(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here with a couple of AWS product experts. Covering AWS's migration and transfer services, Randy Boutin is the general manager of AWS DataSync, and Mat Matthews, GM of AWS Transfer Family. Guys, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thanks. >> So look, we saw during the pandemic, the acceleration to cloud migration. We've tracked that, we've quantified that. What's driving that today? >> Yeah, so Dave, great to be back here. Saw you last year at Storage Day. >> Nice to be in studio too, isn't it? Thanks, guys, for coming in. >> We've conquered COVID. >> So yeah, I mean, this is a great question. I think digital transformation is really what's driving a lot of the focus right now from companies, and it's really not about just driving down costs. It's also about what are the opportunities available once you get into the cloud in terms of, what does that unlock in terms of innovation? So companies are focused on the usual things, optimizing costs, but ensuring they have the right security and agility. You know, a lot has happened over the last year, and companies need to be able to react, right? They need to be able to react quickly, so cloud gives them a lot of these capabilities, but the real benefit that we see is that once your data's in the cloud, it opens up the power of the cloud for analytics, for new application development, and things of that sort, so what we're seeing is that companies are really just focused on understanding cloud migration strategy, and how they can get their data there, and then use that to unlock that data for the value. >> I mean, if I've said it once, I've said it 100 times, if you weren't a digital business during the pandemic, you were out of business. You know, migration historically is a bad word in IT. Your CIOs see it and go, "Ugh." So what's the playbook for taking years of data on-prem, and moving it into the cloud? What are you seeing as best practice there? >> Yeah, so as you said, the migration historically has been painful, right? And it's a daunting task for any business or any IT executive, but fortunately, AWS has a broad suite of capabilities to help enable these migrations. And by that, I mean, we have tools to help you understand your existing on-prem workloads, understand what services in the AWS offering align to those needs, but also help you estimate the cost, right? Cost is a big part of this move. We can help you estimate that cost, and predict that cost, and then use tools like DataSync to help you move that data when that time comes. >> So you're saying you help predict the cost of the migration, or the cost of running in the cloud? >> Running in the cloud, right. Yeah, we can help estimate the run time. Based on the performance that we assess on-prem, we can then project that into a cloud service, and estimate that cost. >> So can you guys explain DataSync? Sometimes I get confused, DataSync, what's the difference between DataSync and Storage Gateway? And I want to get into when we should use each, but let's start there if we could. >> Yeah, sure, I'll take that. So Storage Gateway is primarily a means for a customer to access their data in the cloud from on-prem. All right, so if you have an application that you want to keep on-prem, you're not ready yet to migrate that application to the cloud, Gateway is a strong solution, because you can move a lot of that data, a lot of your cold or long tail data into something like S3 or EFS, but still access it from your on-prem location. DataSync's all about data movement, so if you need to move your data from A to B, DataSync is your optimized solution to do that. >> Are you finding that people, that's ideally a one time move, or is it actually, sometimes you're seeing customers do it more? Again, moving data, if I don't- Move as much data as you need to, but no more, to paraphrase Einstein. >> What we're seeing in DataSync is that customers do use DataSync for their initial migration. They'll also, as Matt was mentioning earlier, once you get your data into the cloud, that flywheel of potential starts to take hold, and customers want to ultimately move that data within the cloud to optimize its value. So you might move from service to service. You might move from EFS to S3, et cetera, to enable the cloud flywheel to benefit you. DataSync does that as well, so customers use us to initially migrate, they use us to move within the cloud, and also we just recently announced service for other clouds, so you can actually bring data in now from Google and Azure as well. >> Oh, how convenient. So okay, so that's cool. So you helped us understand the use cases, but can we dig one more layer, like what protocols are supported? I'm trying to understand really the right fit for the right job. >> Yeah, so that's really important. So for transfer specifically, one of the things that we see with customers is you've got obviously a lot of internal data within your company, but today it's a very highly interconnected world, so companies deal with lots of business partners, and historically they've used, there's a big prevalence of using file transfer to exchange data with business partners, and as you can imagine, there's a lot of value in that data, right? Sometimes it's purchase orders, inventory data from suppliers, or things like that. So historically customers have had protocols like SFTP or FTP to help them interface with or exchange data or files with external partners. So for transfer, that's what we focus on is helping customers exchange data over those existing protocols that they've used for many years. And the real focus is it's one thing to migrate your own data into the cloud, but you can't force thousands or tens of thousands sometimes of partners to also work in a different way to get you their data, so we want to make that very seamless for customers using the same exact protocols like SFTP that they've used for years. We just announced AS2 protocol, which is very heavily used in supply chains to exchange inventory and information across multi-tiers of partners, and things of that nature. So we're really focused on letting customers not have to impact their partners, and how they work and how they exchange, but also take advantage of the data, so get that data into the cloud so they can immediately unlock the value with analytics. >> So AS2 is specifically in the context of supply chain, and I'm presuming it's secure, and kind of governed, and safe. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, so AS2 has a lot of really interesting features for transactional type of exchanges, so it has signing and encryption built in, and also has notification so you can basically say, "Hey, I sent you this purchase order," and to prove that you received it, it has capability called non-repudiation, which means it's actually a legal transaction. So those things are very important in transactional type of exchanges, and allows customers in supply chains, whether it's vendors dealing with their suppliers, or transportation partners, or things like that to leverage file transfer for those types of exchanges. >> So encryption, providence of transactions, am I correct, without having to use the blockchain, and all the overhead associated with that? >> It's got some built in capabilities. >> I mean, I love blockchain, but there's drawbacks. >> Exactly, and that's why it's been popular. >> That's really interesting, 'cause Andy Jassy one day, I was on a phone call with him and John Furrier, and we were talking up crypto and blockchain. He said, "Well, why do, explain to me." You know Jassy, right? He always wants to go deeper. "Explain why I can't do this with some other approach." And so I think he was recognizing some of the drawbacks. So that's kind of a cool thing, and it leads me- We're running this obviously today, August 10th. Yesterday we had our Supercloud event in Palo Alto on August 9th, and it's all about the ecosystem. One of the observations we made about the 2020s is the cloud is totally different now. People are building value on top of the infrastructure that you guys have built out over the last 15 years. And so once an organization's data gets into the cloud, how does it affect, and it relates to AS2 somewhat, how does it affect the workflows in terms of interacting with external partners, and other ecosystem players that are also in the cloud? >> Yeah, great, yeah, again, we want to try and not have to affect those workflows, take them as they are as much as possible, get the data exchange working. One of the things that we focus on a lot is, how do you process this data once it comes in? Every company has governance requirements, security requirements, and things like that, so they usually have a set of things that they need to automate and orchestrate for the data as it's coming in, and a lot of these companies use something called Managed File Transfer Solutions that allow them to automate and orchestrate those things. We also see that many times this is very customer specific, so a bank might have a certain set of processes they have to follow, and it needs to be customized. As you know, AWS is a great solution for building custom solutions, and actually today, we're just announcing a new set of of partners in a program called the Service Delivery Program with AWS Transfer Family that allows customers to work with partners that are very well versed in transfer family and related services to help build a very specific solution that allows them to build that automation orchestration, and keep their partners kind of unaware that they're interfacing in a different way. >> And once this data is in the cloud, or actually, maybe stays on-prem in some cases, but it basically plugs in to the AWS services portfolio, the whole security model, the governance model, shared responsibility comes in, is that right? It's all, sort of all in there? >> Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right, and we're working with it's all about the customer's needs, and making sure that their investment in AWS doesn't disrupt their existing workflows and their relationships with their customers and their partners, and that's exactly what Matt's been describing is we're taking a close look at how we can extend the value of AWS, integrate into our customer's workflows, and bring that value to them with minimal investment or disruption. >> So follow up on that. So I love that, because less disruption means it's easier, less friction, and I think of like, trying to think of examples. Think about data de-duplication like purpose-built backup appliances, right? Data domain won that battle, because they could just plug right in. Avamar, they were trying to get you to redo everything, okay, and so we saw that movie play out. At the same time, I've talked to CIOs that say, "I love that, but the cloud opens up all these cool new opportunities for me to change my operating model." So are you seeing that as well? Where okay, we make it easy to get in. We're not disrupting workflows, and then once they get in, they say, "Well if we did it this way, we'd take out a bunch of costs. We'd accelerate our business." What's that dynamic like? >> Exactly that, right. So that moved to the Cloud Continuum. We don't think it's going to be binary. There's always going to be something on-prem. We accept that, but there's a continuum there, so day one, they'll migrate a portion of that workload into the cloud, start to extract and see value there, but then they'll continue, as you said, they'll continue to see opportunities. With all of the various capabilities that AWS has to offer, all the value that represents, they'll start to see that opportunity, and then start to engage and consume more of those features over time. >> Great, all right, give us the bumper sticker. What's next in transfer services from your perspectives? >> Yeah, so we're obviously always going to listen to our customers, that's our focus. >> You guys say that a lot. (all laughing) We say it a lot. But yeah, so we're focused on helping customers again increase that level of automation orchestration, again that suite of capability, generally, in our industry, known as managed file transfer, when a file comes in, it needs to get maybe encrypted, or decrypted, or compressed, or decompressed, scanned for viruses, those kind of capabilities, make that easier for customers. If you remember last year at Storage Day, we announced a low code workflow framework that allows customers to kind of build those steps. We're continuing to add built-in capabilities to that so customers can easily just say, "Okay, I want these set of activities to happen when files come in and out." So that's really what's next for us. >> All right, Randy, we'll give you the last word. Bring us home. >> I'm going to surprise you with the customer theme. >> Oh, great, love it. >> Yeah, so we're listening to customers, and what they're asking for our support for more sources, so we'll be adding support for more cloud sources, more on-prem sources, and giving the customers more options, also performance and usability, right? So we want to make it easier, as the enterprise continues to consume the cloud, we want to make DataSync and the movement of their data as easy as possible. >> I've always said it starts with the data. S3, that was the first service, and the other thing I've said a lot is the cloud is expanding. We're seeing connections to on-prem. We're seeing connections out to the edge. It's just becoming this massive global system, as Werner Vogels talks about all the time. Thanks, guys, really appreciate it. >> Dave, thank you very much. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We're here talking storage at Amazon in Boston. Asa Kalavade's here, she's the general manager for Hybrid and Data Transfer services. >> Let me give you a perspective of how these services come together. We have DataSync, Storage Gateway, and Transfer. As a set of Hybrid and Data Transfer services. The problem that we're trying to address for customers is how to connect their on premises infrastructure to the cloud. And we have customers at different stages of their journey to the cloud. Some are just starting out to use the cloud, some are migrating, and others have migrated, but they still need access to the cloud from on-prem. So the broad charter for these services is to enable customers to use AWS Storage from on-premises. So for example, DataStorage Gateway today is used by customers to get unlimited access to cloud storage from on-premises. And they can do that with low latency, so they can run their on-prem workloads, but still leverage storage in the cloud. In addition to that, we have DataSync, which we launched at re:Invent last year, in 2018. And DataSync essentially is designed to help customers move a lot of their on-premises storage to the cloud, and back and forth for workloads that involve replication, migration, or ongoing data transfers. So together, Gateway and DataSync help solve the access and transfer problem for customers. >> Let's double down on the benefits. You started the segment just sort of describing the problem that you're solving, connecting on-prem to cloud, sort of helping create these hybrid environments. So that's really the other benefit for customers, really simplifying that sort of hybrid approach, giving them high performance confidence that it actually worked. >> Maybe talk a little bit more about that. >> So with DataSync, we see two broad use cases. There is a class of customers that have adopted DataSync for migration. So we have customers like Autodesk who've migrated hundreds of terabytes from their on-premises storage to AWS. And that has allowed them to shut down their data center, or retire their existing storage, because they're on their journey to the cloud. The other class of use cases is customers that have ongoing data that they need to move to the cloud for a workload. So it could be data from video cameras, or gene sequencers that they need to move to a data pipeline in the cloud, and they can do further processing there. And in some cases, bring the results back. So that's the second continuous data transfer use case, that DataSync allows customers to address. >> You're also talking today, about Storage Gateway high availability version of Storage Gateway. What's behind that? >> Storage Gateway today is used by customers to get access to data in the cloud, from on-premises. So if we continue this migration story that I mentioned with DataSync, now you have a customer that has moved a large amount of data to the cloud. They can now access that same data from on-premises for latency reasons, or if they need to distribute data across organizations and so on. So that's where the Gateway comes into play. Today we have 10's of thousands of customers that are using Gateway to do their back-ups, do archiving, or in some cases, use it as a target to replace their on-premises storage, with cloud backed storage. So a lot of these customers are running business critical applications today. But then some of our customers have told us they want to do additional workloads that are uninterruptible. So they can not tolerate downtime. So with that requirement in mind, we are launching this new capability around high availability. And we're quite excited, because that's solving, yet allowing us to do even more workloads on the Gateway. This announcement will allow customers to have a highly available Gateway, in a VMware environment. With that, their workloads can continue running, even if one of the Gateways goes down, if they have a hardware failure, a networking event, or software error such as the file shares becoming unavailable. The Gateway automatically restarts, so the workloads remain uninterrupted. >> So talk a little bit more about how it works, just in terms of anything customers have to do, any prerequisites they have. How does it all fit? >> Customers can essentially use this in their VMware H.A. environment today. So they would deploy their Gateway much like they do today. They can download the Gateway from the AWS console. If they have an existing Gateway, the software gets updated so they can take advantage of the high availability feature as well. The Gateway integrates into the VMware H.A. environment. It builds up a number of health checks, so we keep monitoring for the application up-time, network up-time, and so on. And if there is an event, the health check gets communicated back to VMware, and the Gateway gets restarted within, in most typical cases, under 60 seconds. >> So customers that are VMware customers, can take advantage of this, and to them, it's very non disruptive it sounds like. That's one of the benefits. But maybe talk about some of the other benefits. >> We saw a large number of our on-premises customers, especially in the enterprise environments, use VMware today. And they're using VMware HA for a number of their other applications. So we wanted to plug into that environment so the Gateway is as well highly available. So all their applications just work in that same framework. And then along with high availability, we're also introducing two additional capabilities. One is real time reports and visibility into the Gateway's resource consumption. So customers can now see embedded cloud watch graphs on how is their storage being consumed, what's their cache utilization, what's the network utilization. And then the administrators can use that to, in fairly real time, adapt the resources that they've allocated to the Gateway. So with that, as their workloads change, they can continue to adapt their Gateway resources, so they're getting the maximum performance out of the Gateway. >> So if they see a performance problem, and it's a high priority, they can put more resources on it-- >> They can attach more storage to it, or move it to a higher resourced VM, and they can continue to get the performance they need. Previously they could still do that, but they had to have manual checks. Now this is all automated, we can get this in a single pane of control. And they can use the AWS console today, like they do for their in cloud workloads. They can use that to look at performance of their on-premises Gateway's as well. So it's one pane of control. They can get CloudWatch health reports on their infrastructure on-prem. >> And if course it's cloud, so I can assume this is a service, I pay for it when I used it, I don't have to install any infrastructure, right? >> So the Gateways, again, consumption based, much like all AWS services. You download the Gateway, it doesn't cost you anything. And we charge one cent per gigabyte of data transfer through the Gateway, and it's capped at $125 a month. And you just pay for whatever storage is consumed by the Gateway. >> When you talk to senior exec's like Andy Jassy, always says "We focus on the customers." And sometimes people roll their eyes, but it's true. This is a hybrid world. Years ago, you didn't really hear much talk about hybrid. You talked to your customers and say, "Hey, we want to connect our on-prem to the public cloud." You're bringing services to do that. Asa, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, thanks for your time. >> You're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be back right after this short break. (upbeat music)