate. We plugged in a significant project of our data capital and it's automatically covered. So I take that out of the vendor of responsibility, which is very difficult to validate, to hold accountable sometimes. And it comes back under our control into this purpose built data security and cyber resilient, business strategy. That's a business strategy for us is to maintain that presence. So everything new, we feel that we're sized, there's not going to be a rip and replace, a huge architectural change because we did have this as an objective at the very beginning. >> Tim, when you go into a project like this, what do you tell customers in terms of things that they really should be focused on to have a successful outcome? >> I'm going to say first that not everybody has a Bob Bender. So we have a lot of these conversations where we have to really start from the beginning and work through it with our customers. If you approach this the right way, it's really about the business. So what are the key processes for your business? It can be different from a bank than from a hospital than from a school point. So what are the key things that you do? And then what's the tech that supports that and underlies those processes? That's what we want to get into the vault. So we'll have those conversations early on. I think we have to help a lot of organizations through the risks too. So understand the risk landscape, why doing one or two little things aren't really going to protect you from the full spectrum of attackers. And then the third piece really is, where do we start? How do we get moving on this process? How do we get victory so that the board can understand and the business can understand, and we can continue to progress along the way? So it's always a bit of a journey, but getting that first step and getting some understanding there on the threat landscape, along with why we're doing this is very important. >> So, Bob, what about any speed bumps that you encountered? What were some of those? No project is ever perfect. What'd you run into? How'd you deal with it? >> Well, I would say the Foundation Services were major part of our time. So it really helped for Dell EMC to come and explain to us and look at that perimeter and how our data is brought into that and size that for us and make sure it's sustainable. So that is definitely, could be a speed bump that we had to overcome. But today, because of those lifts, those efforts invested the Runbooks, the increase in new products, new data as our business organically grows is a non-event. It's very plug and play and that's what we wanted from the start. Again, you go back to that conversation at 1% of the 1%, it's saying, who protects you? We followed that. We stayed with the partner we trusted, the horizon holistically has come back and paid for itself again and again. So speed bumps, we're just enjoying that we were early adapters. I don't want to throw anybody out there, but you look about two weeks ago, there was a major announcement about an attack that was successful. They got them with ransomware and the company paid the ransom. But it wasn't for the ransomware, it was for the data they stole so that they would delete it. That's again, why we wanted this environment is we needed time to react in the case that these malwares are growing much faster than we're capable of understanding how they're attacking. Now it's one, two punch, where's it going to be? Where is it going to end? We're not going to likely be patient zero, but we're also not going to have to be up at night worrying that there's a new strain out there. We have a little time now that we have this secure environment that we know has that air gap solution that was built with the regulatory consideration, with the legal considerations, with the data capital, with the review of malware and such. You can go back in time and say, "Scan to see if I have a problem. So again, the partnership is while we focus on our business, they're focusing on the strategy for the future. And that's what we need. We can't be in both places at once. >> How long did the project take from the point of which you agreed, signed the contract to where you felt like you were getting value out of the solution? >> Six months. >> Really? >> We were adamant. I'd put it off for a year and a half, that's two budget cycles basically is what it felt. And then I had to come back and ask for that money back because we felt so passionate that our data, our critical data didn't need to be at that risk any longer. So it was a very tight timeline. And again, product on prem within six months. And it was a lot of things going on there. So I just wasn't idle during that time. I was having a conversation with Dell EMC about our relationship and our contracts. Let's build that cyber resilience into the contract. Now we've got this, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery environment, let's build it here where you also agree to bring on extra hardware or product if I need that. Let's talk about me being on a technology advisory panel So I can tell you where the pricing of the regulations are going, so you can start to build that in. Let's talk about the executive board reporting of your products and how that can enable us. We're not just talking about cyber and protecting your data. We're talking about back then 60% of your keep the lights on IT person will spend with auditors, talking about how we were failing. This product helped us get ahead of that to now where we're data analytic. We're just analysts that can come back to the business table and say, "We can stand that up very quickly." Not only because of the hardware and the platform solution we have, but it is now covered with a cyber resilience of the the cyber security recovery platform. >> I want to ask you about analytics. Do you feel as though you've been able to go from what is generally viewed as a reactive mode into something that is more anticipatory or proactive using analytics? >> Well, I definitely do. We pull analytics daily and sometimes hourly to make sure we're achieving our KPIs. And looking at the KRIs, we do risk assessments from the industry to make sure if our controls layer of defenses are there, that they will still work what we stood up three years ago. So I definitely think we've gone from an ad hoc rip and replace approach to transformation into a more of a threat hunting type of approach. So our cyber security operation center, for us, is very advanced and is always looking for opportunities not only to improve, to do self-assessments, but we're very active. We're monetizing that with a CUSO arm of the credit union to go out and help others where we're successful, others that may not have that staff. It's very rewarding for us. And I hate to say it sometimes it's at their expense of being in-evolved in the event of a ransomware attack or a malware event. We learned so much the gaps we have, that we could take this back, create Runbooks and make the industry stronger against these types of attacks. >> Well, so Jim, you said earlier, not every company has a Bob Bender. How common is it that you're able to see customers go from that reactive mode into one that is proactive? Is that rare or is it increasingly common? It can't be a 100%, but what are you seeing as trends? >> It's more common now. You think of, again, back to Bob, that's three plus years ago, and he's been a tireless supporter and tireless worker in his industry and in his community, in the cyber area. And efforts like those of Bob's have helped so many other organizations I think, understand the risks and take further action. I think too, Bob talks about some of the challenges with getting started in that three year timeframe, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery has become more productized, our practice is more mature. We have more people, more help. We're still doing things out there that nobody else is touching. And so we've made it easier for organizations that have an interest in this area, to deploy and deploy quickly and to get quick value from their projects. So I think between that some of the ease of use, and then also there's more understanding, I think, of what the bad actors can do and those threats. This isn't about somebody maybe having an outage for a couple of hours. This is about the very existence of a business being threatened. That if you're attacked, you might not come back from it. And there've been some significant example that you might lose hundreds of millions of dollars. So as that awareness has grown, more and more people have come on board and been able to leverage learnings from people like Bob who started much earlier. >> Well, I can see the CFO saying, "Okay, I get it. "I have no choice where we're going to be attacked. "We know that, I got to buy the insurance. You got me." But I can see the CFO saying, "Is there any way we can "get additional value out of this? "Can we use it to improve our processes and cut our costs? "Can we monetize this in some way?" Bob, what's the reality there? Are you able to find other sources of value beyond just an insurance policy? >> Definitely, Dave you're exactly right. We're able to go out there and take these Runbooks and really start to educate what cyber resilience means and what air gap means, what are you required to do, and then what is your responsibility to do it. When you take these exercises that are offered and you go through them, and then you change that perspective and go through a live event with other folks that see that after 60 hours of folks being up straight, it really changes your view to understand that there's no finish line here. We're always going to be trying to improve the product and why not pick somebody that you're comfortable with and you trust. And I think that's the biggest win we have from this is that was a Dell EMC partnership with us. It is very comfortable fit. We moved from backup and recovery into cyber resilience and cybersecurity as a business strategy with that partner, with our partner Dell, and it hasn't failed us. It's a very comforting. We're talking about quality of life for the employee. You hear that, keep the lights on. And they've really turned into professionals to really understand what security means differently today and what that quality of data is. Reports, aren't just reports, they're data capital. The new currency today of the value we bring. So how are we going to use that? How are we going to monetize that? It's changing. And then I hate to jump ahead, but we had our perimeters at 1% of our workforce remote and all of a sudden COVID-19 takes on a different challenge. We thought we were doing really good and next, we had to move 50% of our employees out in five days. And because of that Dell EMC, holistic approach, we were protected every step of the way. We didn't lose any time saying, we bought the wrong control, the wrong hardware, the wrong software. It was a very comfortable approach. The Runbooks held us, our security posture stayed solid. It's been a very rewarding. >> Well, Bob, that was my next question, actually is because you've started the journey. >> Sorry. >> No, no, it's okay. Because you started the journey early, were you able to respond to COVID in a more fast sell manner? it sounds like you just went right in. But there's nuance there, because you've got now 50% or more of the workforce working at home, you got endpoint security to worry about. You got identity access management, and it sounds like you were, "No problem. "We've got this covered." Am I getting that right? >> You're exactly right, Dave. We test our endpoints daily. We make sure that we understand what residue of data is where. And when we saw that employee shift to a safe environment, our most consideration at that time, we felt very comfortable that the controls we had in place, again, Dell and their business partners who we are going to hold true and be solid. And we test those metrics daily. I get reports back telling me, what's missing in patch management, what's missing in a backup. I'll go back to keeping BCP and cyber security separate. In the vault, we take approach of recovery and systems daily. And now that goes from maybe a 2% testing rate almost to 100% annually. So again, to your point, COVID was a real setback. We just executed the same Runbooks we had been maturing all along. So it was very comfortable for employees and it was very comfortable for our IT structure. We did not feel any service delays or outages because of that. In a day, when you have to produce that data, secure that data, every minute of every day of every year, it's very comforting to know it's going to happen. You don't push that button and nothing happens. It's executed as planned. >> Jim, did you see a huge spike in demand for your services as a result of COVID and how did you handle it? You guys got a zillion customers, how did you respond and make sure that you were taking care of everybody? >> We really did see a big spike, Dave. I think there were a couple of things going on. As Bob points out, the security posture changes very quickly when you're sending people to work from home or people remotely, you've expanded or obliterated your parameter, you're not ready for it. And so security becomes even more important and more top of mind. So with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we can go in and we can protect those most critical applications. So organizations are really looking at their full security posture. What can we do better to detect and protect against these threats? And that's really important. For us, we're focusing on what happens when those fail? And with that extension and people going home, and then the threat actors getting even more active, the possibilities of those failures become more possible and the risks are just in front of everybody. So I think it was a combination of all of those things. Many, many customers came to us very quickly and said, "Tell us more about what you're doing here. "How does it fit into our infrastructure? "What does it protect us against? "How quickly can we deploy?" And so there has been a huge uptake in interest. And we're fortunate in that, as you pointed out early on, Dave, we invested early here. I'm five years into the practice. We've got a lot of people, very mature, very sophisticated in this area, a lot of passion among our team. And we can go take care of all those customers. >> Bob, if you had a mulligan, thinking about this project, what would you do differently if you had a chance to do it over? >> I think I would start earlier. I think that was probably the biggest thing I regret in that realizing you need to understand that you may not have the time you think you do. And luckily, we came to our senses, we executed and I got to say it was with common sense, comfortable products that we already understood. We didn't have to learn a whole new game plan. I don't worry about that. I don't worry about the sizing of the product 'cause we did it, I feel correctly going in and it fits us as we move forward. And we're growing at an increased rate that we may not expect. It's plug and play. Again, I would just say, stay involved, get involved, know that what we know today about malware and these attacks are only going to get more complicated. And that's where I need to spend my time, my group become experts there. Why I really cherish the Dell EMC relationship is from the very beginning, they've always been very passionate on delivering products that recover and protect and now are cyber resilient. I don't have to challenge that, you pay for what you get for. And I just got to say, I don't think there's much other than I would have started earlier. So start today, don't put it off. >> So you said earlier though, you're never done, you never are, in this industry. So what's your roadmap look like? Where do you want to go from here with this capability? >> I definitely want to keep educating my staff, keep training them, keep working with Dell. Again, I tell you they're such forward thinking as a company. They saved me that investment. So if you're looking at part of the investment, it's got to be, are you with a partner that's forward thinking? So we definitely want to mature this, challenge it, keep challenging, keep working with Dell and their products to deliver more. Again, we go to the federal and state regulatory requirements. You go to the Sheltered Harbor, the ACET testing from the NCUA regulators, just software asset management. You can keep on going down the line. This product, I hate to say it, it's like the iPhone. You think about how many products the iPhone has now made not relevant. I don't even own a flashlight, I don't think. This is what the Dell product line brings to me is that I can trust they're going to keep me relevant so I can stay at the business table and design products that help our members today. >> Jim, how about from Dell's perspective, the roadmap, without giving away any confidential information, where do you want to take this? We talk about air gaps. I remember watching that documentary Zero Days and hearing them say, "We got through an air gap. "No problem." So analytics obviously plays a role in this machine intelligence, machine learning, AI. Where does Dell want to take this capability? Where do you see that going? >> We've got some things in mind and then we're always going to listen to our customers and see where the regulations are going to. And thus far, we've been ahead of those with the help of people like Bob. I think where we have a huge advantage, Dave is with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. It's a product. So we've got people who are dedicated to this full time. We have a maturity in the organization, in the field to deliver it and to service it. And having something as a product like that really enables us to have roadmaps and support and things that customers need to really make this effective for them. So as we look out on the product, and thanks for your reminder, I don't want to risk saying anything here I'm going to get in trouble for. We look at things in three paths. One is we want to increase the ability for our customers to consume the product. So they want it in different forms. They might want it in appliances, in the Cloud, virtual, all of those things are things that we've developed and continue to develop. They want more capabilities. So they want the product to do more things. They want it to be more secure, and keeping up. As you mentioned, machine learning with the analytics is a big key for us. Even more mundane things like operational information makes it easier to keep the vault secure and understand what's going on there without having to get into it all the time. So those are really valuable. And then our third point, really, we can't do everything. And so we have great partners, whether they're doing delivery, offering cyber recovery as a service or providing secure capabilities, like our relationship with Unisys. They have a stealth product that is a zero knowledge, zero trust product that helps us to secure some of the connections to the vault. We'll keep iterating on all of those things and being innovative in this space, working with the regulators, doing things. Bob's mentioned a couple of times, Sheltered Harbor. We've been working with them for two years to have our product endorsed to their specification. Something that nobody else is even touching. So we'll continue along all those paths, but really following our customer's lead in addition to maybe going some places that they haven't thought about before. >> It's great guys. I have to fear that when you talk to SecOps pros, you ask them what their biggest challenge is, and they'll say lack of talent, lack of skills. And so this is a great example, Jim, you're mentioning it, you've productized this. This is a great example of a technology company translating, IT labor costs into R&D. And removing those so customers can spend time running their business. Bob and Jim, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Great story. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, Bob. >> All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. It's a virtual event, like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE, our next guest, she's Kelly Herod the US SAP Offering Leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely, so first time on, on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte, you call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? >> Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last, the future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have reduced amount of custom code or things that we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive, and that means it's on the cloud and this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. >> So that is a great summary, and I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. You know, there's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic, you know, would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core... Core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean is such an important thing? I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. >> Absolutely, so if you take a step back and think... (Kelly hangs) when comes to ERPs, when ERPs came out, there was... (Kelly hangs) how you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we've found is that as companies have put ERPs, they've gone through and created so much customization, that it's that which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in brand new ERP, such as an SAP S/4HANA, this time around in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future to maintain that flexibility or dynamicism of a Kinetic Enterprise. >> Right. So I have to tease you Kelly 'cause SAP R/3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary, more kinetic? >> And you're right. You know, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R/3 days. And, you know, I would just say that things are changing, is evolving. You know, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud. The technology is the backbones are changing. Now the reality is, you know, going in and actually changing out your ERP, no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor or undertaking. The goal here, and why we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done, and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market, along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement, allows us to do that. >> So, Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS, together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. >> Absolutely. So when you... There's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S/4HANA solutions, in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud, and that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you with is more flexibility, so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S/4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up an environment on AWS. We actually created what we call Kinetic Finance Startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP central finance to begin their journey to the new S/4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution, so over a weekend, we can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data, we can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually through completely touchless built-in automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S/4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic financial transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S/4HANA system on AWS with their mas... >> Oh, that's... >> So the whole concept is to change how we engage. >> Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application, to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand, it is the system of record and it, you know, it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical, maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time, but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. >> It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP's S/4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is, you could actually... If a company has, let's say multiple ERPs, as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S/4 or central finance environment, and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations, or manufacturing, for example, >> That's pretty interesting. So you run it in parallel for a while and then eventually does, is the plan that it takes over, from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess, a slightly delayed lift and shift, or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. >> It's not really lift and shift actually, you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S/4HANA environment or multiple S/4HANA environments. Or some companies may choose to continue to... (Kelly hangs) Especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S/4HANA underneath, and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. >> That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place, but, you know, I'm pretty vehement in that, you know, general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting, but where the real interesting stuff ends is where the rubber hits the road, is in applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. >> Yes. One of the areas, you know, since we've been talking a bit about finance then I'll use it as an example. Is if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working with... (Kelly hangs) especially in finance, you know, one of the topics is, how to optimize a chart of accounts? So over time we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules, so that technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on that I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. >> Right. And is this a relatively new thing, or have you guys been doing this for a while? >> Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months, we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. >> That's great. I want... I'd love to shift gears a little bit, and talk about COVID, and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right? It was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support our remote workers, that said, can't help with the ba... All the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel, and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move, but now we know we're six, seven, eight months into this thing, and it's clear that, you know, we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share, you know, kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be, as we, you know, continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations? >> It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March, when this all occurred, you know, it truly did feel an instant going from in-person. And as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday, or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And, you know, I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many, including myself, were actually leading clients through final cut overs in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts, and I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then, they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past we used to constrain ourselves of, Oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done, or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is going to look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to... Especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're going to create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations is that also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means, you know, I could now have members from Japan joining, you know, my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. >> Hopefully and I know... Like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years, and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes, and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time. But you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines, right? Is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago, called the... "A Chance for Change: Accelerating Business Recovery, Through Gender Diversity," on a Facebook interview, very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I want to follow up on some of those things, 'cause you've made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. You know, we hear this all the time that, you know, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. And isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, you know, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could, you know, kind of share your thoughts on that, and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. >> Absolutely. You know, I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us, and I believe we have, coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion, and equality efforts. You know, one example I think about women, women in leadership positions. You know, being in consulting, you know, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot, and it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities, professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel, or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting, if that's what they, you know, had desired. I also think it allows them to have... You know, spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see as significant movement and women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. I hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from, you know, schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university, or geography, and being able to get the right skill sets in the door and the right talent. Therefore you can actually see movement and diversity within teams, as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. >> Right. Right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this, and we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different than the consultant 'cause your team is there, usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or, you know, within close proximity. Now you too, in your teams. And so, the shift changes that now you have to judge output, (Jeff chuckles) and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think, three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. And I just want to call them out 'cause I thought it was worth calling out. You know, empathy has never been more important. Resilience, and my favorite one you said at the end, calm in the storm. I just wonder again, if you could share, you know, kind of, as you've gone through it, both, you know, as somebody at Deloitte within the greater Deloitte group, but then also in managing your own teams, to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain, you know, empathetic leadership, because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouses working, the kids are doing homeschool. People are taking care of older parents, this and that. It's a real personal thing, and so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important >> That's so true. And, you know, when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and, you know, in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great, you weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You we're actually, you know, sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look... (Kelly hangs) like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now, when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera, all day, it does feel like you're under the lights when you're on camera. And there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And, you know, my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day. Maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it, and it makes us all more human. >> Right. >> And it makes us all more connected. >> Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip, we've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time, because it is just another, you know, kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. >> And I was going to ask, what do you actually, you know, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls (Jeff chuckles) and actually even just being on your cell, put on your air, you know, your earbuds, or your headphones and even walk. >> Right. >> So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back, or to lunch and back, we don't have them anymore. So you've got to work extra hard, actually getting those extra steps in calories and just mental breaks at times. >> Yeah, well then there's a whole another tranche on walking during meetings. And I used have a boss that I would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk. He always says, I get in there... 'Cause then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other. And if there's some sensitive things or tough conversations, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to meet you for the first time. It sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP, that's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you help them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re:Invent. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was great to discuss this with you. >> Absolutely. All right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. (soft music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin, with theCUBE here, talking with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing, at Dell technologies. Caitlin how are you? It's great to see you. >> I'm doing very well Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Nice to see you back on theCUBE. So lots of stuff going on in the news the last few months or so. A lot of stuff with respect to Cyber Recovery, Cyber Security, but talk to us about what's happening in the Purpose-Built Appliance Backup Appliance market. This market is growing. What's happening there, and talk to me about Dell's leadership role. >> Yeah, we've kind of come full circle. I've been in the data protection space for a while and I would say that, you know now we're looking at this as a $4 billion industry and security and protection has bubbled backup to the top of the list from an IT perspective. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve data protection is leveraging Backup Appliances. And there's really two segments within that. There's what I'll refer to as the target appliances and the integrated appliances. And we actually have had leadership in this space, since really the beginning. You know 50 cents of every dollar in this market is spent on Dell equipment. Where we see massive growth is really in that integrated appliance market. And those integrated appliances really simplify the deployment of not only the protection storage, but the protection software. So you can modernize your data protection, get much faster recovery, faster backups, as well as really get a smaller footprint, better efficiency, all in one single solution. And that's really where we've seen a lot of growth in the appliance market recently. >> Yeah. So as that, an integrated appliance market is growing twice as fast as targeted, give us a picture. You mentioned a few things, but kind of dig deeper into why customers are opting more and more for the integrated approach. >> Yeah that comes back to kind of a lot of the trends we see in IT overall. It's simplicity. It's ease of, how can you get to a better solution, a better outcome faster. And when it comes to integrated data protection appliances, it really it takes the guesswork out of it. You know, you have software and hardware, that's optimized to work together. You're really quick and easy to deploy, really simple to manage, 'cause it's all fully integrated and you get to a solution where you can get things like 65 one data reduction, get a very small footprint, get really fast improvements to not only backups, but probably even more importantly to recovery, get instant access to that data. And you really are able to with one purchase, transform all of your data protection. Now there's still a lot of great uses for target appliances as well of better flexibility. But, we've seen this overall you've seen this Lisa, every trend in probably IT and life, right? Simplicity. How can you get a faster, better answer? And integrated appliances really lean into that. It's as similar to what we see in the hyperconverged space, kind of in the primary storage and compute side of things. >> Yeah, I think we all want faster, simpler, better in every walk of life. One of the things this year that, in all of that lack of simplification, the complexity that we're living in that we've seen, is the rise of ransomware. It's not only on the rise, it's getting more personal. We've seen, you know, big companies, Garmin was attacked, one of the Cruise Lines was attacked, The New Zealand Stock Exchange, Facebook and Tik Tok were hacked. So we're starting to see so much more vulnerability and the ability of these hackers to expose more vulnerabilities. Have you seen that impacting your customers saying, "Hey, we need help here because now we have so many employees and devices, scattered." >> Yeah, unfortunately we have. You know, we've been talking about Ransomware Protection, Cyber Resiliency, Cyber Recovery with our customers for quite a number of years. And, now it's not a niche conversation just with financial institutions, it's a conversation with all of our customers. 'Cause either they've felt it or they've seen their competitors feel it and they need to protect themselves. So it has really become a conversation but it's not only our specialty sellers, but all of our sellers are having with our customers. And, it's really about not only being able to protect against them, which is an important part, but also recover from them. And that's really what our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution is all about. And the exciting thing for us is that we actually have recently become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. Which really gives you an idea of the level of investment that we've made to provide that secure, automated air gap solution to give our customers that peace of mind. Because unfortunately this is becoming table stakes for any data protection out there today. >> Well, and as more and more, we see every company either becoming a data company or needing to become a data company to not just survive these times, but become successful as time goes on. To a point, it's one thing about protecting the data, but the actual need is to recover it should anything happen. Tell us a little bit more about Sheltered Harbor and what you guys were the first there to receive? Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Okay a little bit more on overall our solution and Sheltered Harbor is actually a consortium of organizations, primarily financial institutions that have really come together to define the standards, of what we need or Cyber Resiliency for Cyber Recovery. And for us with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we've worked closely with that organization, to meet those standards. And with that work and with that actual deploying in with one of our customers, we were able to become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor to meet their standards there. And what's an important about our solution is that it's both that automated air-gapped solution for the data isolation, which is a part of it. But it's also, we have the CyberSense analytics and forensic tools that give you the ability to discover, to diagnose and to remediate against these attacks. So it gives you both sides of protecting that data air-gapping it, but also being able to intelligently discover and remediate against those attacks, if they do indeed happen. >> As VP of Product Marketing, I'm sure you're with customers often these days virtually. When you're having customer conversations, as you were singing out data protection and being able to recover and remediate, should anything like a ransomware attack happen, that's business critical. That's, you know, lifeline kind of stuff we're talking about. Have you seen the conversations within customer organizations shifts or is this now a board level or a C-level conversation in terms of data protection? >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's become a more frequent conversation. The people involved, are different. It's not just the backup administrators that are involved, it's really about the overall compliance strategy, the CSOs that are involved here. And it's becoming a corporate mandate as it really unfortunately needs to be at this point. So it's coming up more frequently, but also the types of people involved in that conversation have really changed the types of things we're having to talk about and build solutions for. So it's really changed that dynamic for us. And it's been great to really be on the front lines of that with our customers. You know, it started with those financial institutions and now it's really commonplace, to talk about this with everyone. >> So let's talk customers. Give us an example or two of some customers that are leveraging this new technology that are really achieving like the big deduplication ratio that you talked about, but also enabling their business to move forward. >> Yeah. One of my favorite ones for a couple of reasons I'll confess is, World Candy. Actually there are a World Corporation, but to me, they're a candy company. They actually make some chocolate out of Pennsylvania one of my favorites, chocolate covered pretzels. And they're a great example, right? 'Cause they're certainly not an IT specialty organization. They're trying to contract manufactured candy and they want to get things done as efficiently as possible. So they were looking a solution to overall modernize, their overall IT and that came with the combination of an Integrated Data Protection Appliance, as well as VXRail. And by implementing that, they were able to reduce their backup times from running overnight all night, to just two hours. They were able to get dedupe ratios of a 12O to one, 99.2% reduction, which is just incredible. And they were able to reduce their physical server footprint by 60%. So you can just imagine with an organization like this, that needs to run things as efficiently, as simply, as quickly as possible, how transformational that is. And, probably one of the other things that we find out of customers like this is, it's really about finding them a partner that can solve all of their problems in one place. And for data protection that's certainly one of the biggest things for PowerProtect is we now have a one-stop shop appliances software for all your data protection needs, large and small. And my favorite thing is actually our quote from this customer which is, he calls it a perfect partnership and that they have a single hand to high five. And we love to get those high fives from our customer and we really like to be that partner for them and to help them solve these challenges really no matter where their data is or what their challenges are. >> I like that a single can for a virtual high five. Speaking of partners, what's the channel play here? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for us, Dell Technology is overall channel partners are absolutely critical and in the data protection space, probably even more so. So channel partners are a huge part of our go-to-market. And one of the reason that channel partners really like to work with us, with Dell technologies on the data protection side, is because of the breadth of that portfolio. And now with our most recent enhancements on the appliance side, you now have a full PowerProtect portfolio. Target appliances, integrated appliances, physical, virtual, as well as modern data protection software with PowerProtect data manager. And for our partners, and for us, it's so important that they can have one vendor to offer all of these solutions because we know that our customer's challenges are complex, they're diverse, their data sets are diverse and they need to be able to partner with someone, leverage us as a vendor, leverage our partners, leveraging us as a vendor to really give our customers that answer. And that could be very different needs. They have traditional applications, they have new modern applications in Kubernetes and the growth of, and the importance of those types of applications. Our partners don't want and our customers don't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. Multiple vendors actually can increase risk, increase costs. They want to keep that simple, efficient. And that's why partnering with us, with Dell Technologies, why our channel partners really find us to be such a critical vendor to work with on the data protection side. >> So you've shared some impressive stats about what the technology is able to deliver. You gave us the great World Candy company example in terms of the things I heard a big workforce productivity there, they've got big deduplication there. They're able to sounds like reduce their on-prem footprint. From an economic value perspective, help us understand what the economic value of the DP series and even maybe feedback from the analyst community. >> Yeah, we've actually got a recent study which I'd encourage you guys to go read and I will just kind of give you the Cliffs Notes version of it. Which shows you the advantages of leveraging Dell Technologies portfolio for data protection. You can have your cost to protect as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, which is impressive. And that's that efficiency that you can get with PowerProtect. It's a reduction in the administration costs for data reduction of 22%, a reduction of 84% in your Cloud resources and services. We all know that people have moved to Public Cloud and probably one of the biggest concerns is the cost of that. By implementing the right data protection solutions, leveraging our in-cloud backup and protection, you can actually significantly reduce that because of the way that we've implemented it. And overall, you can't argue with anything that reduces costs by 98%. So you can reduce your storage resource costs by 98% by leveraging the PowerProtect portfolio. And again, it's a recent ESG study, which you can find on our website and read more about that study and the economic elements that lead into that. But you can just see the dramatic impact that can have, not only are you protecting your most valuable asset of data, but you're doing so in a way that saves the company money, and time and resources. And we all know that's never been more critical than ever. >> Those are very impressive, but compelling stats. Last question, talking about the three waves that we know Dell technologies is writing, we've got VMware, Cloud, Cyber Recovery, give us a flavor of the launch and the news and the new capabilities for this one-stop shop with perspective of what's happening in Cyber Recovery today. >> Yeah, so we've got enhancements on all fronts. So we, let me go in order there. So we've got on the Cloud front our PowerProtect data manager, which we've talked about a lot this year. We continued to really enhance that. Some recent enhancements, the ability to deploy that in Azure and AWS Cloud, to be able to do in-Cloud data protection. On the VMware side as we talked about just recently at VMworld, we've got new integrations with Storage Based Policy Management to really simplify and automate protection for the Vadmins as well as protection administrators. The ability to support, real mission critical applications and VMs, that are something we're working on to be able to more intelligently protect those VMs that have become more challenging to protect in traditional methods as well as integration with protect VCF. And then lastly, I think we've covered a bit today is certainly on that Cyber Recovery, Cyber Resiliency solution. First one to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor in providing that air gap solution, as well as that ability to discover to remediate from those attacks. And you can kind of get a sense of, where we're really focused on. Those are our big three areas in both our appliance as well as our software portfolio really focused on simplifying that for our customers. >> Well Caitlin, we thank you for joining us as per what theCUBE has seen for many years with Dell Technologies. Lots of innovation, continued innovation. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here, Lisa. >> Excellent. With Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is "theCUBE' conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to 'theCUBE' I'm excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. >> So data protection in the news, what's going on? >> Yeah you know, it's been a busy year. We had obviously our power protect DD appliance launched last year and then this year, we've have announcements on the software side. We had announcements at the VMworld some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect PP series appliances, the new integrated appliances. And it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DD,xx the next generation of data domain, and we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protecting software in a single converge, all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the back of appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the targeted market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, and it's not that dissimilar to actually our DD series from last year which is there's in four models in the new DP series. There's a 4,400 which is actually now taking the PowerProtect brand and putting that on the existing DP 4,400 and then three new appliances: the 5,900, the 8,400 and then the 8,900. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency. We've got new hardware, assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery, in fact you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity, 65 to one theater application, which is just incredible and 60,000 IOPS for instant access. So really ups the game, both in performance and an efficiency. >> Those are big numbers, you mentioned the DD launch last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now. What's the significance of the DP series? >> And that this is exciting for us because it does a couple things. It expands our PowerProtect appliance family with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. On the software side, PowerProtect data manager, which we've enhancing and continuing to talk about all year also has some new improvements. The ability deploy it in Azure, in AWS GovCloud for in-cloud protection. The enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about, not that long ago at VMworld about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes right And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marketing of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect data manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one-stop shop for all of your data protection needs no matter where the data lives, no matter what SLA, whether it's a physical, virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated, you've all bought them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent. All right. Last question for you, Caitlin we know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, it's cloud VMware and Cyber Recovery. Anything else you want to add here? Yeah, I'll pick up, especially on that last one, we talke%d a little bit about the enhancements we've done with cloud in cloud data protection, longterm recovery, disaster recovery, as well as what we've done on the VMware front, really important that we continue to have that automation at simplicity with VM-ware but cyber resiliency, cyber recovery ransomware has really risen to the top of the list. Unfortunately for many organizations and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offer in market for a couple of years, with the exciting new enhancement here. It is the first cyber recovery solution and endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. So it is the first Cyber Recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect data, PowerProtect, if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news, Caitlin. Thanks for sharing what's new congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> For Cait%lin Gordon I'm Lisa Martin. You're watch%ing 'theCUBE'. (calm music)

>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed. And that has changed some of the priorities, for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, or thinking about, where they were going to cloud. And of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers, and the like. So, we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening, and make sure that our workforce, and our customers are all taken care of. So, one of the front seats of this, is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there. And, Nutanix is part of that discussion. So, I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumnus. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product, with Nutanix. And Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer. Second time on theCUBE, in his new role many time guests. Previously, Tarkan is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right. So, Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that, IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general. But in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us, the special cloud announcement. Tell us, what's Nutanix launching, and why it's so important today. >> So, Stu first of all, thank you. And glad to be here with Monica. And basically you and I, spend some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we never seen before. Especially with this pandemic backdrop, as we're going through. And obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously, health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates. But also it creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers, and commercial customers, and in a public sector customers, in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains, and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, Monica knows as well as she's our leader. You know, our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, is too well, Nutanix wrote the book, in digital infrastructures with its own private, (mumbles) infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level, via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions, and end user computer solutions. Now, the multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So, in this launch, we have our new, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available in the AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms, and customers, and partners at sealable executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important, because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what's important for them, save money for them, and making sure they streamlined their IT operation. So it's a huge launch for us. And we're super excited about it. >> Yeah. And the one thing I would add too, what Tarkan said too is, look, we talk to a lot of customers, and obviously cloud is the constant, in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation? But really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we are excited about is we're bringing, making really a hybrid cloud reality, across public and private cloud. But also making sure customers, get the cost efficiency they need, when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed, watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI Space and Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that, true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud, simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkan has helped us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done, for so long now in the data center, into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu you're spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven. And I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So, just recently I was with a senior executive, C level executive of an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling. Talking to, not all the CIO, the chief operating officer on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was, how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress. And obviously, now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, he was an airline executive. "Look Tarkan, in the next four months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less, in so many different ways, while I'm cutting costs." So it's a tough time. So, in that context is to... Your actually right. Multicloud is in a difficult proposition, but it's critical, for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us, is not a destination, it's a means to an ends. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures, to deliver, end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to making sure to take advantage of, these VDI decibels service topic capability. So in that context, what we are providing now to this CIOs who are going through, this difficult time is, a platform, in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud, based on their needs, with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank. They have a workloads on AWS, they have workload on Azure, they have workloads on Google, workloads on (indistinct), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany. They have workloads providers in Asia, in Taiwan, and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for VR. And then, this is not just in this nation. This is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use, all these operating models and move our data, and applications from cloud to cloud? In simple terms, can we get, some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as we pay credits they paid for so far? And, those are things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail, as we talk to this. You are super excited, to start this journey with AWS, with this launch, but you're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just kind of discussed with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem, for our customers to cut costs, and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multicloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more detail, but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement, and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers, and how do they decide, what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud? It's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So, when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect, or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure. And as we talk to customers too, this clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to, build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of, a demand of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment. or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply, and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR, and we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly, in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, of which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is, into the cloud? Without having to rewrite a single line of code, or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is, how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services, that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course. But in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and is a computing, and also databases. More and more of our customers, don't want to invest in again having, on-premises data center assets sitting there idly. And, wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tarkan was talking about, really their three key reasons, why the current hybrid cloud solutions, haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough, to actually put into real execution. You know, with Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within, under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters, which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon, under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan, that we offer on-prem, that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then, you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you're going to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs, making sure you know, how you're going to incur costs. How about, if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the... We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing, where to place which workload. Which workload goes into public cloud, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called beam, that gives the customers that ability to assess, which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. You know, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell. You know, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand of course? You're probably going to need to anonymize. But, I'd like to understand, how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia, I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine, if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row, well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they are getting ready with now clusters, to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud, in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS, and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer, who is in the insurance business. For them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry in every business. But for them, they realize that they need to be able to, transparently run the applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using non Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of the database applications into, AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring, their a part of the data center estate, and moving that completely to AWS, with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity, and spin up hundreds and thousands of remote employees, using clusters into AWS cloud. Using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for the solution. Because now it's so easy to use. We have customers, really surprised going, "Wait, I now have built a whole hybrid card within an hour. And I was able to scale from, six nodes, to 60 nodes, just like that, on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes, to 16 in AWS cloud. Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use, and how quickly they can scale, using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah. Tarkan I have to imagine that, this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partner with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix, at the reinvent show. But, cloud is definitely front and center, in a lot of your customer's conversations. So, with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect, to the conversations that you can have. >> Actually Stu, as you heard from Monica too. As I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, there's an open end model. If it's an open end model they want to take advantage of, to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, even in this conversation, there is many pinpoint in this. Like again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps, and the data relating those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So we're hearing constantly, from the enterprises is small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off prem. And off prem is going to have, tons of different radiations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skews to 17,000 customers around the world. It's a $2 billion software business run rate is as you know. And, a lot of those questions on-prem customers now, also coming to our own cloud services. With cloud partners, we have our own cloud services, with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities. With a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR. (mumbles) a service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS, or Azure, or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's US companies, we think US only. But think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider, within the country. Because of the new data governance, laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us, to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same continent, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure, we give capabilities for customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just you know Stu, you're not alone in this, we can not do this alone. We have, tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the new announcements. From HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing. You're partnering with Palo Alto networks for security, Azure partners, as you know we support (indistinct). We have partners like Red Hat, whose in tons of work in the Linux front. We partnered with IBM, we partner with Dell. So, the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points, to help the customers innovate the cut costs, in this difficult backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is, tremendous so to speak adoption, of this multicloud approach that you're focusing on right now. >> Yeah, and let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course. The WebPros, and HCL, and TCS, and Capgemini, and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier, and Tarkan reminded me is a superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now, and work across multiple clouds. And, we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is, it's built in native network integration. And what that means is, if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs, in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services. And we bypass any, complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, the Amazon credits, with the way we've architected this. And we allow for bringing your own license, by the way. That's the other true part about simplicity is, same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix, can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And now of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that DVIOL is something that we are very proud of. It's truly enabling, bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move, from an appliance primarily to a software model. And, as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like, that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have, when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, and cloud as popular. So, customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring their existing on-prem license, to AWS. Or we also have a commit model, where they commit for a certain capacity for the year, and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers. We offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah. Well, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all of the hybrid solutions. So, every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So, architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand, as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd, when it comes to hybrid cloud. >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego. But really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we, speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So, building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plan, being able to move apps and data, with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability. All of that together. I think the way, (indistinct) I've talked about this as, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe they are the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Tarkan and I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So, with Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is, it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had, that enabled this, and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you feel when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit what should we be looking for, when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond. >> Thank you Stu. Actually, is spot on question. Most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? (indistinct) multicloud. And when you killed on, you and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services, and you actually own some kind of a marketplace. And you're one of the 19,000 services. We don't see this as a multicloud. Our view is, complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government clouds success with our customers. We've got enterprise commercial and public sector customers. Also delivered to them choice, with Nutanix is own cloud as I mentioned earlier. With our own billing payment, we're just as capable starting with DR as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service. But take that to next level, the database as a service, with VDI based up as a service, and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have, with service providers, like Yoda in India, a lot going on with SoftBank in Japan, Brooklyn going on with OBH in France. And multiple countries that we are building this XSP (indistinct) telco relationships, give those international customers, choice within that own local region, in their own country, in some cases in their city, where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue. Security, data governance, is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multilayer stool is, hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug (indistinct), Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, biggest super partners. Obviously, that bare metal service capability, is huge differentiator. And with the typical AWS simplicity. And obviously, with Nutanix simplicity coming together. But given choice to our customers as we move forward obviously, our customer set a multicloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Roads. It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout the history, those empires, those countries who have been successful, partnered well, connect the dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history. Connecting dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier. Working with companies that with Wipro. And we over deliver to the end user computer service called, best of a service door to desk. Database as a service, digital data services get that VA to other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure, as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, you're going to see, these announcements coming up, one partner at a time. And obviously we are going to measure success, one customer at a time as we more forward with the strategy. >> All right. So Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud, in under an hour. I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud. and leverage some capabilities? And, whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely. We are all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects, and customers the ability to go try this out. Either just take a tour, or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out. They can just get spun up in the cloud completely, and then connect to on-premises if they choose to. Or just, if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really, only the beginning for us as Tarkan was saying. I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future, and how we are going to enable customers, to use cloud for innovation going forward. In a really simple, manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning. So, we look forward to, talking to you, your partners, and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Stu. Thank you, Monica. >> Hi, and welcome back. We've just heard Nutanix's announcement about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, from Monica and Tarkan, And, to help understand some of the specific implications for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome Justin Hurst, who is the CTO, for APJ with Nutanix. Justin, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks Stu. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So, we know Justin of course, 2020, has had a lot of changes, for everyone globally. Heard some exciting news from your team. And, wondering if you can bring us inside the APJ region. And what will the impact specifically be for your customers in your region? >> Yeah, let's say, that's a great question. And, it has been a tremendously unusual year, of course, for everyone. We're all trying, to figure out how we can adapt. And how we can take this opportunity, to not only respond to the situation, but actually build our businesses in a way, that we can be more agile going forward. So, we're very excited about this announcement. And, the new capabilities it's going to bring to our customers in the region. >> Justin, one of the things we talk about is, right now, there's actually been an acceleration of how customers are looking to On-Ramp to the cloud. So when you look at the solution, what's the operational impact of Nutanix Clusters? And that acceleration to the cloud? >> Well, sure. And I think that, is really what we're trying to accomplish here, with this new technology is to take away a lot of the pain, in onboarding to the public cloud. For many customers I talk to, the cloud is aspirational at this point. They may be experimenting. They may have a few applications they've, spun up in the cloud or using a SaaS service. But really getting those core applications, into the public cloud, has been something they've struggled with. And so, by harmonizing the control plan and the data plan, between on-premises and the public cloud, we just completely remove that barrier, and allow that mobility, that's been, something people have really been looking forward to. >> All right, well, Justin, of course, the announcement being with AWS, is the global leader in public cloud. But we've seen the cluster solution, when has been discussed in earlier days, isn't necessarily only for AWS. So, what can you tell us about your customer's adoption with AWS, and maybe what we should look at down the road for clusters with other solutions? >> Yeah, for sure. Now of course, AWS is the global market leader, which is why we're so happy to have this launch event today of clusters on AWS. But with many of our customers, depending on their region, or their regulatory requirements, they may want to work as well, with other providers. And so when we built the Nutanix cluster solution, we were careful not to lock in, to any specific provider. Which gives us options going forward, to meet our customer demands, wherever they might be. >> All right. Well, when we look at cloud, of course, the implications are one of the things we need to think about. We've seen a number of hybrid solutions out there, that haven't necessarily been the most economical. So, what are the financial considerations, when we look at this solution? >> Yeah, definitely. I think when we look at using the public cloud, it's important not to bring along, the same operational mindset, as traditional on-premise infrastructure. And that's the power of the cloud, is the elasticity. And the ability to burst workloads, to grow and to shrink as needed. And so, to really help contain those costs, we've built in this amazing ability, to hibernate workloads. So that customers can run them, when they need them. Whether it's a seasonal business, whether it's something in education, where students are coming and going, for different terms. We've built this functionality, that allows you to take traditional applications that would normally run on-premises 24/7. And give them that elasticity of the public cloud, really combining the best of both worlds. And then, building tooling and automation around that. So it's not just guesswork. We can actually tell you, when to spin up a workload, or where to place a workload, to get the best financial impact. >> All right, Justin, final question for you is, this has been the works on Nutanix working on the cluster solution world for a bit now. What's exciting you, that you're going to be able to bring this to your customers? >> Yeah. There's a lot of new capabilities, that get unlocked by this new technology. I think about a customer I was talking to recently, that's expanding their business geographically. And, what they didn't want to do, was invest capital in building up a new data center, in a new region. Because here in APJ, the region is geographically vast, and connectivity can vary tremendously. And so for this company, to be able to spin up, a new data center effectively, in any AWS region around the world, really enables them to bring the data and the applications, to where they're expanding their business, without that capital outlay. And so, that's just one capability, that we're really excited about. And we think we'll have a big impact, in how people do business. And keeping those applications and data, close to where they're doing that business. >> All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for giving us a look inside the APJ region. And congratulations to you and the team, on the Nutanix Clusters announcement. >> Thanks so much for having me Stu. >> All right. And thank you for watching I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)