(upbeat music) >> I'm Dave Nicholson and welcome to Dell Technologies World 2022. I'm delighted to be joined by Tony Bishop. Tony is senior vice president, enterprise strategy at Digital Realty. Tony, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Happy to be here. >> So Tony, tell me about your role at Digital Realty and give us a little background on Digital Realty and what you do. >> Absolutely, so my job is to figure out how to make our product and experience relevant for enterprises and partners alike. Digital Realty is probably one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It's the largest provider of multi-tenant data center capacity in the world, over 300 data centers, 50 submetros, 26 countries, six continents. So it's a substantial provider of data center infrastructure capacity to hyperscale clouds to the largest enterprise in the world and everywhere in between. >> So what's the connection with Dell? What are you guys doing with Dell? >> I think it's going to be a marriage made in heaven in terms of the partnership. You think of Dell as the largest leading provider of critical IT infrastructure for companies around the world. They bring expertise in building the most relevant performant efficient infrastructure, combine that with the largest most relevant full spectrum capability provider of data center capacity. And together you create this integrated pre-engineered kind of experience where infrastructure can be delivered on demand, secure and compliant, performant and efficient and really unlock the opportunity that's trapped in the world around data. >> So speaking of data, you have a unique view at Digital Realty because you're seeing things in aggregate, in a way that maybe a single client wouldn't be seeing them. What are some of the trends and important things we need to be aware of as we move forward from a data center, from an IT perspective, frankly. >> Yeah, it's an excellent question. The good part of the vantage point is we see emerging trends as they start to unfold 'cause you have the most unique diverse set of customers coming together and coming together, almost organized like in a community effect because you have them connecting and attaching to each other's infrastructure sharing data. And what we've seen is in explosion in data being created, data being processed, aggregated, stored, and then being enriched. And it's really around that, what we call the data creation life cycle, where what we're seeing is that data then needs to be shared across many different devices, applications, systems, companies, users, and that ends up creating this new type of workflow driven world that's very intelligent and is going to cause a radical explosion in all our eyes of needing more infrastructure and more infrastructure faster and more infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah, when you talk about data and you talk about all of these connectivity points and communication points, talk about how some of those are explained to us. Some of these are outside of your facilities and some of them are within your facilities. In this virtualized abstracted world we live in it's easy to think that everything lives in our endpoint mobile device but talk about how that gravity associated with data affects things moving forward. >> Absolutely, glad you brought up about the mobile device because I think it's probably the easiest thing to attach to, to think about how the mobile device has radically liberated and transformed end users and in versions of mobile devices, even being sensors, not just people on a mobile phone proliferating everywhere. So that proliferation of these endpoints that are accessing and coming over different networks mobile networks, wifi networks, corporate networks, all end up generating data that then needs to be brought together and processed. And what we found is that we've found a study that we've been spending multiple years and multiple millions of dollars building into an index in a tool called the Data Gravity Index where we've been able to quantify not only this data creation life cycle, but how big and how fast and how it creates a gravitational effect because as more data gets shared with more applications, it becomes very localized. And so we've now measured and predicted for 700 mentors around the world where that data gravity effect is occurring and it's affecting every industry, every enterprise, and it's going to fundamentally change how infrastructure needs to be architected because it needs to become data centric. It used to be connectivity centric but with these mobile phones and endpoints going everywhere you have to create a meeting place. And it has to be a meeting place where the data comes together and then systems and services are brought and user traffic comes in and out of. >> So in other words, despite your prowess in this space you guys have yet to solve the speed of light issue and the cost of bandwidth moving between sites. So is it fair to say that in an ideal world you could have dozens of actually different customers, separate entities that are physically living in data center locations that are built and posted and run by Digital Realty, communicating with one another. So when these services are communicating instead of communicating over a hundred miles or a thousand miles, it's like one side of the chicken wire fence to the other, not that you use chicken wire in your data center but you get the point, is that fair. >> It is, it's like the mall analogy, right? You're building these data malls and everybody's bringing their relevant infrastructure and then using private secure connections between each other and then enabling the ability for data to be exchanged, enriched and new business be conducted. So no, physics hasn't been solved, Dave, just to add to that. And what we're finding is it's not just physics. One of the other things that we're continuing to see and hear from customers and that we continue to study as a trend is regulations, compliance and security are becoming as big a factors as physics is. So it's not just physics and cost which I agree with what you're saying but there's also these other dimensions that's in effect in placement, connectivity in the management of data and infrastructure, basically, in all major metros around the world where companies do business and providers support them, or customers come to meet them both physically and digitally. It's an interesting trend, right? I think a number of the industrians call it a digital twin where there's a virtual version and of a digital version and a physical version and that's probably the best way to think of us, is that secure meeting place where each can have their own secure infrastructure of what's being digitized but actually being placed physically. >> Yeah, that's interesting. When you look at this from the Dell, Digital Realty partnership perspective we know here at theCUBE that Dell is trying to make consumption of what they build, very, very simple for end user customers. Removing the complexity of the underlying hardware. There's a saying that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. You hear things referred to as serverless or no code, low code, those sort of abstract away from the reality of what's going on under the covers. But APEX, as an example from Dell allows things to be consumed as operational expense, dramatically simplifying the process of consuming that hardware. Now, if you go down to almost the concrete layer where Digital Realty starts up, you're looking at things like density and square footage and power consumption, right? >> Yep. >> So tell me, you mentioned infrastructure. Tell me about the kind of optimization from a hardware standpoint that you expect to see from Dell. >> Yeah, in the data center, the subset of an industry, they call it digital or mission critical infrastructure, the space, the power, the secure housing, how do you create physical isolation? How do you deal with cooling and containment? How do you deal with different physical loads? 'Cause some of the more dense computers likely working with Dell and some of the various semiconductors that Dell takes and wraps into intelligent compute and storage blocks, the specialized processing for our use cases like artificial intelligence and machine learning, they run very fast, they generate a lot of heat and they consume a lot of power. So that means you have to be very smart about the critical infrastructure and the type of server infrastructure storage coming together where the heat can be quickly removed. The power is obviously distributed to it, so it can run as constant and as fast as possible to unlock insights and processing. And then you also need to be able to deal with things like, hey, the cabling between the server and the storage has to be that when you're running parallel calculations that there's an equal distance between the cabling. Well, if I don't think about how I'm physically bringing the server storage and all of that together and then having space that can accommodate and ensure the equal cabling in the layout, oh and then handle these very heavy physical computers. So that physical load into the floor, it becomes very problematic. So it's hidden, most people don't understand that engineering but that's the partnership that why we're excited about with Dell is you're bringing all that critical expertise of supporting all those various types of use cases of infrastructure combinations and then combining the engineering understanding of how do I build for the right performance, the right density, the right TCO and also do it where physical layout of having things in proximity and in a contiguous space can then be the way to unlock processing of data and connecting to others. >> Yeah, so from an end user perspective, I don't need to care about any of what you just said. All I heard was wawawawawa (chuckles). I will consume my APEX delivered Dell by the drink, as a service, as OPEX, however I want to consume it. But I can rest assured that Digital Realty and Dell are actually taking care of those meaningful things that are happening under the hood. Maybe I'm revealing my long term knuckle dragging hardware guy credentials when I just get that little mentioning. >> (indistinct) you got it, performance secure compliant and I don't need to worry about it. The two of you're taking care of it and you're taking care of it for me. And every major mentor around the world delivered in the experience it needs to be delivered in. >> So from the Digital Realty point of view, what are the things that not necessarily keep you up at night worrying, but sort of wake you up in the morning early with a sense of renewed opportunity when it comes to the data center space, a lot of people would think, well we're in the era of cloud, no one's building any data centers except for monster cloud players. But that's definitely not the case, is it? There's a demand for what you folks are building and delivering. So first, what's the opportunity look like and then what are the constraints that are out there? Is it dirt, is it power? What are the constraints you face? >> We have probably all the above, is the shortest answer, right? So we're not wawawa, right Dave? But what we are is the opportunity is huge because it's not one platform, there's many platforms there isn't one business that exists today that doesn't use many applications, doesn't consume many different services both internally and externally, and doesn't generate a ton of data that they may not even know where it is. So that's the exciting part. And that continues to force a requirement that says I need to be able to connect to all those clouds which you can do at our platform but I also need to be able to put infrastructure or the storage of data next to it and in between it. So it's like an integration approach that says if I think physical first think physical that's within logical proximity to where I have employees, customers, partners, I have business presence. That's what drives us, and in our industry continues to grow both. And we see it in our own business. It's a double digit growth rate for both commercial oriented enterprises and service providers in the telco cloud, or content kind of space. So it's kind of like a best of both worlds. I think that's what gets us excited. If I should take a second part of the question, what ends up boring is like all of us, it is a physical world, physical world start with, do we have enough power? Is it durable, sustainable and secure? Is it available? Do we have the right connectivity options. Keeping things available is a full-time job, making it so that you can accommodate local nuances when you start going in different regions and countries and metros there's a lot of regional policy compliance or market specific needs that have to be factored in. But you're still trying to deliver that consistent physical availability and experience. So it's a good problem to have but it's a critical infrastructure problem that I would put in the same kind of bucket as power companies, energy companies, telecommunication companies, because it's a meeting place for all of that. >> So you've been in this business, not just at Digital Realty but you you've been in this part of the IT world for a while. >> Yeah. >> How has the persona of a customer for a Digital Realty changed over time? Have we seen the kind of consolidation that people would expect in this space in terms of fewer but larger customers coming in and seeking floor space? >> Well, I think it's been the opposite of what probably people predict. And I pause there intentionally being very candid and open. And it's probably why that using data as the proxy to understand, is that it's a many to many world that's only getting bigger, not smaller. As much as companies consolidate, there's more that appear. Innovation is driving new businesses and new industries or the digitization of old industries which is then creating a whole multiplier effect. So what we're seeing is we're actually seeing a rapid uptake in the enterprise side of our business which is why I'm here in driving that. That really was much more nominal five years ago for being the provider of the space and capabilities for telcos and large hyperscalers continues to go because it's not like a once and done, it's I need to do this in many places. I need to continue to bring as there's a push towards the edge, I need to be able to create meeting places for all of it. And so to us, we're seeing a constant growth in more companies becoming customers on the enterprise side more enterprises deploying in more places solving more use cases. And more service providers figuring out new ways to monetize by bringing their infrastructure and making an accessibility to be connected to on our platform. >> So if I'm here hearing you right, you're saying that people who believe that we are maybe a few years away from everything being in a single cloud are completely off base. >> Mmh hmm. >> That is not the direction that we're heading, from your view, right? >> We love our cloud customers, they're going to continue to grow. But it's not all going to one cloud. I think what you would see is, that you would see where a great way to assess that and break it down is enterprise IT, Gartner's Forecast 4.2, four and a half trillion a year in spend, less than a third of that's hitting public cloud. So there's a long tail first of all, it's not going to one cloud of people. There's like seven or eight major players and then you go, okay, well, what do I do if it's not in seven or eight major players? Well, then I need to put it next to it. Oh, that's why we'll go to a Digital Realty. >> Makes a lot of sense. Tony Bishop, Digital Realty. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Have a great Dell Technologies World. For me, Dave Nicholson, stay tuned more live coverage from Dell Technologies World 2022 as we resume in just a moment. (soft music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome, everybody. This is theCUBE's special coverage of Veemon 2017 from New Orleans. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Danny Allan is here as the Vice President of Cloud and Alliance Strategy at Veeam. Danny, big week for you. >> Very exciting to be here. My first VeeamON, so you can imagine how excited I am. >> Us too. So cloud and Alliance Strategy, what is the strategy there? Sum it up for us. >> So kind of three things. There's to the cloud, from the cloud, within the cloud. So if you break those out, most organizations today, what they're doing, or what they do is they use their backups, they push them up to the cloud. Some of those that are in areas where they care about disaster recovery are using disaster recovery as a service, both of those kind of pushing services up to the cloud. From the cloud would be things like SAS services. You have things like Office 365, pull the data down, protect it because it belongs to you. And then within the cloud, we've seen our customers with cloud-hosted workloads, and they say, "I want to keep my protection but in a different cloud, "in a multi-cloud world." >> Interesting they would say, in the keynote this morning, they would say, "Well, today's going to be cloud day," but yesterday you had some AWS announcements, too. We know today you can't talk about IT without having cloud and kind of the hybrid multi-cloud get dispersed everywhere. Lot of announcements. What I was hoping you could dig into a little bit for us is the Veeam powered network with Azure and maybe give us the quick overview and let's drill down in there a little bit. >> Sure, so one of the capabilities we've had for a while is this ability to do direct restore to Azure. So you have the Veeam, it goes down and you hit a button and it goes up to Azure. Now that's all great, but when that server was in your data center, you could actually just connect to it because it was on your network. One of the challenges is when you put something up in the cloud, how do you get your users to that service? It's a different IP, it's a different subnet, it's a different network. So this is to make it simple. We've always focused on it just works, so this is a model that we can do a very simple model to connect users to the service when we push it up into the cloud. >> Yeah, maybe, I think most people in cloud understand the Amazon VPN service. Could you maybe compare and contrast that with what you've got? >> Very similar. So Amazon does the VPC, and this just takes it down and simplifies it so that it's part of your orchestration strategy. So typically, when you have something running up in the cloud, what happens is you set it up, the connection, and you maintain the connection for the duration of that service. This is a little bit different, because you want the connection, but only when you need it. And so it's orchestrating that connection in a very simple lightweight way that you don't have to maintain an ongoing connection. That enables that service delivery. >> There's a lot of talks at events like this and certainly has been at this event about just migrating workloads and help us square the circle. So you hear a lot of that talk, and then the same time you hear about data explosion, data growth, and then there's the speed of light problem. So how are customers sort of managing that, and how can you help? >> So I don't necessarily believe that organizations are migrating from cloud to cloud on a regular basis. But what does happen is they outgrow the cloud that they happen to be in. We see this in private cloud all the time. I have so much capacity, I don't have any left, I need to jump over to another cloud. So there's kind of three drivers that cause people to go into a multi-cloud air. One is certainly disaster recovery. Second though is cost optimization and business alignment. So it's sometimes you'll have an executive level far above IT says, "Hey, we strategically aligned "with this cloud; we would like to shift workloads "over to another one." And the last is around really the footprint of the cloud provider themselves. So it could be because of geophysical location or compliance certifications. That organizations say, "I need to take this particular "service and move it over here." >> We had some talk about cloud service providers as a channel this week, and what's the discussion like with CSPs in terms of them monetizing services? And how do you help? With whether it's software defines something, or programatic thresholds through APIs. Can you and how do you support that monetization strategy? >> So, a few different things. One is that the cloud service providers are very focused on their specific value add. And if you go talk to them, some of them are heavy in security, some of them are heavy in the managed services, some of them are heavy in the analytics. They all have a specific value add that they have. But one of the things that we do for them is in the platforms that we've announced, like Veeam Availability Console has a full restful API that they can integrate into their environment. Take iland, for example. They have their own portal, they call their APIs, customer never sees anything other than their specific portal, and that's true for all of the products that we've been announcing. Veeam Availability Console, Veeam Backup for Office 365, we enable that integration with our product set. >> One of the other announcements that we were digging into a little bit is to be able to have an archive tier with a lot of the object storage out there. Whether it be as the Amazon Blob, is this some of the AWS offerings, or any kind of S3 or Swift compatible solutions. Is that something that you've been hearing customers asking for for a while? How do you expect that to roll out? >> It is. So there's two kinds of customers. Those that say, "Hey, I would like to leverage "the hyper-scale public clouds 4S3 or Azure. "We have credits with them, we want to use them up." And so this enables them to push off an archive tier to the data up to there. But we also see organizations, especially the large ones that are building their own on premises object storage because of the characteristics of scale up, scale out. And they've been saying, "Hey, we want to leverage that." Now, the performance historically has not been as good as block storage, obviously, but now it's catching up and people are using it more for an archive tier than a primary tier or a secondary tier. >> The other day at the analyst briefing, you talked about there were three things that came out. One was digital transformation and agility, and we want to explore that a little bit. The other was core business continuity, and the third was analytics and visualization. And I wonder if we could stick on that for a minute. That analytics and visualization. Can you explain a little bit further what you guys bring to the table there and how customers are using it? >> So one of the things that Veeam has is an archive of all of your data that is stored. And we've been looking to expose that data to our partners so that they can dig into it and add their value. So we announced a partnership with Data Gravity, for example, that reaches into those VMs. And as regulations like GDPR come out, then there is a higher and higher business need, sorry, General Data Protectionary Regulation, higher and higher business need to understand what is in the data that we're storing and then perform analysis on it. >> Yeah, so GDPR takes affect like basically a year from now, right? >> Danny: Yeah, May. >> May of '18. We've had also a lot of discussion about ransomware, and just creating air gaps and so forth. The reason why I was so interested in analytics and visualization is it seems that it would require more than just an air gap because Bill Philbin said it today. When you make a boo boo, the boo boo gets replicated very quickly. Well, when someone's maliciously encrypting your data, it probably gets maliciously encrypted very quickly, or replicated very quickly. It seems that you are in a unique position to provide analytics on an anomalous behavior on change data. Has that discussion taken place with your partners and clients? >> Yes, absolutely, we're looking at it. In fact, there was a breakout session on this very thing. Basically, when you saw the files being deleted from a particular folder or .docex files being changed to .enc files, when you saw a ransomware attack taking place that you could actually roll back to the latest snapshot, or you could take a snapshot and send an email to someone and say, "Hey, this is happening, you should look at it." I look forward actually out into the future that we can leverage some of the things that we're doing now with continuous data protection that traps the IO traffic. So that is the VCR API for IO filtering. And if you see an attack taking place, you could actually roll back that IO journal say five minutes and say take a snapshot at that point even before it happened. So it has more behavioral-based protections associated with it. So I think we're at a really interesting era in the space where we're going to begin to see new things that have never been done in the past. >> And potentially specific solutions are around ransomware. Maybe they'll talk about it generically, maybe they're out there, I just haven't seen a very specific, I'm sure they are out there. But I haven't seen a specific solution around. It seems like the guy with the backup data would be in a unique position to do that. >> Yeah, data is the lifeblood of the organization, so being able to mine it for data insights, being able to leverage that for data governance, being able to use it for e-discovery, but also to be able to use it in proactive ways for the business. Like determining that a ransomware attack is taking place and perhaps fire off instructions to your perimeter to act differently. Who knows what these things are going to go towards. But the data is the content that actually drives a lot of those behaviors. >> Danny, one of the things I found interesting, Mark Rosinovich's keynote. He was talking about the evolution of application platforms and Veeam started with the VM, and I saw a lot of the show. There's physical endpoints, there's cloud endpoints. When you start going to things like paths an even serverless functions as a service, what impact will that have on availability overall and where does Veeam see that going in your world? >> So our vision is to perform always on availability for any service, so as we go forward into containers and serverless, there's still a requirement to provide protection. So I was listening to him as he was saying, "Hey, there could be an API that resizes the image." You could actually use that exact same API to say, "Hey, is that image important? "Send it over to this repository for retention." So there's still a requirement for availability, and what it means is, if you're looking at paths and container-type model, then maybe we do it underneath the containers to protect them as they're running. But if you're looking at serverless, maybe we actually inject it into the APIs itself to perform that same protection. It's going to be required no matter what the structure of the data happens to be. >> We're out of time, but maybe, Danny, quick summary of the announcements that you guys made this week and some of the things that people are excited about. >> Yeah, so a lot of different announcements, obviously. Veeam Availability Console Release Candidate is out. We announced a whole lot of disaster recovery as a service functions for service providers. Things like continuous data protection, things like VCD integration. We announced Veeam Backup for Office 365. Actually two different versions of it. One is for service providers, multi-tenant, multi-repository, but also adding in SharePoint and OneDrive capabilities. We obviously, our flagship product, Veeam Availability Suite. We talked a lot about the object storage. We talked about continuous data protection. A lot of these capabilities have been announced over the last few days. >> Yeah, so Veeam, you've seen a lot of strategy, they're hitting R and D, turning it into product, turning into customer value and revenue. So you guys have been busy and quite an impressive stream of innovation coming out this week. So Danny, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing that with us. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate being here. >> Okay, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman live from VeeamON 2017. Right back.