live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam hi everybody welcome back to Miami I'm Dave Volante and this is day two of veeam on 2019 we're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel in beautiful sunny Miami a lot of swanky people a lot of big boats parties going on last night of course it's v-mon so you know there's a lot of fun this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage Allen Stern is here he's that technical solutions architect at Cisco really what that means is he's an evangelist the cube alam al and good to see you again great to see you again david coming on so yeah this is quite a venue as always Vemma action going on a lot of customers here 2,000 plus people so let's get into it hey Cisco we're gonna be at Cisco live in a couple weeks really excited about that it's gonna be a great show in San Diego absolutely another awesome venue we were in Barcelona earlier this year to do Cisco so we you know we love the circuit it's a great customer show I want to start with something that we talked about in Barcelona which is Cisco really as it evolves into the multi cloud world is is making the case that it's networks are more secure higher performance and more cost effective than anybody out there and it's in a good position to do that now we're gonna talk deep about infrastructure but I want to start there and just get your take on that sort of overall challenge to Cisco well it's not really a challenge it's an opportunity for us because we look at the cloud is this great opportunity you still have to have networking within your cloud provider you've still got to do all the things you do on your on-prem datacenter you just have to do it in somebody else's data center and what we've done is we wanted to simplify that operation so the way you deploy Cisco ACI on Prem you deploy it the same way in the cloud provider you're using the same interface and yeah on the backend we're doing different things because we're interfacing with their networking api's but to the end-user they don't have to know each cloud providers interface they just have to know Cisco and they know that it'll be configured correctly and if we think about what happens with a lot of the threats and attacks that occur in networks what's one of the easiest ways to get attacked it's a misconfigured network a firewall port that's left open but if you're doing it the same way every time regardless of where you're doing it that makes it a lot easier and reduces the the chance that you're going to make a mistake yeah and you guys can do the deep packet inspection you've got a lot of experience around that you're driving a lot of analytics and obviously machine intelligence is going to come into play and so but you've been able to go back to what you just said so give me an example so you guys have announced a multi cloud strategy is support basically you're essentially describing what we talked about on the cube all the time is bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is so whether it's on Prem in the public cloud supporting hybrid so you're saying for example if you've got a customer who's running on AWS and using you know heavily using AWS primitives and api's you make that transparent to the user is that correct absolutely okay and so it sounds like magic but it's a lot of hard work I'm sure a lot of software it is a lot of hard work from a lot of really smart people inside of Cisco that are we have some amazing developers now your your sweet spot is the infrastructure side of the business so UCS and and and obviously the partnership with Vemma which we'll get into but what's your swimlane so my swimlane really is our software-defined storage partners and our data protection partners and when when I started on this role a few years ago they seemed very very much separate and now what we're seeing is they're coming very much together because what are we what are customers looking to get away from tape what do they need large amounts of storage because we've seen this explosion of data we talked about it last year and we're seeing terms like yottabyte and branagh byte and I remember when I first saw branagh byte I was like is this something you know somebody watched too many episodes of The Flintstones but no it's it's a real term a yottabyte is a thousand exabytes and a branagh byte is a thousand yottabytes so data is growing at multiple orders of magnitude on a regular basis and we've got to store it differently than we have in the past if somebody sent me a stat and no just would you just reminded me of it Allen a couple months ago and I got to go back and research it but if anybody out there knows the stat it was astounding to me it said by by like 2025 or 2022 there's gonna be more bytes of data created or stored than there are stars in the universe now that just blew my mind and we could do the math and figure that out but I gotta go back and check out the link but to your point the the growth curve it's it's nonlinear you know used to be Moore's law and now their curve is is reshaping so when everybody talks about digital transformation they're what they're really talking about is making their business digital which is all about data and you talk about getting away from tape you can't have a bit digital business that runs on tape you could save tape you know for deep archive and stick it in the iron mountain or whatever but you can't recover yeah right now keep your business running 24/7 so to your point about those worlds coming together that really underscores it so what's your role in supporting digital business strategies and keeping businesses up and doing fast recovery and your partnership with Veen so we provide great platforms for folks like beam and the object storage vendor so beam now has fantastic integration with the s3 interface that many of these object providers allow cisco has very deep platforms you know we've got a 4u box that can hold 768 terabytes of data and if you think about how much data that is you know two of these units it's a petabyte and a half of data I mean that's a fantastic amount of data it's online it's available to them if they need to restore it they can do it quickly because each of those nodes has 160 gigabits per second of network connectivity but more importantly if they want to use some of this data it's available to them right on the platform they don't have to pull back the tape restore from tape and hope they got the right one it's about data management really yeah you're talking about all these fights and yottabytes and exabytes and and the growth of storage are you seeing a really a big a big wave a trend toward the petabyte data center yeah absolutely I mean it used to be petabytes where the purview of only the fortune 500 maybe and now we're seeing it really across the board as companies yeah we're digital hoarders and you look at my laptop I've got emails from 10 years ago I've got pictures of everything from forever companies are no different because we're there looking at data and saying I've got this data I'm not sure if it's valuable today but it may be worth something tomorrow let me hold on to it but their ability to access it and use it that's going to be the critical piece because you know it's like an oversized storage unit you stuff it full of stuff you're not really sure what's in there and if you have to find that one little widget that's in there forget it as the tools get better to go find the data within the bit bucket I mean that's where the real value is coming so we could go a little journey down memory lane and talk about the Cisco strategy and how its evolved I remember when you started you know it would ucs and I was like wow that's Cisco's getting into servers and kind of didn't really understand it until I dug into it and you guys obviously we're trying to change the game with converged infrastructure and you had some partnerships to do that but I remember one of my first questions was you had like a zillion VMs that you can run on on this this block yep and I said how do you protect that and they're really at the time it was like 2009 it was like well we could kind of bolt on and that's the way backup was back then fast forward to 2019 it seems like data protection is much more of an integrated component of people's digital strategy so one of you could talk about that a little bit and how your strategy has evolved yeah and and it absolutely is because we're not just talking about data protection anymore if you look at the capabilities of folks like beam it's really about data management it's not just hey back it up put it over in the vault and forget about it never use it again it's back it up put it in the vault and if you need it I can bring it back really quickly I can use it to test data with I can use it to scan for malware so I'm not reintroducing an infection after I've cleaned it out so a lot of ways to use it and in Cisco's providing the platforms to do that the days of the old monolithic storage arrays they're still going to be here but the world for them is shrinking because you think about what do they do they're the last bastion of vertically integrated systems we saw storage you know the mainframe still here but the world for it shrunk as we had x86 systems with the operating system of choice so we're seeing the same thing happening with storage customers are just they want to be able to use all this data that's out there and in my career I've observed it's always been about recovery like when something goes wrong how do you recover that that's always the killer question right and and so but now it's even more complicated because of Eames messaging this week has been fast recovery they announced a bunch of stuff that you could recover you know directly from backup don't have to go to a replicated you know set of data and so the compression that the time to recover has really compressed so have you seen that how are you guys responding to that you know both technically and just from a business standpoint it's a great question you and I have enough gray hair to remember the days of planned downtime that's going on yeah so now it's how do we build a platform they're going to enable the software side of the recovery but if the platform isn't capable of keeping up with the software then you've got a disconnect so you've got to have disk systems disk up systems that are capable of keeping up you've got to have networking you've got to have a completely integrated system that not only do we look at it and go okay well this software should work here we know that it does and we do cisco validated designs with folks like beam to make sure that the customers don't have to turn all the different nerd knobs to make sure they're going to get the optimal performance because at the end of the day they don't have time for that that's not their area of expertise and we want to make sure that they've got the always-on enterprise so I'd love to talk about the the horses on the track of the competitive landscape and I especially want to explore a little bit with you Alan the multi cloud you know some people don't like that term III think it's fine a hybrid you know to me is different than multi cloud I've argued that multi cloud has largely been a system of multi bender where people just line a business shadow IT and then all of a sudden you have these multiple clouds and Sasa's and but increasingly now organizations organizations saying ok CIOs get a handle on this okay so multi-cloud strategies have started to come into play Cisco announced in February I believe at Cisco live Barcelona a big push into multi-cloud you certainly see Dell EMC talking about it Google announced you know certainly Microsoft is there you guys have partnerships you were onstage David Koechner was at Google next cloud next so it's at Red Hat IBM's acquisition of Red Hat so you you have all these interesting you know cooperative to a petition and and and and people companies going after this multi cloud so question how do you see the multi cloud opportunity what's Cisco's strategy with regard to that obviously you're coming at it from a standpoint of network and infrastructure strength but I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and sort of summarize the opportunity and what your strategy is sure so I want to go back to a quote a famous quote by John Chambers he said we were plumbers for the network and being a plumber is an honorable profession and I think while we've certainly expanded beyond that we still do that whether you know you're talking about multi cloud strategies well you still got to connect to all of these different clouds whether it's you know infrastructure or as a service you've still got to connect to it so that it works efficiently for your enterprise we want to make sure that we enable that technology that we're giving the customers what they need from that technology and there's still room for for on-prem it's not like any of this is going away it's select whatever feature is best for that particular customer so you know if there's an as a service provider that does customer CRM better than anybody else by all means go use them and we'll help you connect to them help you secure it and with partners we may help you back up if it's email you know without saying who it is we know who it is but you've still got to back that up where are you going to back it up how are you going to have the networking how are you going to have security so Cisco provides all of that enabling technology to make sure that you've got the enterprise that's secure and you can connect all of them so it operates seamlessly for you as as your multi virtualized enterprise well and so cisco has always been a a partner friendly organization you've stressed optionality every one of those companies I mentioned is a partner of yours as well and you know it's like Joe Tucci said hey sometimes we compete sometimes we partner at the end of the day it's the customers going to decide right so if I understand you correctly just from a from a control playing standpoint you've got software technology that that your customers can use if a customer wants to use a VMware control plane you'll you'll play there or some other you know third party that's the strategy correct and but at the same time you're investing in your own IP to build the best control plane and other I guess you know network capabilities data playing infrastructure as possible yeah we wanted we're gonna leverage you know their infrastructure because in some ways they're ubiquitous but there's things that they don't do you know network analytics we do that better than anybody else with you know products like tetration also performs some security functions we have stealth watch you know at the branch you want to make sure that nefarious things aren't happening on your network that without you knowing it so we want to enable that visibility and allow the customers to take action so it's not just enabling the technologies it's protecting the technologies as well so I think a lot of it is things that these other infrastructure providers aren't doing or they're not doing well we can do well because of our history because of our continued investment in all of these areas you know Cisco we have a lot of money to spend on R&D and we spend it well to other areas I want to absolutely you get great engineers and also you do you do acquisitions pretty well but to other areas you want to cover that we haven't touched upon that much hyper-converged you know you said you guys kind of started the converged infrastructure or at least the modern era and then hyper-converged comes in you've got to play there and I want to talk about the edge but let's start with HCI so HCI we've got a fantastic platform in Cisco hyperflex we've continued to evolve it you know we have spinning disks we have all flash we have nvme we've got hybrid so whatever the customers performance needs are we're there with them and if as we look at it this is about simplifying and collapsing the infrastructure that's what converged infrastructure did we went out partnered with some leading companies in the storage space at the time and said how do we make this easier for customers consume we reel it into the data center they turn it on they move their workloads to it well now we've seen this cost model in in technology shift towards hyper-converged where it's x86 servers running the storage and the compute together and you wheel it in you move your workloads to it and you grow it in very nice easy to consume increments and it just it just works and that's coupled with our management plan and and I can never overemphasize that when you look at how we manage hyperflex how it plugs into our new inter-site product which is a cloud offering to let you manage the the infrastructure anywhere inter-site will help you deploy the hyper-converged infrastructure so we continue to focus on making this easy to consume well so now that leads me to your tagline the anywhere data center which which I want to ask you about the edge IOT I know it's not your area of expertise but I love what what the dev net group has done with infrastructure is code I see all these CC II's gettin retrained and and coming up with really some amazing use cases I mean I saw one at Cisco live in Barcelona you know basically an edge case in a police vehicle with some with some cisco HCI infrastructure it was unreal and just collecting data at the edge which is critical but so what's your strategy with the edge what do you see as the opportunity there so we've got you the hard part is always defining the edge is the edge the branch is it my home office is it a telephone pole but well where the answer is yes yes and yes right absolutely so at some of the edge we've got the Cisco hyper flex edge device which is a two node hyper flex cluster we've got small servers that fit into our routers for collecting edge data there so really the idea is meet the data where it is and to the degree that we can let's help process it there because you can't always bring all the data back yeah and what I like about Cisco strategies to sort of set the context there's many infrastructure providers I would observe are trying to take a top-down approach to say okay we've got this box we're gonna go put it on the edge and you guys do that too but what I really like about of your approach is that your box is programmable so I can develop applications at the edge I can do that with a cloud provider if I want to I can do that directly using you know Cisco api's and so I think that gives you guys an advantage and obviously your networking estate you know helps as well Alan great to have you back in the cube thanks so much and give you the last word on v-mon 2019 you know it's a great show we love being here beam is a fantastic partner we're doing some really innovative things and you know it's just it's wonderful to be here I'm almost speechless yeah so the cube is here all day today we got keynotes now coming up so we're going to come back after those keynotes of course Veeam has its big customer party tonight the bean parties are renowned always a lot of fun always great food and then always some kind of interesting twist so Alan thanks again for coming on the cube great to see you pleasure I keep it right there buddy we'll be back right after this short break I'm Dave Volante you're watching the cube from v-mon 2019