>>it is time to take a look at what piers up to from a slightly different perspective to help us do that as scott Sinclair, who is a senior analyst at the enterprise strategy group and scott, thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good to see you today. >>Great to see you >>All right. So let's let's jump into this first. We'll get to the announcement just a little bit first off. In terms of pure strategy as you've been watching this company evolve over over years now. How has it evolved? And and and then we'll move to the announcements and how that fits into the strategy. First off, let's just take them from your point of view. Where have they been and how are they doing? >>Yeah. You know, you know many people know a pure, maybe they don't know of their history is an all flash array. I think Pure has always been ever since they entered the I. T. Industry as as a pioneer. They're one of the early ones that said look we're going all in on the all flash array business and a focus on flash technology. Then there were early pioneers and things like evergreen and things like storage as a service capabilities for on premises storage and the entire time they've had a really you know almost streamlined focus on ease of use, which you know from the outside. I think everyone talks about ease of use and making things simple for I. T. But Pure has really made that almost like core as part of not only their product and they're designed but also part of their culture and one of the things and we'll get into this a little bit as we talk about the announcements but you know if you look at these announcements of where Pure is going there trying to expand that culture that DNA around ease of use or simplicity and expanding it beyond just storage or I. T. Operations and really trying to see okay how do we make the entire digital initiative process or the larger I. T. Operations journey simpler. And I think that's part of where pure is going is not just storage but focusing more on operations and data and making it easier for the entire experience. >>So so how do the announcements we're talking about uh whether three phases here and again we'll unpack those separately but just in general how did the announcements and you think fit into that strategy and fit into their view and your view really of of the market trends. >>You know I think one of the big trends is you know I. T. In terms for most businesses is it's not just an enabler anymore. It is actually in the driver's seat. Uh You know we see in our research at TsG we just did this study and I'm going to glance over my notes as I'm kind of talking but we see one of the things is more than half of businesses are identifying some portion of the revenue is coming from digital products for digital services. So data is part of the revenue chain for a majority of organizations according to what we're seeing in our research and so what that does is it puts I. T. Right in that core you know that core delivery model of where the faster I can operate the faster organizations can realize these revenue opportunities. So what what is that doing to tighty organizations? Well first off it makes your life a lot harder. It makes demands continue to increase. But also this old this old adage or this old narrative that I thi is about availability it's about resiliency, it's about keeping the lights on and ensuring that the business doesn't go down. Well none of that goes away but now I. T. Organizations are being measured on their ability to accelerate operations and in this world where everything is becoming more and more complex they're more demands, organizations are becoming more distributed. Application demands are becoming more diverse and they're growing and breath all of this means that more pressure is falling not only on the I. T. Operations but also on the instructor providers like pure storage to step up and make things even simpler with things like automation and supplication which again we're going to talk about but to help accelerate those operations. >>Yeah I mean if your devops these days I mean and you're talking about kind of these quandaries that people are in. Um but I mean what are what are these specific challenges do you think? I mean on the enterprise level here that that that pure is addressing? >>Yeah well so for example you talked about developers and you know dr going into you know that in particular I want to say let's say you know glancing my notes here, about two thirds of organizations say they're they're under pressure to accelerate their I. T. Initiatives due to pressures from specifically from devops teams as well as line of business teams. So what does that mean? It means that as organizations build up and try to accelerate either their revenue creation via the creation of software or products or things that that drive that support a devops team maybe it's improving customer experience for example as well as other line of business teams such as analytics and and trying to provide better insights and better decision making off of data. What that means is this traditional process of I. T. Operations of where you submit a trouble ticket and then it takes you know after a few days something happens. And they started doing analysis in terms of basically what ends up being multiple days or multiple weeks to end up to basically provision storage just takes too long. And so in these announcements what we're seeing is pure delivering solutions that are all about automating the back end services and delivering storage in a way that is designed to be easily and quickly consumed by the new consumers of I. T. The developers the line of business teams via a. P. S. Where you can write to a standard api and it goes across basically lots of different technologies and happens very quickly where a lot of the back end processes are automated and essentially making the storage invisible uh to these to these new consumers and all of that just delivers value because what what these groups are doing is now they can access that get the resources that they need and they don't have to know about what's happening behind the scenes which candidly they don't really know much about right now and they don't really care >>right. You know what I what I don't see what I don't know won't hurt me. Exactly and as we know it can. Um All right so let's let's look at the announcements Pure fusion. Um I think we're hearing about that just a little bit before earlier in the interview that day was conducting. But let's talk about pure fusion and your thoughts on that. >>Yeah confusion is what I was talking about a little bit where they're they're abstracting a lot of the storage capabilities and presenting it as an A P. I a consistent api that allows developers to provision things very quickly and where a lot of the back end services are automated and you know essentially invisible to developer and that is I mean it's it addresses where you know I kind of talked about this with some of the data that we just you know, some of our research stats that we just discussed but it's where a lot of organizations are going. The bottom line is you know we used to you know in a world where it services weren't growing as fast and where everything had to be resilient available, you could put a lot of personnel power or personal hours focused on okay, making sure every box and everything was checked prior to doing a new implementation and all that was designed to reduce risk and possibly optimize the environment, reduced costs. Now in this world of acceleration, what we've seen is organizations um need faster responsiveness from their I. T. Organizations. Well that's all well and good. But the problem is it's difficult to do all those back end processes and make sure that data is fully being protected or making sure that everything is happening behind the scenes the way it should be. And so this is again just mounting more and more pressure so with things like pure fusion, what they're doing is they're essentially automating a lot of that on the back end and really simplifying it and making so storage or I. T. Administrators can provide access to um to their line of business to development teams to leverage infrastructure a lot faster while still ensuring that that all those back end services, all those operations still happen. >>Port works, data services also announced and hearing from Dave from that perspective, maybe a game changer in terms of storage. So your take on that import works. >>I really liked what works. I've been following them ever since prior to the acquisition. Um, you know, one of the things that they were very early on is understanding the impact of microservices on the industry and really the importance of designing infrastructure around for that for that environment. I think what they're doing around data services is really intriguing. I think it's really intriguing first off for Pure as a company because it elevates their visibility to a new audience in the new persona that may not have been familiar with them. Right? As organizations are looking at one of the things that they're doing with this um, with this data services is essentially delivering a database as a service platform where you can go provision, you know, and stand up databases very quickly and again, similar to, we talked about fusion a lot of those back end processes are automated um really fascinating, again aligns directly with this acceleration need that we talked about, so, you know, huge value but it's really fascinating for Pure because it opens them up to, you know, hey, there's this whole new world of possible consumers that where there's, you know, that where they can get experience to really the ease of use of Pure is known for a lot of the capability. Support works is known for, but also just, you know, increase, you know, really the value that pure is able to deliver to some of these modern enterprises >>and just did briefly on the enhancements to Pure one also being announced today. Your take on those >>um you know, I like that as well. I think one of the things if I kind of go through the through the list is a lot of insights and intelligence in terms of uh new app, you know, sizing applications for the environment if I remember correctly um and more, you know, better capabilities to help ensure that your environment is optimized, which candidly is a is a top challenge around the organizations we talked about again, I keep hitting on this need to move faster faster, faster. One of the big disconnect what we've seen and we saw it very early when organizations were moving to for example public cloud services is this disconnect towards for this individual app. How many resources do I really need? And I think that's something that you know, vendors like Pure need to start integrating more and more intelligence and that's what my understanding is they're doing with Pure One, which is really impressive. >>Well, solid takes scott, we appreciate the time, thank you for your insights and what has been a big day for pure storage but thank you again for the time scott some clarity and her enterprise strategy group senior analyst there, let's go back to day Volonte now with more on the cube. >>Thanks for watching this cube program made possible by pure storage? I want to say in summary. You know, sometimes it's hard to squint through all the vendor noise on cloud and as a service and all the buzz words and acronyms in the market place. But as we said at the top, the cloud is changing. It's evolving, it's expanding to new locations. The operating model is increasingly defining the cloud. There's so much opportunity to build value on top of the massive infrastructure build out from the hyper scale is $200 billion dollars in Capex last year alone. This is not just true for technology vendors but organizations are building their own layer to take advantage of the cloud? Now of course technology is critical. So when you're evaluating technology solutions, look for the following first the ability of the solution to simplify your life. Can it abstract the underlying complexity of a cloud multiple clouds connect to on prem workloads in an experience that is substantially identical irrespective of location. Does the solution leverage cloud native technologies and innovations and primitives and a P. I. S. Or is it just a hosted stack? That's really not on the latest technology curve whether that's processor technology or virtualization or machine learning streaming? Open source tech et cetera. 3rd, How Programmable is the infrastructure? Does it make developers more productive? Does it accelerate time to value? Does it minimize rework and increase the quality of your output for? What's the business impact? Will customers stand up and talk about the solution and how it contributed to their digital transformation? By flexibly supporting emerging emerging data intensive workloads and evolving as their business rapidly changed. These are some of the important markers that we would suggest you monitor pure is obviously driving hard to optimize these and other areas. So watch closely and make your own assessment as to how what they and others are building will fit into your business Now as always, this content is available on demand at the cube dot net. So definitely check that out. This is day Volonte for jOHN walls and the entire cube team. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Veritas Vision 2017 brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision in 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Jason Buffington is here, good friend of the Cube, Senior Analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, otherwise known as ESG. Jason, good to see you again. >> Thanks for having me back. >> We've been bumping into each other a lot lately, a lot of storage stuff going on and you you gave a panel discussion today. You had, you know, three of the four big Cloud guys up there, no Amazon, Stu. They weren't up on the panel, but that was good, you had an interview with those guys. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So, congratulations on that and welcome again. >> Yeah, everyone wants to talk about data protection, right? So, there's... >> Dave: Hottest topic, isn't it? >> It is, every time you go to a show, the last show that I was at, it seemed like over half the booths were talking about data protection. So, to come here, you know, Veritas kind of owns that as a name. And so it's been fun to just be part of the participants. >> Yeah, Jason, you know, you cover this base, and you know Veritas well. There are people I talked to getting ready for this, and they said, "We remember Veritas back in its hay day." You know, back pre-acquisition. During the virtualization era, it kind of got quiet. I mean, they got acquired by Semantic, things went down, but now they're an independent company, and one of the shows that, you know, we've been at VMWorld, absolutely. Data protection is super hot, you know, product of the year was one of those companies, whole lot of startups there, a lot of investment. What's your take on kind of the new Veritas, you know, where they fit in that ecosystem with all those startups and everybody else? >> No, that's a good read, so let's talk about the market first, and then I'll put Veritas in it, right? So, I think you're spot on that when the virtualization wave came through, most of the really big established data protection vendors were not first market, right? And in fact, every time that we see this, I've been doing this for 28 years, I've been backing stuff up, right? And for most of it, every time the platform shifts, the traditional dominant data protection vendors are not the first ones to jump on that new gear, right? Windows versus NetWare, now we're into virtualization. So, we saw Veeam, and PHD and vRanger, and a few others that barely get an honorable mention in that line, right? We're in a really interesting time, though, this time around because every time, in the past, when you moved off of the old platform, the presumption was, you turned it off, right? This time around, we're on the, here's a fancy word, we're on the precipice of a new shift again because we're looking at Cloud as the new platform to move to. But here's the fun part. We're not leaving the old stuff behind, right? We're not turning off all the virtual servers and the physical servers are on their way out the door as we go to Cloud. We're embracing Multicloud as the new destination, not this mid-step along the way. And I think that's really interesting because, just like in every time past, it means we're going to get a reset of the leader board when it comes to data protection. And, just like in times past, the secret sauce that made you dominant on the last platform, doesn't necessarily give you an edge technology-wise on the next platform. All it really does is give you momentum, right? So, yeah, there's a few other folks that we could list that they've got some momentum going for one reason or another along the way, but for the marketplace, if physical and virtual and Cloud are all going to be together, Veritas has been doing some of those for 20 some odd years. They've made some announcements around the rest of the suites. I think they're in a good place here. The thing I'm excited about from Veritas, and I do, I'm a fan, you want to root for them, right? I mean, 25 years on the bench, you want to see them keep going. I think the opportunity is that, since the divestiture from Semantic, they have a lot more focus, right? You know, it's really hard to tell a story that's everything from Malware and cyber security, all the way through to a breadth of data protection. But if you look at how they're talking about things now, and I really like the 360 narrative that kind of pulls it all together. Every part of their portfolio kind of pulls the other parts together, right? It doesn't matter, in data management, whether you want to start with backup, or you want to start with storage, or you want to start with availability, anywhere you look on that circle, it's going to pull the rest of the line in, and these are all the things that folks are asking for from a customer base. So, I like the tech that they've got. I like where the market is headed, and I think they've got a real shot to be one of those top three dominant names that we talk about moving forward. >> Yeah, so, I mean it's a 30 plus year history. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And pretty amazing, I mean this is an amazing story, this company. I mean, they came out, kind of a small company, and then there was that relationship which they bought Seagate. You know, Seagate's backup business. Seagate actually had a piece of the company for a while. >> Jason: Yeah. >> You know, Al Shugart, when he sold that stock, basically saved Seagate cause of the cash infusion. So, it was a long history, and then they kind of went dormant... >> Jason: Yeah. >> For a while under the Symantec Governance. And now, so the big question is, can Veritas get its mojo back in the space and become that super hot company again? >> So, by the way, sidebar, you talked about Seagate. I actually have a copy of Seagate Backup Exec sitting on a shelf in my office. (Dave laughing) And one of these days, I will open up the data protection museum, cause I think I've got most of the pieces and parts laying around. So, can Veritas get is mojo back? The thing that Veritas has to consistently remind people, one, we are not your daddy's or your granddaddy's backup company anymore, right? So, they're working on things like, they announced this week a new UI coming for NetBackup 8.1, and I thought they were going to crowd mob out of affirmation for that. People were so excited for, you know, finally we're going to get a contemporary UI that doesn't look like 1995 coming in, in that backup. So, certainly, some of the cosmetics, the sterilization of that UI going across as many of those products as possible in order to provide more of a contemporary feel. That's an easy place to dig on, right? But I think what Veritas really needs to think about is, they need to remind folks that, while they are not the stodgy presumption of what people might think, this is not their first rodeo in any of these areas, right? We had new announcements on software to find storage this week. Things like storage foundation and VCS, they've been doing that for 25 years, right? I mean, they've been doing to software to find storage before it was a thing, right? Availability, right? So, we talk about, I like the VRP product. I think it's a cool architecture, and something certainly that powers a lot of the Cloud mobility type capabilities that are there. And the idea of a heterogeneous platform to enable higher levels of availability, I think the market is just now growing into that, right? So, the trick is, we're not the old folks, but, oh by the way, we have reams of experience like you can't imagine. Let's put those things together and have an enterprise level conversation. >> So, let's lay the horses out on the track here. I mean, we were all at VMWorld, and we saw the, it was the hottest... That and security, backup and security are the two hottest spaces in the business right now. We saw the startups, the Cohesity's, the Rubrik's, the Zerto's, and sort of, the upshots. The Veeams, you know, a lot of action at their booths. Obviously, Veritas getting its mojo back. Where's Commvault in all this, so how do you lay out the horses on the track, what's the competitive landscape look like? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah, so, first and foremost, I always go back to what ESG calls the data protection spectrum, right? So, the behaviors of archive, backup, snapshot, replication, availability. They are not interchangeable mechanisms. We call it a spectrum as a rainbow kind of feel. You know, when is the last time you went outside, saw a rainbow in the sky, and one of the colors was missing? You know, these colors do not replace each other. Snapshots and replications, etc. When you look at where the market's going, imagine a capital Y. In fact, if you go look up on your favorite blog site, I have a blog on, why does data protection have to evolve? This is the answer to your question. The base of that Y is just backup. Can you make copies of all of your stuff? And even that, I think a lot of folks have a challenge with. The next step up is that idea of data protection. So, backup plus snapshots plus replications, single set of policies. Where the market's going, and how it kind of lays out the horses, is now we're at that fork in the road in the capital Y, right? And some of the folks are moving down the availability path. And think about that word for a second, you can remember the vendors who like to go that direction. We're going from reactive recovery to proactive assured productivity, right? Because all the backup folks are just as down until somebody hits the restore button. That's the thing that no one really wants to talk about, as opposed to, if you have monitoring, if you have orchestration, if you have failover and rapid recovery mechanisms. Now, you really do have an availability story that comes out of that. And not all the vendors that you mentioned have that. >> Dave: Well, who are the leaders? >> Yeah, so, certainly, from a momentum and brand perspective, Veeam is definitely on the front line of that, you know, I think car racing is more easier... >> Dave: Cause they've got growth and... >> Yeah, they have momentum, they have, certainly virtualization is still a sweet spot for the data centers... >> Obviously, Veritas is... >> Veritas is absolutely... >> They said 15 years in a row in the Gartner Upper Right... >> Yeah. >> Okay, check. >> Dell EMC, broad portfolio there. Those are kind of the biggest three from, who has all the checked boxes they need to make sure they have a dialogue for the next conversation. >> And Commvault, you wouldn't put in that? >> So, well, I always think of three, you know, bronze, silver, gold, not in that order. >> Yeah, it's like baseball playoffs. Who's going to get in, who's the wild card, you know. >> So, Commvault checks all the right boxes, right? They have all the right narratives along the way. I think the challenge is, organizationally, they're a little siloed in how they tell the stories, and so sometimes it's hard to remember that they're actually the only ones who have a single code base. The ones that, you know, one set of tech that can check all the boxes. Everyone else actually has some myriad of pieces and parts that have to be assembled along the way. >> Dave: So, that's both a strength and a weakness... >> Yeah. >> Dave: For Commvault, right? >> Yeah, the opportunity is there to increase the marketing to tell one narrative. >> Kind of Tivoli, same thing, right? >> Yes, same kind of idea there. And by the way, I don't count, let's call them Spectrum Protect now, but I don't count them out. So, Spectrum Protect took a facelift a couple years ago and really got virtualization savvy. They took the, they had the same gap that everyone else that you mentioned had, and, what is it, six, four, a couple years back, they finally got around to that. And then they just announced Spectrum Protect Plus, which is really built for that V-Admin role. So, certainly we've got a good lens there. On the other side, just like in every other generation, you've got some upstarts that are looking pretty good. >> Well funded, some of them paid 100 million. >> Yeah, well funded, some of them I think have kind of a little bit of a puffer fish, right? They feel bigger than they are for the moment, and yet, the tech looks really good. They want to have a dialogue that says, don't start with backup and try to grow forward. Start over, right? Reimagine what storage might look like in the broader range of things. And by the way, data protection is one of the outcomes for that. And so, you put the Actifio, Cohesity, Rubrik, kind of mix, along the lines for that. You also get the... Catalogic stuff that goes into, that's OEM by IBM, kind of gets on the other side. I think that's going to be probably the coolest thing to watch in 2018. So, you hear the buzz words of copy data management. Everybody wants to talk about some version of those three words. We think that the market's going to go either evolution versus revolution. So, evolution is, start with the data protection folks that you know, and those technologies are going to grow into data management type folks. Here at the show, right, so we saw Veritas Velocity. It's their first foray into that. Cloud Point starts to come into that mix as well. So, the idea of keeping all you need, getting rid of it when you don't, and enabling, and here's the fun part, enabling those secondary use cases so that you can get more value out of that otherwise dormant data. Mike talked about that during the day one keynote. I thought he was spot on for that. So, that's the evolution approach. Revolution, start over, better storage, gets you the same results. Those other guys are old anyway... >> So, Bill Coleman's saying, "It's ours to lose." He said that to us on the Cube. They're obviously an evolution play. >> Jason: Yep. >> I've also heard, they've got, they've made the claim, "We've got the best engineering team in the business." Comments? >> So... >> Dave: It's a very competitive market. >> Yeah, it's hard to say best. I never like ultimate superlatives, but here's what I will say. I meet an amazing number of engineers at Veritas who have been doing this 15, 20, 25 years. There's a lot of wonderful institutional knowledge that comes out of that, that you don't get when you're three, five years, even if you come from multiple vendors, and you kind of pop along the way. There are folks that their initials are still in the source code of NetBackup, and I think that gives them an edge from that perspective if they have a vision from an architecture and from a message perspective on carrying it forward and growing beyond just backup. >> Yeah, Jason, want to get your commentary on the customers. So, one of the things we're trying to reconcile here is, they've got a lot of NetBackup customers. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And then they're pitching this new Cloud hyper-scale, distributed architecture world. Are the customers ready for that? Are they, you know, Bill Coleman told us, five years, ten years, maybe five years from now, every single product that's selling today will be obsolete. So, are the Veritas customers today ready to make that move? What are you hearing? Or are they just going to, you know, go to Microsoft and Amazon and, you know, come in that way? How does this, you know, it goes that kind of revolutionary, evolutionary, discussion you were having. >> Good read, so working backwards, I don't think the answer for better backup for the enterprise is clouding. Cloud managed, absolutely. Disaster recovery as a service, as a secondary tier for the people who don't want to have dormant data centers, yeah probably. But we're still going to have a significant majority of infrastructure on-prem that's going to demand for current SLAs to have recoverability on-prem as well. So, I don't think it starts from a Cloud angle. What I do think, from the Veritas customer perspective is, certainly, you know, Veritas is, their homies are the NetBack of admins. That role is evolving. Or maybe I should say it's devolving. You know, you're not going to have backup admins in the same way. Honestly, more and more, we see that data protection should be part of a broader system's management platform management conversation, right? Cause if I'm an IT generalist, that means I don't have a Ph.D. in backup, and I don't want one. I'm an IT generalist, and I'm the one who's responsible for provisioning servers, and patching servers, and providing access to servers. When those green lights turn red, I want to be able to be part of that process and not wait on somebody else. And if I want to be part of the recovery process, it means I better be part of the protection process as well. So, certainly, Veritas is going to have to grow into some new personas of who they're going to be adding value to. IT ops is the big one, right? So, the backup admin is starting to decline a little bit, the V-Admin for the virtualization role is starting to decline a little bit. That IT operations role is really taking a much more dominant share. That said, Veritas's best route to market is to go through the backup admin, and not in spite of because you can turn that backup admin into a hero by saying, "Look, you have a certain set of problems." "Your adjacent peers have a wider set of problems, "and aren't you going to be the smart one "to walk in somebody who can fix "the rest of the problems while we're at it." And that's that 360 story... >> Well, to your point, evolve or devolve, that role. So, we're out of time, but how about a plug for some recent research, what's hot, what's new, anything that you've worked on that you want to share with the audience. >> Yeah, so ESG, we just finished research on real world SLAs and availabilities. So, how are people doing that proactive lens, as opposed to just reactive? Today, earlier today, I kicked off research with the research team on copy data management, so all that evolution/revolution, we're in that right now. And then the next two projects we're working on, GDPR readiness and data protection drivers in Western Europe. Appliance form factors for data protection, so turnkey versus dedupe, is kind of the next one. And then we're going to refresh our Cloud Strategy Data Protection intersection, so BaaS, DRaaS, STaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, and how the protection traction moves. >> Awesome, sounds like a good lineup. I'd be interested to see that GDPR readiness. We'll have to forecast that and... >> That'll be fun. >> And then hit you up after that comes out cause there's going to be some big gaps going on there. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks very much for coming back in the Cube, good job. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Okay, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back. This is day two, Veritas Vision. You're watching the Cube.

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VEEMON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson, my co-host for the week, two days at wall to wall coverage. Jason Buffington is here, JBuff, who does some amazing work for VEEAM, former Analyst from the Enterprise Strategy Group. So he's got a real appreciation for independence data, and we're going to dig into some data. You guys, I got to say, Jason, first of all, welcome back to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. >> Yeah, two and a half years, thanks for having me back. >> Yeah, that's right. (Jason laughs) Seems like a blur. >> No doubt. >> But so here's the thing as analysts, you can appreciate this, the trend is your friend, right? and everybody just inundates you with now, ransomware. It's the trend. So you get everybody's talking about the ransomware, cyber resiliency, immutability, air gaps, et cetera. Okay, great. Technology's there, it's kind of like the NFL, everybody kind of does the same thing. >> There's a lot of wonderful buzzwords in that sentence. >> Absolutely, but what you guys have done that's different is you brought in some big time thought leadership, with data and survey work which of course as an analyst we love, but you drive strategies off of this. So you got to, I'll set it up. You got a new study out that's pivoted off of February study of 3,600 organizations, and then you follow that up with a thousand organizations that actually got hit with ransomware. So tell us more about the study and the work that you've done there. >> Yeah, I got to say I have the best job ever. So I spent seven years as an analyst. And when I decided I didn't want to be an analyst anymore, I called VEEAM and said, I'd like to get in the fight and they let me in. But they let me do independent research on their behalf. So it's kind of like being an in-house counsel. I'm an in-house analyst. And for the beginning of this year, in February, we published a report called the Data Protection Trends Report. And it was over 3000 responses, right? 28 countries around the world looking at digital transformation, the effects of COVID, where are they are on BAS and DRS. But one of the new areas we wanted to look at was how pervasive is ransomware? How does that align with BCDR overall? So some of those just big thought questions that everyone's trying to solve for. And out of that, we said, "Wow, this is really worth double clicking." And so today, actually about an hour ago we published the Ransomware Trends Report and it's a thousand organizations all of which have all been survived. They all had a ransomware attack. One of the things I think I'm most proud of for VEEAM in this particular project, we use an independent research firm. So no one knows it's VEEAM that's asking the questions. We don't have any access to the respondents along the way. I wish we did, right? >> Yeah, I bet >> Go sell 'em back up software. But of the thousands 200 were CISOs, 400 were security professionals which we don't normally interact with, 200 backup admins, 200 IT ops, and the idea was, "Okay, you've all been through a really bad day. Tell us from your four different views, how did that go? What did you solve for? What did you learn? What are you moving forward with?" And so, yeah, some great learnings all around helping us understand how do we deliver solutions that meet their needs? >> I mean, there's just not enough time here to cover all this data. And I think I like about it is, like you said, it's a blind survey. You used an independent third party whom I know they're really good. And you guys are really honest about it. It's like, it was funny that the analyst called today for the analyst meeting when Danny was saying if 54% and Dave Russell was like, it's 52%, actually ended up being 53%. (Jason laughs) So, whereas many companies would say 75%. So anyway, what were some of the more striking findings of that study? Let's get into it a little bit. >> So a couple of the ones that were really startling for me, on average about one in four organizations say they have not been hit. But since we know that ransomware has a gestation for around 200 days from first intrusions, so when you have that attack, 25% may be wrong. That's 25% in best case. Another 16% said they only got hit once in the last year. And that means 60%, right on the money got hit more than once per year. And so when you think about it's like that school bully Once they take your lunch money once and they want lunch money, again, they just come right back again. Did you fix this hole? Did you fix that hole? Cool, payday. And so that was really, really scary. Once they get in, on average organizations said 47% of their production data was encrypted. Think about that. So, and we tested for, hey, was it in the, maybe it's just in the ROBO. So on the edge where the tech isn't as good, or maybe it's in the cloud because it's in a broad attack surface. Whatever it is, turns out, doesn't matter. >> So this isn't just nibbling around the edges. >> No. >> This is going straight to the heart of the enterprise. >> 47% of production data, regardless of where it's stored, data center ROBO or cloud, on average was encrypted. But what I thought was really interesting was when you look at the four personas, the security professional and the backup admin. The person responsible for prevention or mediation, they saw a much higher rate of infection than the CSOs and the IT pros, which I think the meta point there is the closer you are to the problem. the worst this is. 47% is bad. it's worse than that. As you get closer to it. >> The other thing that struck me is that a large proportion of, I think it was a third of the companies that paid ransom. >> Oh yeah. >> Weren't able to recover it. Maybe got the keys and it didn't work or maybe they never got the keys. >> That's crazy too. And I think one thing that a lot of folks, you watch the movies and stuff and you think, "Oh, I'm going to pay the Bitcoin. I'm going to get this magic incantation key and all of a sudden it's like it never happened. That is not how this works. And so yeah. So the question actually was did you pay and did it work right? And so 52%, just at half of organization said, yes. I paid and I was able to recover it. A third of folks, 27%. So a third of those that paid, they paid they cut the check, they did the ransom, whatever, and they still couldn't get back. Almost even money by the way. So 24% paid, but could not get back. 19% did not pay, but recovered from backup. VEEAM's whole job for all of 2022 and 23 needs to be invert that number and help the other 81% say, "No, I didn't pay I just recovered." >> Well, in just a huge number of cases they attacked the backup Corpus. >> Yes. >> I mean, that's was... >> 94% >> 94%? >> 94% of the time, one of the first intrusions is to attempt to get rid of the backup repository. And in two thirds of all cases the back repository is impacted. And so when I describe this, I talk about it this way. The ransomware thief, they're selling a product. They're selling your survivability as a product. And how do you increase the likelihood that you will buy what they're selling? Get rid of the life preserver. Get rid of their only other option 'cause then they got nothing left. So yeah, two thirds, the backup password goes away. That's why VEEAM is so important around cloud and disk and tape, immutable at every level. How we do what we do. >> So what's the answer here. We hear things like immutability. We hear terms like air gap. We heard, which we don't hear often, is orchestrated recovery and automated recovery. I wonder if you could get, I want to come back to... So, okay. So you're differentiating with some thought leadership, that's nice. >> Yep. >> Okay, good. Thank you. The industry thanks you for that free service. But how about product and practices? How does VEEAM differentiate in that regard? >> Sure. Now full disclosure. So when you download that report, for every five or six pages of research, the marketing department is allowed to put in one paragraph. It says, this is our answer. They call the VEEAM perspective. That's their rebuttal. To five pages of research, they get one paragraph, 250 word count and you're done. And so there is actually a commercial... >> We're here to buy here in. (chuckles) >> To the back of that. It's how we pay for the research. >> Everybody sells an onset. (laughs) >> All right. So let's talk about the tech that actually matters though, because there actually are some good insights there. Certainly the first one is immutability. So if you don't have a survivable repository you have no options. And so we provide air gaping, whether you are cloud based. So your favorite hyper-scale or one of the tens of thousands of cloud service providers that offer VEEAM products. So you can have, immutability at the cloud layer. You can certainly have immutability at the object layer on-prem or disk. We're happy to use all your favorite DDoS and then tape. It is hard to get more air-gaped and take the tape out drive, stick it on a shelf or stick it in a white van and have it shipped down the street. So, and the fact that we aren't dependent on any architecture, means choose your favorite cloud, choose your favorite disc, choose your favorite tape and we'll make all of 'em usable and defendable. So that's super key Number one. Super key number two there's three. >> So Platform agnostic essentially. >> Yeah. >> Cloud platform agenda, >> Any cloud, any physical, we work happily with everybody. Just here for your data. So, now you know you have at least a repository, which is not affectable. The next thing is you need to know, do you actually have recoverable data? And that's two different questions. >> How do you know? Right, I mean... >> You don't. So one of my colleagues, Chris Hoff, talks about how you can have this Nalgene bottle that makes sure that no water spills. Do you know that that's water? Is it vodka? Is it poison? You don't know. You just know that nothing's spilling out of it. That's an immutable repository. Then you got to know, can you actually restore the data? And so automating test restores every night, not just did the backup log work. Only 16% actually test their backups. That breaks my heart. That means 84% got it wrong. >> And that's because it just don't have the resource or sometimes testing is dangerous. >> It can be dangerous. It can also just be hard. I mean, how do you spend something up without breaking what's already live. So several years ago, VEEAM created the sandbox is what we call a data lab. And so we create a whole framework for you with a proxy that goes in you can stand up whatever you want. You can, if file exists, you can ping it, you can ODBC SQL, you can map the exchange. I mean, you can, did it actually come up. >> You can actually run water through the recovery pipes. >> Yes. >> And tweak it so that it actually works. >> Exactly. So that's the second thing. And only 16% of organizations do. >> Wow. >> And then the third thing is orchestration. So there's a lot of complexity that happens when you recover one workload. There is a stupid amount of complexity happens when you try cover a whole site or old system, or I don't know, 47% of your infrastructure. And so what can you do to orchestrate that to remediate that time? Those are the three things we found. >> So, and that orchestration piece, a number of customers that were in the survey were trying to recover manually. Which is a formula for failure. A number of, I think the largest percentage were scripts which I want you to explain why scripts are problematic. And then there was a portion that was actually doing it right. Maybe it was bigger, maybe it was a quarter that was doing orchestrated recovery. But talk about why scripts are not the right approach. >> So there were two numbers in there. So there was 16% test the ability to recover, 25% use orchestration as part of the recovery process. And so the problem where it is, is that okay, if I'm doing it manually, think about, okay, I've stood back up these databases. Now I have to reconnect the apps. Now I have to re IP. I mean, there's lots of stuff to stand up any given application. Scripts says, "Hey, I'm going to write those steps down." But we all know that, that IT and infrastructure is a living breathing thing. And so those scripts are good for about the day after you put the application in, and after that they start to gather dust pretty quick. The thing about orchestration is, if you only have a script, it's as frequently as you run the script that's all you know. But if you do a workflow, have it run the workflow every night, every week, every month. Test it the same way. That's why that's such a key to success. And for us that's VEEAM disaster recovery orchestra tour. That's a product that orchestrates all the stuff that VEEAM users know and love about our backend recovery engine. >> So imagine you're, you are an Excel user, you're using macros. And I got to go in here, click on that, doing this, sort of watching you and it repeats that, but then something changes. New data or new compliance issue, whatever... >> That got renamed directly. >> So you're going to have to go in and manually change that. How do you, what's the technology behind automated orchestration? What's the magic there? >> The magic is a product that we call orchestrator. And so it actually takes all of those steps and you actually define each step along the way. You define the IP addresses. You define the paths. You define where it's going to go. And then it runs the job in test mode every night, every week, whatever. And so if there's a problem with any step along the way, it gives you the report. Fix those things before you need it. That's the power of orchestrator. >> So what are you guys doing with this study? What can we expect? >> So the report came out today. In a couple weeks, we'll release regional versions of the same data. The reason that we survey at scale is because we want to know what's different in a PJ versus the Americas versus Europe and all those different personas. So we'll be releasing regional versions of the data along the way. And then we'll enable road shows and events and all the other stuff that happens and our partners get it so they can use it for consulting, et cetera. >> So you saw differences in persona. In terms of their perception, the closer you were to the problem, the more obvious it was, did you have enough end to discern its pearly? I know that's why you're due the drill downs but did you sense any preliminary data you can share on regions as West getting hit harder or? >> So attack rate's actually pretty consistent. Especially because so many criminals now use ransomware as a service. I mean, you're standing it up and you're spreading wide and you're seeing what hits. Where we actually saw pretty distinct geographic problems is the cloud is not of as available in all segments. Expertise around preventative measures and remediation is not available in all segments, in all regions. And so really geographic split and segment split and the lack of expertise in some of the more advanced technologies you want to use, that's really where things break down. Common attack plane, uncommon disadvantage in recovery. >> Great stuff. I want to dig in more. I probably have a few more questions if you don't mind, I can email you or give you a call. It's Jason Buffington. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of VEEAMON 2022. We're here in person in Las Vegas, huge hybrid audience. Keep it right there, be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to talk about data protection in the age of ransomware. It's a top of mind topic. And with me are two great guests and CUBE alumnus, David Noy, Vice Presidents of Product Management at Dell Technologies and Rob Emsley, Director of Data Protection Product Marketing at Dell. Guys, welcome back to the CUBE, it's good to see you both. >> Oh, thanks so much, I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks a lot Dave. >> Hey David, let me start with you. Maybe we could look at the macro, the big picture at Dell for cyber security. What are you seeing out there? >> You know, I'm seeing an enormous amount of interest in cybersecurity obviously driven by a string of recent events and the presidential executive order around cybersecurity. Look, we're in unprecedented times where, you know, disaster readiness is not just about being prepared for a wildfire or a sprinkler going off in your data center. It's around a new class of malicious attacks that people just have to be ready for. And it's not even a question of if it's going to happen, it's a question of when it's going to happen. We know it's going to happen, you're going to get hit by them. And so we go beyond just thinking about, hey, how do you build in technical capabilities into the product to make it difficult for attackers? We actually want to get predictive. We want to use advanced technologies and capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning to go out and scan users environments and look at their data which is really the lifeblood of a business and say, hey, we can see that there is potentially an attack looming. We can start to look for dormant attack vectors. And as soon as something bad is happening because we know something bad is going to happen, we can help you quickly recover the restore or figure out which restore point to recover from so you can get your business back and operational as soon as possible. >> Great, thank you for that, David. Hey Rob, good to see you. You know, we've seen a lot of changes recently kind of as David was referencing, it used to be okay, cybersecurity, that's the domain of the SecOps team and, you know, the rest of the company said, okay, it's their problem. You know, data protection or backup, that was the backup admin. Those two worlds are kind of colliding together. We use terms like cyber resiliency now. It's a sort of super set of, if you will, of the traditional cybersecurity. So how can organizations get ahead of these cyber threats when you engage with customers? Do you have any sort of specific angles or tooling that you use to help? >> Yeah, Dave, there's a couple of things to unpack there. You know, I think one of the things that you call out is cyber resiliency. You know, I think there's a balancing act that customers are all working through between cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. On the left-hand side of the balancing act, it's, you know, how can I keep bad things out of my network? And the reality is that it's very difficult, you know, to do that. You know, there's many applications that customers have deployed to protect the perimeter. But as you know, many cyber threats, you know, are manifested from inside of the perimeter. So what we're seeing is customers starting to invest more in making themselves cyber resilient organizations, you know, and as David mentioned, it's not the if, it's the when. The question is, how do you respond to when a cyber attack hits you? So one of the things that we introduced pointing back six months ago is a globally available cyber resiliency assessment. And we worked in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group and we put out a free online assessment tool to allow customers to really answer questions around, you know, a big part of the NIST framework, around detection, protection and recovery. And we give customers the opportunity to get themselves evaluated on, are they prepared? Are they vulnerable? Or are they just, you know, black and white exposed? You know, what we found over the last six months is that over 70% of the people that have taken this cyber resiliency assessment fall into that category of they're vulnerable or they're exposed. >> Right, thank you for that. Yeah, the guys at ESG do a good job in that they have deep expertise in that space. And David, Rob just talked about sort of the threats from inside the perimeter and, you know, any person, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist, you can go on the dark web. You can acquire ransomware as a service. If you have access to a server and are willing to put a stick in there and do some bad things or give credentials out, hopefully you'll end up in handcuffs. You know, but more often than not, people are getting away with really, you know, insidious crime. So how is Dell, David helping customers respond to the threat of ransomware? >> So, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the product approach is pretty sophisticated. You know, you're right, somebody can come and just put a USB stick into a machine or if they have administrative access, they can figure out a code that they've either been given because, you know, the trust has been placed in the wrong place or they've somehow socially engineered out of someone. Look, it's not enough to just say, I'm going to go lock down my system. Someone who's gained access can potentially gain access to other systems by hopping through them. We take a more of a vault based approach which means that when you create a cyber vault, it's essentially locked down from the rest of your environment. Your cyber criminal is not able to get to that solution because it's been air gapped. It's kept somewhere else completely separate from other network but it also has keys and to the keys to the kingdom or that it opens up only at a certain time of day so it's not vulnerable to coming in at any time. It goes and requests data, it pulls the data and then it keeps that immutable copy in the vault itself. So the vault is essentially like a gated off, modded off environment that an attacker cannot get into. If you find that there was an attack or if an attack has occurred in which an attack will occur sooner or later, you then can basically prevent that attacker from getting access into that vaulted environment before that next opening event occurs. We also have to go back and look at time because sometimes these attackers don't instantiate all at once, I'm going to basically go and encrypt all your data. They take a more of a graduated approach. And so you have to go and look at patterns, access patterns of how data has actually changed and not just look at the metadata, say, okay, well, it looks like the data changed at a certain time. You have to look at the data contents. You have to look at the, if there's a file type. Often times, you can actually analyze that as well and say, hey, this given file whether it's a PowerPoint file or an Excel file or one of the a hundred or a thousand different file types should look like this, it doesn't look like that inside. What are many of the solutions that look for these attackers do is they're just looking at metadata access and then potentially just entropies or how fast things are changing. Well, it's changing faster than it normally would. That's not enough. And the attackers are just going to get smarter about how they go and change things. They're going to change it so that they don't change file suffixes or they don't change them with a very high entropy rate. And without using some kind of a system that's actually constantly tuning itself to say, hey, this is how these attack vectors are evolving over time, you're going to miss out on these opportunities to go and protect yourself. So we have also a constantly evolving and learning capability to go in and say, okay, as we see how these attack vectors are evolving to adapt to the way that we defend against them, we're going to also (audio glitches) other practices to make sure that we account for the new models. So it's a very adaptable kind of, it really is artificial intelligence form of protecting yourself. >> Can I ask you a question, David, just a follow-up on the immutable copy? Where does that live? Is it kind of live on prem? Is it in the cloud, either? >> Both, so we have the ability to put that on prem. We have the ability to put that in a second data center. We have the ability to keep that actually in a colo site so basically, completely out of your data center. And we've got the ability to keep that in the cloud as well. >> The reason I ask is because I just, you know, putting my paranoid SecOps hat on and I'm no expert here but I've talked to organizations that say, oh yeah, it's in the cloud, it's a service. Say, okay, but it's immutable? Yeah, it's write once, read many. You can't erase it. I go, okay, can I turn it off? Well, no, not really. Well, what if I stopped paying for the service? Well, we'd send a notice out. I said, okay, wait a minute. So am I just being too paranoid here? How do you handle that objection? >> Of turning it off? >> Yeah, can I turn it off or can you make it so that nobody can turn it off? >> Oh yeah, that's a good question. So actually what we're building into the product roadmap is the ability to that product actually self inspect and to look at. Whether or not even the underlying, so for example, if the service is running in a virtual machine. Well, the attacker could say, let me just go attack the virtual machine and it infect it and basically turn itself off even in an on-prem, nevermind in the cloud. And so we're looking at building or we're building into the roadmap, a lot more self inspection capabilities to make sure that somebody isn't going to just shut down the service. And so that kind of self resiliency is critical even to a vaulted solution which is air gapped, right? To your point. You don't want someone going, well, I can just get around your solution. I'm just going to go shut it down. That's something that we're getting at. >> So this talks, I think for the audience, this talks it's like an ongoing game of escalation and you want to have a partner who has the resources to keep up with the bad guys cause it's just the constantly, you know, upping the ante, Rob, you guys do a survey every year, the Global Data Protection Index. Tell us about that. What are the latest results? You survey a lot of people. I'm interested in, you know, the context of things like remote work and hybrid work, it's escalated the threat. What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, so as you mentioned, the Global Data Protection Index, we survey over a thousand IT executives, you know, around the globe. And in the most recent study, we absolutely started to ask questions specifically around, you know, customer's concerns with regards to cybersecurity. And we found that over 60% of the customer surveyed, you know, really are concerned that they don't feel that they are adequately prepared to respond to cyber threats that they see, unfortunately on a day-to-day basis. You know, certainly, you know, as you mentioned, the work from anywhere, learn from anywhere reality that many customers are dealing with, you know, one of the concerns that they have is the increased attack surface that they now have to deal with. I mean, the perimeter of the network is now, you know, much broader than it ever has been in the past. You know, so I think all of this leads, Dave, to cybersecurity discussions and cyber resiliency discussions being top of mind for really any CIO, their CSO in any industry. You know, in the days of old, you know, we used to focus at the financial services industry, you know, as, you know, a bunch of customers that we, you know, could have very relevant conversations with but now, you know, that is now cross industry-wide. There isn't a vertical that isn't concerned about the threats of cyber security and cyber attacks. So, you know, when we think about our business especially around data vaulting with our PowerProtect portfolio but also with our PowerScale portfolio, with our unstructured data storage solutions. You know, when we're really having constant conversations of brand, how do you make your environment more cyber resilient? And, you know, we've been seeing, you know, rapid growth in both of those solution areas, both implementing extensions of customers, backup and recovery solutions, you know, but also, you know, in the environments where, you know, we're deploying, you know, large scale unstructured storage infrastructure, you know, the ability to have real-time monitoring of those environments and also to extend that to delivering a vaulted solution for your unstructured storage are all things that are leading us to, you know, work with customers to actually help them become more cyber resilient. >> Great, thanks. The last question and maybe for both of you. Maybe Rob you start and David you can chime in. I'm interested in what's exciting you guys, what's new in the portfolio, are there new features that you're delivering that map to the current market conditions? I mean, your unique value proposition and your capabilities have shifted. You have to respond to the market changes over the left last 18 to 24 months whether it's cyber, ransomware, the digital transformation, what's new in the portfolio and what's exciting you guys. >> So Dave, yes, so quite recently we, you know, as well as, you know, running an event specifically to talk about protection and the age of ransomware and to discuss many of the things that we've covered on this call. You know, data protection is still a foundational technology to help customers become, you know, more secure and, you know, reduce their risk profiles. So innovation that we delivered very recently, you know, it's really in three specific areas, you know, VMware Data Protection, NAS Data Protection and then, you know, also, you know, we introduced a tech preview of a direction that we're taking to expand the scalability and manageability of our PowerProtect appliances. So transparent snapshots delivers capabilities to help customers better protect their VMware environment without the concern of disrupting their production applications when they're doing backup and recovery of virtual machines. Dynamic NAS protection moves away from the age old mechanism of NDMP and provides a much more performance and scalable solution for protecting all of that unstructured data running on NAS infrastructure. And then last but not least to say the tech preview of Smart Scale which is our new solution and architecture to allow customers to pull together multiple power of attack appliances within their data sensors and give them a much easier way of managing the PowerProtect appliances that they have and scaling them environment by implementing a federated namespace to align on them to get support in that environment. >> Nice, some great innovations there. All right, David bring us home. What's exciting you? You shared a little bit with the roadmap of... >> Yeah, look, I think all of this is about operations today. Every enterprise is 24/7. It doesn't matter what vertical you're in, right? Downtime is unacceptable. And whether that means whether it's downtime because you got hit by a malicious attacker, it means downtime because you were caused by disruption of virtual machine instances to Rob's point during the backup process. And we can't interrupt those processes, we can't impact their performance. It means, you know, making sure that your largest unstructured repositories in NAS deployments can be backed up in a time that makes sense so that you can meet your own SLAs. And it means that with a smart scale product there are ability to go and say, okay, as you're expanding your backup target environment, we can do that in a seamless fashion without disrupting your backup operations and your day-to-day operations. All of this is around making sure that we minimize the amount of disruption that our end users experience either because of malicious attacks or because of day-to-day operations and making, you know, making sure that those businesses really can operate 24/7. And that is the crux of a really true enterprise solution for data protection >> Guys, very important topic, really appreciate you coming on the CUBE. Great conversation and keep up the good work of protecting our data. >> Well, Dave, thanks. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thanks everybody for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>Mhm Yes. Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch, instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch so it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing, if you've got a high availability top of rack up environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start, they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where I don't know, you might have some regulated services, right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up, configure apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right, Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East west traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication you said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these. So, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said, it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP. Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right. But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch, enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical, as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. >>Mhm.

>>Thank you. >>Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me, deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch. Instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch. So it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing if you've got a high availability top of rack it environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where, I don't know you might have some regulated services. Right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up configure, apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run, >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center, as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this. Because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right. Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East West traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust, always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well, like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication. You said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these so, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack, adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right? But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E. Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences. Um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. Yeah. Mhm.

>>the cloud is evolving, you know, it's no longer just a set of remote services access through a public cloud Rather it's expanding to on premises to multiple premises across clouds and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one the opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this cube program. We're featuring pure storage and its latest innovations and bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them if you will. And today we have a two part program. First we're gonna hear from rob leaves the CTO of pure storage and then my colleague john Walls is gonna talk to scott. Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is rob lee CTO pure storage. Welcome rob. Good to see you. >>Good to see you again to dave >>Okay, so take us through the announcements from today at a high level what's most exciting about what you're delivering? Yeah, >>absolutely. So as you know, many announcements today, many things to discuss. But overall, uh you know, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. Right. We've always thought of the journey to modern data is being formed by by three pillars if you will. Certainly modernizing infrastructure modernizing operations uh and applications, uh today's announcements are really uh in that in that kind of middle category if like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. Right. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one. Probably people best know us for that. Today's announcements are really about uh tackling that operations, peace bring infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about pure fusion, for example, um you know that that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, uh products and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the application actions that they serve. Whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations or between the premise on premise environment, in the cloud environment. Um likewise, uh the application front, um you know, when we think about today's announcements uh in port works data services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate uh steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud native developers are using and relying on the database applications that are most popular and open source CAssandra Mongo so on and so forth. How do we make the run and operate pieces of those applications, a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed monitored for those app developers and so a ton of a ton of momentum is a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in pure one, um that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure, running the apps and bring those closer together. So when we think about um, you know, the visibility, we're now able to deliver for port works to apologies, allowing developers and devops teams to look at the entire uh tech stack, if you will of a container environment from the application to the containers to the kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes all the way down to the storage and be able to see everything that's going on root cause any sort of problems that come up again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. Um so that's really how I view it, uh and and like I said, it's really the next step in our journey of of helping customers modernize between infrastructure operations and and their applications. >>Okay, So, so you've got the control plane piece, which is all about the operating model. You've got pure one, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the port works piece, which brings sort of development and deployment together and both infrastructure as a code is code and better understanding that full stack of like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers all the way down. So the story says, I feel like it's not even storage anymore. I mean it's cloud, >>It is and you know, I talk a little bit because, you know, at the end of the day we deliver storage, but what customers are looking for is in what they value and what they care about is their data. Now, obviously the storage is in service of the data. Um what we're, what we're doing with today's announcements is again just making it extending, extending our reach, helping customers work over their data. Uh you know, a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage. But now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly? Get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. How >>does this news fit into pure evolution as a company? I mean I don't see it as a pivot because of pivots like, okay, we're gonna go from here and now we're >>doing this right? So >>it's it's more like a reinvention or progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >>Absolutely. Um you know, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's the next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. Right? You know, and again, I go back to um you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long, long term hath long term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data we got our starting infrastructure um and and just uh you know, if you want to do, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not gonna do it on decades old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first. That's how we got our start. Um you know, today's announcements are really the next couple of steps along that journey. Um how do we make, how do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate more automated in the hands of not just the devops teams, the I. T. Teams but the application developers, how do we, how do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why why is that important? Um It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds the traditional kind of measures bandwidth i obsolete and see that sort of thing. But they're looking for a speed of agility. Right? You look at the modern application space around how data is being processed. It's a very, very fast moving application space. Uh you know, the databases that are being used today may be different than the ones using being used three months from now or six months from now And so um developers, application teams are looking for, you know, a ton more flexibility, ton more agility than they were 35, 10, 15 years ago. Um The other aspect is simplicity and reliability, right? As you know, um that's a core component of uh you know of everything. We do our core products uh you know, uh you know, our arrays are storage appliances, um you know, we're very well known for the simplicity and reliability. We drive at the individual product level. Well as we scale and look at um you know, larger environments as we look at uh customers expectations for what they expect from a cloud like service. There is the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. Right. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud wants to be able to manage large fleets of uh infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver uh infrastructure services to their internal customers, want they want to be able to do it in a self service, policy driven, easy to control, easy to manage way. Um and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what what pure fusion is about, right, is allowing operators that control plane to specify those um those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Um Same thing with poor works, right. If we think about simplicity and reliability, uh containers, collaborative applications, microservices, a lot of benefits. They're very fast moving space, you can mix and match components put them together very easily. Um, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity because you have more moving parts and a greater need for reliability because well now you're not just serving one application, but You know, 30 or 40 working in unison and that's really what we're after with port works and port works data services in the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question um, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >>Right. Thanks for that rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. Virtually every infrastructure player now has an as a service offering and there are lots of claims out there about who was first, who is the best etcetera. What's up yours position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack and delivering subscription and, and as a service offerings in the storage industry? You certainly refers to with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as a service and Pure as a service. What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're leading the industry in this regard? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think first and foremost we think of everything we do, uh, you know, pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate uh in an average service model internally or whether it's pure taking on more of that run and operate uh as a service ourselves with pure as a service. Um and so, you know, the second part of your question, which is uh you know, what is it that that sets us apart, What are we doing differently? What gives us confidence that um you know, this is the right path? Well, you know, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a uh you know, a hotter topic in the industry um you know, of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. Right. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry. Um you know, who look at it as a little bit more of a, you know, a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T and CS and call it a service. Um what do I mean by that? Right. So, you know, if you look internally a pure everything we do, we think of as a service, we have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it uh in building out service offerings. Um, you know, when we think about why this is technology led, uh you know, I think of a service for something to be thought of as a service. Right. It's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need uh whether that's, you know, changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day one rigid kind of static swim lanes of Having the capacity plan or plan out what my use is gonna look like 18 months from now. Right. Um I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption. Right? Uh you know, it's it's not it's not a service if you're gonna make me do a data migration or take a downtown. Uh and so when I net all that out Right, what are the things that you need? The attributes you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product that that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolved able. Um you need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of, of needs, whether it's price performance, uh tears, uh you know, high performance capacity, lower cost price points. Um you need something that's got a rich set of capabilities, whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replication snapshots, uh ransomware protection, so you need that full suite of capabilities um but in order to deliver this to service and enable me as a customer to seamlessly grow and change, you know, that's got to be delivered in a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products uh and expect me to change and and move every every single time I have a a service to need change. And so when I net that out that puts us in a absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on to core product families, port works adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price, performance and service tiers. And we're able to do this on a very tight code base and and as you know, uh everything we do is completely not disruptive. So all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of strategic focus for us. >>So these offerings are all part of the services. Service driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >>Absolutely great. >>Um you talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern applications, modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure, what exactly does that mean? And how are you driving that? >>Well, I think um I think it means a couple different things, but if I had to let it out, it's it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. Um and if we look at why that is uh you know, when I talk to customers As they think about infrastructure largely they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support, which is often times the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve. So they're kind of balancing both worlds um and in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic meaning, you know, the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time. Um the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver uh has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up down, growing has to be a lot more elastic um and has much higher variance. Right? And what I mean by that is um you know, you look at a modern cloud, native microservices architecture type application, it's really, you know, 2030 40 different applications, all working in concert with one another under the hood, This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set right back in the day, um you know, you have an oracle application, you go design in an environment for that, right? It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own life cycle. Um these days with modern applications, uh you know, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them, uh you know, working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece. Um and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the changing events and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle and so that at the end of the day drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure, being able to use it for many different purposes, um much more agility, being able to adapt very, very quickly. Uh and much more variants are dynamic range, right? The ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure and this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >>Great, thank you for that. I really liked that answer because it's not just a bunch of, you know, slide wear mumbo jumbo, you actually put some substance on rob, we're gonna have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >>Thank you and >>look forward to having you back soon. Now in a moment, scott Sinclair, who's a senior analyst at enterprise Strategy Group, speaks with the cubes john walls to give you the independent analysts take you're watching the cube, your global leader in high tech coverage. >>Mhm.

(electronic music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer just a set of remote services accessed through a public cloud. Rather, it's expanding to on-premises, to multiple premises, across clouds, and eventually out to the edge. The challenge for customers is how to treat these locations as one. The opportunity for technology companies is to make that as simple as possible from an operational perspective. Welcome to this CUBE program where we're featuring Pure Storage in its latest innovations in bringing infrastructure and applications more closely together, fusing them, if you will. And today, we have a two-part program. First, we're going to hear from Rob Lee who's the CTO of Pure Storage and then my colleague John Walls is going to talk to Scott Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group. Scott will provide his expert analysis on infrastructure modernization and what to expect in today's changing world. So joining me right now is Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage. Welcome, Rob, good to see you. >> Good to see you again too, Dave. >> So take us through the announcements from today at a high level. What's most exciting about what you're delivering? >> Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, many announcement today, many things to discuss. But overall, I think what's most exciting is it's the expansion of our ability to help customers along the modern data journey. We've always thought of the journey to modern data as being formed by three pillars, if you will, certainly, modernizing infrastructure, modernizing operations and applications. And today's announcements are really in that kind of middle category of, like you said, bringing infrastructures and applications a lot more closely together. We've been modernizing infrastructure since day one, probably, people best know us for that and today's announcements are really about tackling that operations piece, bringing infrastructure and code and applications more closely together. So when we think about Pure Fusion, for example, that's really a huge step forward in how we're enabling our customers to manage large fleets of infrastructure, products, and components to deliver those services in a more automated, more tightly-integrated, seamlessly transparently delivered way to the applications that they serve, whether these services are being delivered by many different arrays in one location, many different arrays in different data center locations, or between the premise, on-premise environment and the cloud environment. Likewise, on the application front, when we think about today's announcements in Portworx Data Services, that's really all about how do we make the run and operate steps of a lot of the application building blocks that cloud-native developers are using and relying on, the database applications that are most poplar in open source, Cassandra, Mongo, so on and so forth, how dow we make the run and operate pieces of those applications a lot more intuitive, a lot more easily deployed, scaled, managed, monitored for those app developers? And so a ton of momentum. It's a big step forward on that front. And then right in the middle, when we think about today's announcements in Pure One, that's really all about how do we create more visibility, connecting the monitoring and management of the infrastructure running the apps and bring those closer together? So when we think about the visibility, we're now able to deliver for Portworx topologies allowing developers and DevOps teams to look at the entire tech stack, if you will, of a container environment from the application to the containers, to the Kubernetes cluster, to the compute nodes, all the way down to the storage, and be able to see everything that's going on, the root cause of any sort of problems that come up, that again, that's all in service of bringing infrastructure and applications a lot more closely together. So that's really how I view it and like I said, that's really the next step in our journey of helping customers modernize between infrastructure, operations, and their applications. >> Okay, so you got the control plane piece which is all about the operating model, you've got Pure One, you mentioned that which is for monitoring, you've got the Portworx piece which brings sort of development and deployment together in both infrastructure as code and better understanding of that full stack of, like you say, from applications through the clusters, the containers, all the way down to the storage. So I feel like it's not even the storage anymore. I mean, it's cloud. (chuckling) >> It is and you know, I chuckle a little bit because at the end of the day, we deliver storage but what customers are looking for is, and what they value and what they care about is their data. Now obviously, the storage is in service of the data and what we're doing with today's announcements is, again, just making it, extending our reach, helping customers work with their data a couple more steps down the road beyond just serving the bits and bytes of the storage but now getting into how do we connect the data that's sitting on our storage more quickly, get it, you know, in the hands of developers and the applications more seamlessly and more fluidly across these different environments. >> How does this news fit into Pure's evolution as a company? I mean, I don't see it as a pivot because a pivot's like, okay, we're going to go from here and now we're doin' this? >> Rob: Yeah, we were doing this, now we're doing that, right. >> And so it's more like a reinvention or a progression of the vision and the strategy. Can you talk to that? >> Absolutely. You know what, I think between those two words, I would say it's a progression, it's a next step in the journey as opposed to a reinvention. And again, I go back to, you know, I go back to the difference between storage and data and how customers are using data. We've been on a long-term path, long-term journey to continue to help customers modernize how they work with data, the results they're able to drive from the data. We got our start in infrastructure and just, you know, if you want to do bleeding edge things with data, you're not going to do it on decades-old infrastructure. So let's fix that component first, that's how we got our start. Today's announcement are really the next couple of steps along that journey. How do we make the core infrastructure more easily delivered, more flexible to operate, more automated in the hands of not just the DevOps teams, the IT teams, but the application developers? How do we deliver infrastructure more seamlessly as code? Well, why is that important? It's important because what customers are looking for out of their data is both speeds and feeds, the traditional kind of measures, bandwidth, iOps, latency, that sort of thing, but they're looking for speed of agility. You look at the modern application space around how data's being processed, it's a very, very fast-moving application space. The databases that are being used today may be different than the ones being used three months from now or six months from now. And so developers, application teams are looking for a ton more flexibility, a ton more agility than they were three, five, 10, 15 years ago. The other aspect is simplicity and reliability. As you know, that's a core component of everything we do. Our core products, you know, our arrays, our storage appliances, we're very well-known for the simplicity and reliability we drive at the individual product level. Well, as we scale and look at larger environments, as we look at customers' expectations for what they expect from a cloud-like service, there's the next level of scale and how we deliver that simplicity and reliability. And what do I mean by that? Well, a large enterprise customer who wants to operate like a cloud, wants to be able to manage large fleets of infrastructure resources, be able to package them up, deliver infrastructure services to their internal customers, they want to be able to do it in a self-service, policy-driven, easy to control, easy to manage way and that's the next level of fleet level simplicity and that's really what Pure Fusion is about is allowing operators that control plane to specify those attributes and how that service should be delivered. Same thing with Portworx, if we think about simplicity and reliability, containers, cloud-native applications, micro services, a lot of benefits there. A very fast-moving space, you can mix and match components, put them together very easily, but what goes hand in hand with that is now a need for a greater degree of simplicity 'cause you have more moving parts, and a greater need for reliability because, well now, you're not just serving one application but 30 or 40 working in unison. And that's really what we're after with Portworx and Portworx Data Services and the evolution of that family. So getting back to your original question, I really look at today's announcements as not a pivot, not a reinvention, but the next logical steps in our long-term journey to help customers modernize everything they do around data. >> Right, thanks for that, Rob. Hey, I want to switch topics. So virtually every infrastructure player now has an as-a-service offering and there're lots of claims out there about who was first, who's the best, et cetera. What's Pure's position on this topic? You claim you're ahead of the pack in delivering subscription and as-a-service offerings in the storage industry. You certainly were first with Evergreen. That was sort of a real change in how folks delivered. What about as-a-service and Pure as-a-service? What gives you confidence that you have the right approach and you're lead in the industry in this regard? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think of, first and foremost, we think of everything we do at Pure as a service and whether that's delivering products and helping customers to run and operate in an as-a-service model internally, or whether it's Pure taking on more of that run and operate as-a-service, ourselves, with Pure as a service. And so the second part of your question which is what is it that sets us apart, what are we doing differently, what gives us confidence that this is the right path, well, fundamentally, I think the difference is obviously this is a, you know, a hotter topic in the industry of late, but I think the difference is between us and the competitive set is we really look at this as a product and technology-led philosophy and strategy and we have since day one. And I think that's different than a lot of others in the industry who look at it as a little bit more of a packaging exercise between financial services, professional services, wrap it up in T(s) and C(s) and you call it a service. And what do I mean by that? So, you know, if you look internally at Pure, everything we do we think of as a service. We have a business unit organized around it, we have an engineering team, significant resources dedicated to it and building out service offerings. When we think about why this is technology-led, I think of a service. For something to be thought of as a service, it's got to be flexible, it's got to be adaptable. I've got to be able to grow as a customer and evolve as I need, whether that's changing needs in terms of performance and capacity, I've got to be able to do that without being locked into day-one, rigid kind of static some lands of having the capacity planned or plan out what my user's going to look like 18 months from now. I've got to be able to move and evolve and grow without disruption, right? You know, it's not a service if you're going to make me do a data migration or take a down time. And so when I net all that out, what are the things that you need the attributes that you need to be able to deliver a service? Well, you need a product set that is going to be able to be highly malleable, highly flexible, highly evolvable. You need something that's going to be able to cover the entire gamut of needs, whether it's price performance, tiers, you know, high performance capacity, lower cost, price points. You need something that's got a rich set of capabilities whether it's access protocols, file block object, whether it's data protection properties, you know, replications, snapshots, ransomware protection. So you need that full suite of capabilities but in order to deliver it as a service and enable me, as a customer, to seamlessly grow and change, that's got to be delivered on a very tight set of technology that can be repurposed and configured in different ways. You can't do this on 17 different products (chuckling) and expect me to change and move every single time that I have a service need change. And so when I net that out, that puts us in an absolutely differentiated position to be able to deliver this because again, everything we do is based on two core product families, Portworx adds a third. We're able to deliver all of the major storage protocols, all of the data protection capabilities across all of the price performance and service tiers, and we're able to do this on a very tight code base. And as you know, everything we do is completely non-disruptive so all of the elements really add up in our favor. And like I said, this is a huge area of a strategic focus for us. >> So these offerings, they're all part of the service-driven component of your portfolio, is that correct? >> Absolutely, yep. >> Great. You talk all the time about modern data experiences, modern application, the modern data changing the way customers think about infrastructure. What exactly does that mean and how are you driving that? >> Well, I think it means a couple of different things, but if I were to net it out, it's a greater demand for agility, a greater demand for flexibility and optionality. And if we look at why that is, you know, when I talk to customers, as they think about an infrastructure, largely, they think about their existing application demands and needs, what they're spending 90% of their time and budget dealing with today, and then the new stuff that they're getting more and more pressured to go off and build and support which is oftentimes the more strategic initiatives that they have to serve, so they're kind of balancing both worlds. And in the new world of modern applications, it's much more dynamic, meaning the application sets that are being deployed are changing all the time, the environments and what the infrastructure needs to deliver has to change more quickly in terms of scaling up, down, growing, it has to be a lot more elastic, and has much more variance. And what I mean by that is you look at a modern, cloud-native, micro services architecture-type application, it's really, you know, 20, 30, 40 different applications all working in concert with one another under the hood. This is a very different infrastructure demand than your more traditional application set. Back in the day, you have an Oracle application, you go design an environment for that. It's a big exercise, but once you put it in place, it has its own lifecycle. These days with modern applications, it's not just one application, it's 20 or 30, you've got to support all of them working in unison, you don't want to build separate infrastructures for each piece, and that set of 20 or 30 applications is changing very rapidly as open source ecosystem moves forward, as the application space moves forward. And so when customers think about the change in demands and infrastructure, this is kind of what they're thinking about and having to juggle. And so that, at the end of the day, drives them to demand much more flexibility in their infrastructure being able to use it for many different purposes, much more agility being able to adapt very, very quickly, and much more variance or dynamic range, the ability to support many different needs on the same set of infrastructure. And this is where we see very, very strong demand indicators and we're very invested in meeting these needs because they fit very well with our core product principles. >> Great, thank you for that. I really like that answer because it's not just a bunch of slideware mumbo-jumbo. You actually put some substance on it. Rob, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> And look forward to havin' you back soon. Now, in a moment, Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group speaks with theCUBE's John Walls to give you the independent analyst's take. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in high tech coverage. (techno music) >> Agility is what all digital organizations strive for, and for almost the entirety of the enterprise storage industry, agility and storage aren't words you'd often hear together. Since the founding of Pure Storage, we've been laser focused on taking what's painful about traditional enterprise storage and making it better. We imagined a world where consumers self-service the provisioning of their storage resources to match the performance and data protection capabilities that their applications require. No endless back and forth between application owners and storage teams, just true on-demand self-service. At the same time, imagine all of the complex storage management operations required to make this possible being automated through software. From the placement of the initial workload to storage adjusting with the unpredictable needs of an application and seamlessly migrating and rebalancing the fleet as needed, all with zero down time and no manual intervention. And finally, imagine almost limitless scale that adjusts to meet your business' data management needs over time. This is what we believe the future of enterprise storage looks like. >> Today, we are announcing Pure Fusion, a leap forward in enterprise storage, marrying the best parts of the public cloud with the storage experience and capabilities you've come to expect from Pure. By bringing the simplicity and scalability of the cloud operating model with on-demand consumption and automated provisioning, organizations can deliver an enterprise-grade managed, self-service storage model that unifies fleets of arrays and optimizes storage pulls on the fly. End users will be able to rapidly consume volumes, file systems, and advanced data services like replication without waiting for backend manual work making storage hardware truly invisible. And organizations will be able to scale seamlessly across block, file, and object workloads, leveraging the power of the entire Pure Storage family, including FlashArray, Pure Cloud Block Store, FlashBlade, and Portworx. (electronic music) >> It is time to take a look at what Pure's up to from a slightly different perspective. To help us do that is Scott Sinclair who's a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. And Scott, thanks for joining us here, on theCUBE. Good to see ya today. >> Great to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this. First, we'll get to the announcement in just a little bit. First off, in terms of Pure's strategy, as you've been watching this company evolve over years now, how has it evolved? And then we'll go to the announcements and how that fits into the strategy. But first off, let's just take them from your point of view where have they been and how are they doin'? >> You know, many people know of Pure or maybe they don't know of their history as an all-Flash array. I think Pure has always been, ever since they entered the IT industry as a pioneer, they're one of the early ones that said look, we're going all in on the all-Flash array business and a focus on Flash technology. Then they were early pioneers in things like Evergreen and things like storage-as-a-service capabilities for on-premises storage. And the entire time, they've had a really almost streamline focus on ease of use which, you know, from the outside, I think everyone talks about ease of use and making things simple for IT, but Pure has really made that almost like core as part of not only their product and their design but also part of their culture. And one of the things, and we'll get into this a little bit as we talk about the announcements, but, you know, if you look at these announcements and where Pure's going, they're trying to expand that culture, that DNA around ease of use or simplicity, and expanding it beyond just storage or IT operations, and really trying to see okay, how do we make the entire digital initiative process or the larger IT operations journey simpler. And I think that's part of where Pure is going is not just storage but focusing more on apps, operations, and data, and making it easier for the entire experience. >> So how do the announcements we're talking about, well, there're three phases here, and again, we'll unpack those separately, but in general, how do the announcements then, you think, fit into that strategy and fit into their view and your view, really, of the market trends? >> I think one of the big trends is, you know, IT in terms for most businesses is, it's not just an enabler anymore. IT's actually in the driver's seat. We see in our research at ESGU, we just did this study and I'm going to glance over my notes as I'm kind of talking, but we see one of the things is more than half of businesses are identifying some portion of their revenue is coming from digital products or digital services. So data is part of the revenue chain for a majority of organizations according to what we're seeing in our research. And so what that does is it puts IT right in that core, you know, that core delivery model of where the faster IT can operate, the faster organizations can realize these revenues opportunities. So what is that doing to IT organizations? Well first off, it makes their life a lot harder, it makes demands continue to increase. But also, this old adage or this old narrative that IT's about availability, it's about resiliency, it's about keeping the lights on and ensuring that the business doesn't go down, well none of that goes away. But now, IT organizations are being measured on their ability to accelerate operations. And in this world where everything's becoming more, you know, more complex, there're more demands, organizations are becoming more distributed, application demands are becoming more diverse and they're growing in breadth. All of this means that more pressure is falling not only on the IT operations but also on the infrastructure providers like Pure Storage to step up and make things even simpler with things like automation and simplification which, you know, we're going to talk about, but to help accelerate those operations. >> Yeah, I mean, if you're DevOps these days, I mean, and you're talkin' about kind of these quandaries that people are in, but what are these specific challenges do you think, on the enterprise level here, that Pure is addressing? >> Well so for example, you talked about developers and driving into that in particular, I want to say let's see, glance at my notes here, about two-thirds of organizations say they're under pressure to accelerate IT initiatives due to pressures specifically from DevOps teams as well as line of business teams. So what does that mean? It means that as organizations build up and try to accelerate either their revenue creation via the creation of software or products, or things of that, that drive, that support a DevOps team, maybe it's improving customer experience for example, as well as other line of business teams such as analytics and trying to provide better insights and better decision making off of data, what that means is this traditional process of IT operations of where you submit a trouble ticket and then it takes, after a few days, something happens and they start doing analysis in terms of basically what ends up being multiple days or multiple weeks, to end up to basically provision storage, it just takes too long. And so in these announcements what we're seeing is Pure delivering solutions that are all about automating the backend services and delivering storage in a way that is designed to be easily and quickly consumed by the new consumers of IT, the developers, the line of business teams via APIs where you can write to a standard API and it goes across basically lots of different technologies and happens very quickly where a lot of the backend processes are automated, and essentially, making the storage invisible to these new consumers. And all of that just delivers value because what these groups are doing is now they can access and get the resources that they need and they don't have to know about what's happening behind the scenes which, candidly, they don't really know much about, right now, and they don't really care. >> Right. (chuckling) That's right. Yeah, what I don't see, what I don't know won't hurt me. And it can, as we know, it can. So let's look at the announcements. Pure Fusion, I think we were hearing about that just a little bit before, earlier in the interview that Dave was conducting, but let's talk about Pure Fusion and your thoughts on that. >> Pure Fusion is what I was talking about a little bit where they're abstracting a lot of the storage capabilities and presenting it as an API, a consistent API that allows developers to provision things very quickly and where a lot of the backend services are automated and, you know, essentially invisible to the developer. And that is, I mean, it addresses where, you know, I kind of talk about this with some of the data that we just, you know, some of our research stats that we just discussed, but it's where a lot of organizations are going. The bottom line is, we used to, in a world where IT services weren't growing as fast and where everything had to be resilient and available, you could put a lot of personnel power or personal hours focused on okay, making sure every box and everything was checked prior to doing a new implementation.and all that was designed to reduce risk and possibly optimize the environment and reduce cost. Now in this world of acceleration what we've seen is organizations need faster responsiveness from the IT organization. Well that's all well and good, but the problem is it's difficult to do all those backend processes and make sure that data's fully being protected or making sure that everything is happening behind the scenes the way it should be. And so this is, again, just mounting more and more pressure. So with things like Pure Fusion what they're doing is they're essentially automating a lot of that on the backend and really simplifying it and making it so storage, or IT administrators can provide access to their line of business, to development teams to leverage infrastructure a lot faster while still ensuring that all those backend services, all those operations still happen. Portworx Data Services also announced and we're hearing it from Dave, for that perspective may be a game-changer in terms of storage. So your take on that and Portworx? >> You know, I really like Portworx. I've been following them ever since prior to the acquisition. One of the things that they were very early on is understanding the impact of micro services on the industry and really, the importance of designing infrastructure around for that environment. I think what they're doing around data services is really intriguing. I think it's really intriguing, first off, for Pure as a company because it elevates their visibility to a new audience and a new persona that may not have been familiar with them. As organizations are looking at, you know, one of the things that they're doing with this data services is essentially delivering a database-as-a-service platform where you can go provision and stand up databases very quickly and again, similar to we talked about fusion, a lot of those backend processes are automated. Really fascinating, again, aligns directly with this acceleration need that we talked about. So, you know, a huge value, but it's really fascinating for Pure because it opens them up to, you know, hey, there's this whole new world of possible consumers that where they're, that they can get experience to really, the ease of use that Pure is known for a lot of the capabilities that Portworx is known for, but also just increase really the value that Pure is able to deliver to some of these modern enterprises. >> And just to add, briefly, on the enhancements that Pure One also being announced today. Your take on those? >> I like that as well. I think one of the things if I kind of go through the list is a lot of insights and intelligence in terms of new app, sizing applications for the environment if I remember correctly, and more, you know, better capabilities to help ensure that your environment is optimized which candidly is a top challenge around IT organizations. We talk about, again, I keep hitting on this need to move faster, faster, faster. One of the big disconnects that we've seen and we saw it very early when organizations were moving to, for example, public cloud services, is this disconnect towards for this individual app, how many resources do I really need and I think that's something that, you know, vendors like Pure need to start integrating more and more intelligence. And that's, my understanding is they're doing with Pure One which is really impressive. >> I hope it's all it takes. Scott, we appreciate the time. Thank you for your insights into what has been a big day for Pure Storage. But thank you again for the time. Scott Sinclair at the Enterprise Strategy Group, senior analyst, there. Let's go back to Dave Vellante now with more on theCUBE. (electronic music) >> Thanks for watching this CUBE program made possible by Pure Storage. I want to say in summary, you know, sometimes it's hard to squint through all the vendor noise on cloud and as-a-service, and all the buzz words, and acronyms in the marketplace. But as I said at the top, the cloud is changing, it's evolving, it's expanding to new locations. The operating model is increasingly defining the cloud. There's so much opportunity to build value on top of the massive infrastructure build-out from the hyperscalers to $100 billion in CapEx last year, alone. This is not just true for technology vendors, but organizations are building their own layer to take advantage of the cloud. Now, of course, technology's critical so when you're evaluating technology solutions, look for the following. First, the ability of the solution to simplify your life. Can it abstract the underlying complexity of a cloud, multiple clouds, connect to on-prem workloads in an experience that is substantially identical, irrespective of location? Does the solution leverage cloud-native technologies and innovations and primitives and APIs or is it just a hosted stack that's really not on the latest technology curve, whether that's processor technology or virtualization, or machine learning, streaming, open source tech, et cetera? Third, how programmable is the infrastructure? Does it make developers more productive? Does it accelerate time to value? Does it minimize rework and increase the quality of your output? And four, what's the business impact? Will customers stand up and talk about the solution and how it contributed to their digital transformation by flexibly supporting emerging data-intensive workloads and evolving as their business rapidly changed? These are some of the important markers that we would suggest you monitor. Pure is obviously driving hard to optimize these and other areas, so watch closely and make your own assessment as to how, what they and others are building will fit into your business. Now as always, this content is available on demand on theCUBE.net, so definitely check that out. This I Dave Vellante for John Walls and the entire CUBE team, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (soft electronic music)

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> We're back with the Cuban active FiO Data driven day one day Volante with student a man you're watching The Cube. Steve Duplessis here is the, uh, let's see. Uh, I'm going to say benevolent. Dictator of Enterprise Strategy Group. Chief analyst, Founder Welcome. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thanks. Nice friend. Nice to be here, you fellows, and we don't Great. Congratulations. Newly newly closed. That's awesome. I want Yeah, thank you very much. >> Great. Looking good. You're here for your honeymoon. >> He said this is it? After a few marriages. This is the honeymoon. >> Yeah. That's good to know that the honeymoon's not over. So let's talk data, Tio. It's happening. >> That is a terrible question, Dave. >> So yeah, Data. Okay, everybody talks. Data you here, bro. My data is the new oil. Fate is a competitive advantage. And >> you like that. >> You do like what Data's in oil. >> So it's funny because we're I think I'm way older than you. You look better. >> God, no. >> But if you go back in time as long as we were doing this, it's been kind of hilarious, really. In retrospect, when you watch way watch these massive industries get created like the AMC just created because all they were about building bigger buckets to put data, zeros and ones. But no context, completely useless, just big buckets. So we valued Wow, you built a big fast bucket. Then IBM and her tachy whoever was gonna leap frog your next built a faster, bigger bucket. And that was with the world considered valuable. And it's now fast forward to the modern day and oh, maybe with the thing that's really valuable with those zeros and he's in contact. Maybe it's not really the bucket. It's, uh so valuable anymore. So >> So, do you think the with the bucket builders still bucket builders air they actually becoming data Insite creators? Or is it just still build a better bucket? That's cheaper. Faster >> till it's a great question. I think >> that we're first of all, you You still have to have the buckets, right? It's a relative who's going to make a smarter bucket builder. I don't know. >> You need someplace to put it, so >> you're gonna have to put it some place and you're gonna have to deliver it in the good news, you know, storage and or infrastructural say is the most brilliant business ever. From a capacity demand perspective, no one ever needs less, right. You always need Mauritz justa matter what you're gonna do with it, how you're going to address that. So it's we've propagated for 50 years and infrastructure business that build a bigger, faster bucket. Build a bigger, faster processor, build a bigger, faster. And every time you you solve one of those particular problems as long as data doesn't abate and it never does, is only is there's more versus Les. It's just every time we fix one problem way, you stick your finger in the dike and another poll springs out. So right now we're at the we've got more processing capabilities that week, ever possible. Use not true, right? We'll figure out a way to use it so that the last five years of and for the >> next five years waiting talk about analytics, wouldn't talk about io ti. We didn't talk about any of those things that are all just precursors to folk crap. We could make a whole bunch more NATO and do stuff with >> so So computers. Kind of a similar dynamic. It's sort of sensational. But is the relatively crappy business compared to storage rights? Storage is 60% plus gross margin. Business servers. I don't know. You're lucky if you get in in a low twenty's. Um, why is that? >> Hello, Number one. It's essentially monogamous. So 20% is wonderful if your intel and you get it. All right. Well, it sells. Got great gross margins, right? Everybody else's does it. You go down the supply chain. That's where you're gonna add value. So that's difficult for anything. Hard to get gross margins out of like spending. She had a box. >> So, Steve Yes, she's now 20 years old. >> I know >> when I think back 20 years ago. You know, short. You know this capacity price per dollar price per gigabyte. You know, all that stuff has changed a lot. The other thing, You know, I think back 20 years talk about automation and intelligent infrastructure. We were using those terms back that sure, one of things that they did. That that's right. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about is like, right back then when you talked about well, how intelligent wasn't what could it do? And automation was There was a lot of times, you know, I'm just building a little script. I'm doing something like that. At least you know, from what we see, it feels like, you know, today's automation and intelligence is light times away from what we were talking about. 20 years. Sure, and it's true. What do you see in that? Well, >> so remember where we came from When we were talking originally about automation and orchestration, we were talking about how to manage a box, how to expand a box, how to manage infrastructure. Now it's data operations. Right now it's that that's the whole point of activity. Right to be in with is all right, if you are good enough and smart enoughto have the data sort of everything. What kind of matters? There you've gotta have the data and what can you up? What can you automate an orchestra from a data out perspective? Not from a box, not from a Let's scale out or scale up or something like that again, that's just a bigger bucket. It's a better bucket, but to be able to actually take data and say, You know what? I don't even know necessarily what I'm going to want to use this for, but I know that I gotta have. It's gotta be You have to be able to go click, click, click and get it. If if and when I figure out who I want to find out how lowering the price of Sharman and Seattle at a Wal Mart is going to affect my revenue or my supply chain or whatever. >> So one of the things I've talked with you in the past about is the pace of change of the industry. And, you know, I've said, you know, we know things are changing rather fast, but the average company, how much were they? Actually are they good at adopting change? And you've called me on stupid enterprises slow getting any faster, you know? Are they Are they open to change? Mohr. You know, what do you see in 2019? Is is it any different than it was in, You know, two thousand nine? >> That's a great question. So thie answer is yes, they're getting better. We are finally getting better. Problem, though, is a CZ industry insider watcher or a Boyar is ur is you see it and know what should happen 10 years. It takes 10 years in general for the world to actually catch upto the stuff that we're talking about. So it's not really that helpful to the poor schlub that's running on operation that build sneakers in Kansas, right? That's not really that helpful that we're talking about. This is what you could be doing and should be doing. The pace of change is much faster now because and give the em where most of the credit. Because once that went into place, all of the sudden and that you gotta remember there, everyone thinks vm where was an instant home run? It was 10 years of the same cold sitting in the corner in a queue, a environment before. Finally, we ran out of room in the data center, and that's the only reason they were able to come out. But once it was there, and it enabled you to stop associating the physical to the to the logical once, we could just just dis aggregate that stuff that I think opened up a tidal wave of kind of what else can we do? And people have adopted now. Now it's pervasive. So VM where's everywhere? Now? We're moving in the next level of kind of woman. Why can't I just build a containerized app that I can execute anywhere? No matter of fact, I don't even want it in my data center on. No one has to know that necessarily. So as modernization exercises have started to take off, they just they pick up, they actually pick up steam. So what we know empirically is those that are are halfway down. Call it the transformation or the modernization curve are going three times faster than those just starting. And those guys are going three times faster than the ones that are sitting there in idle doing stuff. The same >> city with the inertia going on. What do you make of this Bubblicious Back up market. Let's talk about that a little bit. You got these big install bases? The veritas, Conmebol, Delhi emcee, IBM, Tivoli install base. Everybody wants a piece of that action. Well, I guess cohesive rubric also want a piece of each other. Sure, which is kind of, you know, they get that urinary Olympics going on. I'd like to say And then you got these guys, which is kind of, you know, playing. Uh, I said to Ashleigh kind of East Coast, West Coast, There's no no, it's not East Coast, West Coast, but there's definitely more conservativism on this side of the of the flyover states. What's your take on what's going on in the landscape right now? >> So back up is awesome from the again, still probably the single most consistently line item budget thing for five decades. It's a guaranteed money in and out, and by and large it still sucks. My general rule is still it's crazy that we haven't been able to solve that particular problem. But regardless, the reason that it's so important is, besides the obvious. Yeah, you need to protect stuff, case. Something goes away and something bad happened good. But really, it's That's the inn. Just point for everything you do, you create data today. I'm backing it up on our later so that backup becomes the injust engine and it also is kicking off point. So at tapioca it started as wow, this is a better backup, most trap for lack of a better term. But really what? It was is didn't matter what with was back up or something else. It's I need tohave the data in order to do other stuff with it, and back up is just a natural, easiest way to be able to do that. So I think what's finally happening is we're moving from Christophe Would would say it's really about intelligence intelligence more so than just capturing those bits and being able to assemble and put it back together. It's understanding the context of those bits so that I can say stew in test. Dev has a different use case than Dave in whatever analytics, etcetera, etcetera. But they both need a copy of the exact scene data, the exact same state at the exact same point in time, etcetera. So if lungs backup's going to be kind of a tip of the spear in terms of going from what I will say, production or live data to the first copy, there's almost always back up. It's gonna matter. >> Christoph, Christoph Bertrand want your analyst? And so we saw, uh, c'mon, Danni Allen put a slideshow $15,000,000,000 tam and back up being a big chunk of that, probably half of it um, how does that jibe with your gut feel in terms of the opportunity beyond backup Dev ops? You know, I don't know. Ransomware insights. So you think that's low? High? Makes sense. >> I think I could justify the number. And what history has taught me is that it's probably low because we we're only talking about a handful of use cases that we've all glommed onto. But there will be remembered, like 11 years ago, there was no iPhone. You know what? How bad that changed. Everything that we do over there. And when did you know at some point during that particular journey, the phone became Who gives a shit about the phone? Excuse. But it's a text machine and it's an instagram thing, and it's a video production facility and all these other things, and the phone's almost dead. I only use it when my mom calls me kind of thing. So, you know, really, it's difficult to imagine. I certainly don't have the mental capabilities to imagine what the next 10 things after Dev Ops and this that and the other. But it's still all predicated on the same you got Somebody's gonna have a copy of that data and you're gonna be able to access it. You've got to be able to put it where you need it for whatever the reason again, a disaster is an important thing to recover from. But so is being ableto farm That data for nuggets of gold. >> Well, I guess I asked the question because, you know, it's a logical question is, is the market big enough to support all these companies that are in, You know, that gardener thing that they do? And I hope so because we love competition. >> I think I >> can answer it >> this way. Everything. Even the oldest guard Veritas, for God's sakes, 1000 years old, t sm 1000 years old con vault code base, 1000 years old. You're all big companies, right? And they're not perishing anytime soon. And I don't run. Love the startup Love the active FiOS or the cohesive sees coming in. But what they're really trying to do is not, you know, they might have started, as in a common ground, backup is a common warzone, but because there's money there like this consistent money there go get. But they soon turn in Teo other value propositions. And that's not is true with the incumbent back up guys because of their own legacy, right? It's hard to turn 1,000,000 year 1,000,000 lines of code into something. It wasn't designed, innit? >> Yeah, and it's not trivial to disrupt that base. But I guess if you get, you know, raising I don't know how much the industry is raised, but it's well over $1,000,000,000 now. I mean, activity has raised 200,000,000 and that's like chump change. Compared to some of the other races that you've seen. Cody City was to 60 and their last rubric was even, you know, crazy, crazy, even >> count the private money that beam God is that, you know, that was half 1,000,000,000 >> right? Well, that's a That's an off camera discussion. All right, we gotta go. So, Steve, thanks so much for for coming. Thank you. Great to >> have you. All right. All right, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You wanted the Cube from active field data driven from Boston, right on the harbor. Right back

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. Good afternoon to you. No matter where you're watching, here in the US, we know it is afternoon. As we wind up our coverage for day three at AWS re:invent here on the Cube. One of seven venues we're in right now that's hosting various satellite events. Right now we're in the Sands Expo. Rebecca Knight, John Walls, with Russ Currie. The vice president of Enterprise Strategy at NetScout. Russ, good to see you sir. >> Nice to see you again. >> I've got to be careful. I've got two Bostonian's of sorts here. >> Sorry, sorry. >> So if I don't get something on the accent, you just let me know (laughs) >> We'll talk amongst ourselves. >> Sorry if your sports inferiority complex is.. We're the champions, whatever >> Russ, if you would, first off, your take about what you're seeing here. Because, here we are, day three. As you know, you've been to a lot of shows. Day three, kind of, usually hits a different gear, right? >> Right >> Slows down a little bit. There's still a lot of excitement here. There's still a lot of people around. This show has a little different vibe to it. >> It really does. It's interesting because it becomes a little bit more serious, I think. At this point, in day three for this show, it's now, people are really kind of, they've been exposed to an awful lot in the last three days. And they're really saying, "Okay, now I really want to understand the nuts and bolts of it", and they're spending a little bit more time sitting and learning, understanding what you have to offer them in terms of your solution sense. So it's been an awful lot of fun. Also we did a couple of speaking engagements, so it's really good getting the folks that went and saw our guys speak and seeing them come into the booth and say, 'I want to talk more about that'. >> Well, I want to talk more about that, so you have a new marketing campaign, but first for the viewers who are not familiar with NetScout, you're a Fortune 500 company, but tell us a little more about who you are and what you do. >> Right, so what we do is we provide visibility into the communications between servers and clients and basically see all of the traffic that traverses the network and whether the network is in a public cloud, private cloud, or an on-prem environment, and by looking at that traffic we're able to understand the performance of the services that are being delivered and ensure the security performance of those servers. But right in that perspective we give IT the tools they need to get quicker to the mean time to knowledge, identifying where a problem might be or where a risk may exist and being able to solve those tough problems. >> So it's been a year since you've been on the Cube, I know the esteemed John Walls interviewed you. >> We go way back, yes. >> What's new this year? What sort of advancements, progressions have you implemented? >> So last year when we came in was really our first entry into the public cloud environment and our first entry into AWS, since then we've got a lot of really good traction, a lot of embracing of our technology, we partnered more closely with AWS and got ourselves onto the marketplace. We also enhanced our partnership with VMware and now a part of their NetX integration so we have high levels of integration into both of those platforms, which of course is strong to this entire audience. We've introduced new features and functionality into our product to be able to provide greater visibility, even going deeper into understanding the way the applications are functioning and also added some more security profiling into our products and being able to identify threats as they come into the enterprise network and also as they go out ,so, it's been interesting, it's been a lot of fun. >> You talk about the hybrid cloud and obviously we're hearing that here, this week right, so AWS is obviously slightly shifting its perspective a bit, you know, in terms of on-prem and dealing with the public cloud as well, mind that merger. Your clients, is their any arm twisting that you still have to do or are people buying into it a little more wholeheartedly now in terms of the public cloud and that you've addressed these security concerns? >> I think actually we've become an enabler in often times for our customers, to move to the cloud with competence, where they were a little bit concerned that as they move into the cloud, what kind of investment in tools are they going to have to make? What are they going to potentially lose as they put their workloads into the cloud ? Do they lose a degree of visibility and control? And what we've been able to do is ensure that they have that same experience no matter where they deploy. We were talking earlier about one of our customers that's in the travel and entertainment business and they have been using our gear on cruise ships and in their on-prem data center, but expanded themselves into AWS to extend their capabilities and provide a better user experience for those on ship and now what they really have was the ability to have visibility from ship to shore to cloud and have that perspective and have the confidence that they're delivering a high quality experience to their customers. >> Ship to shore to cloud, not every company can say that. >> Exactly. >> But speaking of motto's, you have a new marketing campaign, visibility without borders. What does that mean? What are you trying to evoke their with your customers? >> What we we're really trying to look at there is the ability to provide visibility no matter where you're deployed. If you have a deployment in a public cloud environment like AWS, you want to have that same level of visibility in your on-prem environment, you want to have it no matter where you have a workload, wherever you have an instance that you want to manage. You want to be able to have that same perspective, one of the things we talk about a little bit, is the idea that, providing a single pane of glass into the service insurance experience and I think that often times, when people try to get to that single pane of glass, they end up with more of a single glass of pain. (laughing) You know, they're trying to aggregate so much stuff that it really doesn't come together too well. >> Right. >> But because we focus in on the data source itself then it just provides that continuity regardless of where they deploy. >> Alright and the importance of visibility, obviously when you're talking about end to end right now, whether you're on-prem or whether you're in the public cloud you're not particular, right? >> Right. >> As a user, I just want to see my operation from start to finish and I don't care where it is. >> Exactly, providing that end to end perspective and being able to understand how I'm delivering services, what the customer experiences, no matter where I deploy and especially when we look at taking advantage of some of the elastic compute capabilities and the like that exists in the cloud, you want to ensure that you're actually getting what you paid for as well, you want to have those controls in place, knowing that what you're delivering is meaningful and impacting the business in a positive way as opposed to, potentially, in a negative way, and spending too much for something that doesn't improve anything in terms of the customer experience. >> Right. >> So the customers, when they want to talk about return on investment, what excites them most? What kind of things are you showing them that is delighting them? >> Often times it's really about mean time to knowledge, we spend a lot of time pointing fingers at each other when we're trying to solve a problem instead of pointing our fingers at the problem. And that's really what we try to focus in on, really getting down into the real details of why something is not performing properly, not, what might be performing improperly. So being able to really get down to that detail and get the right people working on the right problems, I often talk about it in terms of getting the right information, to the right person at the right time, to do the right thing. And if you're able to do that, you're going to provide a better user experience to your customers. >> You mention that a lot of your personnel, a lot of your folks here have been speaking, talking to various groups, I always find that interesting right, because, it's usually the Q&A. >> Yes. >> That when things pop off. So, if you had to generalize about the kind of feedback you're getting from those sessions in terms of the questions, the concerns, the challenges, what are you hearing from folks out there? >> It's kind of funny, one of the things that we get a lot of times is, "You really can do this?" you know, "Is this real what you're showing us?", it's like, yes, this is actual traffic we're showing you exactly what we're seeing. >> Yeah. >> And then they are often pretty amazed at our ability to bring this all into something that visualizes these complex applications that they're delivering across multiple different environments and they have that ah-ah moment where they go, "Oh gosh I really need this, you know, this is really that end to end view that I've been looking for for so long, but I really can't get what I use, a bunch of disparate tools, to try and bring that together" >> So that means, what you just described, is really the definition of innovation, which is providing customers with things that they want, that they didn't even know they wanted. How do you stay innovative? I mean here we are at AWS, Amazon, one of the most innovative companies on the planet and in the history of industry. >> Absolutely. >> How does a company, you're based in Westford, Massachusetts, how do you stay on the cutting edge? >> We spend an enormous amount of time working with our customers and listening to them in terms of where they're going, what their plans are, what new technologies might they be implementing, what are their major initiatives, we regularly reach out and we have constant contact with them to get that feedback and make sure that we're developing solutions that are meaningful to them, it's really about, not what feature can I deliver but what can I provide as value, that's going to make their lives better. Because, as an IT person, it's a tough job right? You're usually the person that people look at and say "Why isn't this working?". >> Right. >> And not being able to have an answer to that, is not a good position to be in. (laughter) Right, so what we're really trying to do is provide them with that answer and give them that ability to be able to answer the tough questions and solve those tough problems. >> Talking about finger pointing, it happens right? >> It does, you know. So what we're really all about is making sure that they're able to get the problem solved as quickly as possible. One of the interesting things I've been hearing from our customers too is that they're looking to this concept of a versatilist, rather than having just a straight forward specialist coming in and work on problems, having people that are a little bit broader in terms of their capabilities and looking at things not only from the perspective, say I'm a network guy, I'm going to look at the network and the app guys going to look at the app. >> Right. >> You got to cross pollinate a little bit and provide that ability to see both sides of that problem, so that's starting to happen. >> Certainly presents a challenge for your workforce right? All of a sudden, you've got to be a little smarter and where a lot of different hats. >> Exactly. >> Versatilist, I like that. You heard it here first. >> Yeah. >> Well, Russ, if you're going to go and ship the shorter cloud, you let us know? OK? >> OK. (laughing) >> Because we want to take that journey with you, alright? >> Love to. >> Thanks for being with us again, good to see you. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> You bet, safe trip home. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, you are watching us live on the Cube.

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, welcome to this special CUBE presentation, where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Appliance announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat, it's an ask me anything crowd chat you can login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives, we're gonna hear from VMware executives, we've got the analyst perspective, we're gonna hear from customers and then of course we're gonna jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen, who is the President of Dell's EMC, Dell EMCs Data Protection Division, Beth, great to see you again. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> Okay so, we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized, we also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? >> Data protection is crucial for our customers today, and more and more the vAdmins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise, and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400, we announced this a few weeks ago, it is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection, and makes it simple and easy to use, and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers. We're the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. >> Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. You know people expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? >> And the cloud has many different ways the customers can leverage it. The two that we're gonna highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option, so customers can fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how wildly popular that is and how rapidly it's growing, and we've now integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal, but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection, all integrated within VCD. >> Okay great, so, we know that VMware of course is the leader in virtualization, we're gonna cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives, we're gonna back here we're gonna do a deep dive, as I say we got great agenda, we're gonna explore some of these things; and then of course there's the crowd chat, the ask me anything crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California, in our studios over there, and let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. (intense orchestral music) >> Thanks, Dave! And this is Peter Burris, and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also, we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yanbing Li is the Senior Vice President and GM for the Storage and Availability Business Unit at Vmware, welcome back to theCUBE Yanbing. >> It's great to be here, thank you for having me Peter. >> Oh absolutely we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important to VMware and Dell EMC to work on this question, data availability, data protection? >> You know I have a very simple answer for you. You know Dell EMC has been the marketing leader for the past decade, and they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment, it's very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important, is our collaboration is not only go-to-market collaboration, in labeling our joint customers, but also deep engineering level collaboration, and that is very very exciting. Lots of our solutions are really co-engineered together. >> So, that is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution, is in service of data protection but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is gonna make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. >> Certainly VMware has been also on a journey to help with our customers, their transition from data center to the cloud, and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that; and we're looking for simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solutions. You know VMware launched our VMware Cloud on AWS service last year, and Dell EMC has been with us since day one; they're the first solution to be certified as a data protection service for VMware Cloud on AWS. We also work with 4500 VCCP partners, this is the VMware Cloud partner program partners that, you know they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection source with vCloud, their vCloud Director software, so that you know our customer has integrated data protection for our VCCP partners. So you know across all the cloud initiatives, we are working very closely with Dell EMC. >> So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together, to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. >> Definitely. I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement that has been to the Data Domain Virtual Edition, where they're offering a subscription-based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware Cloud on AWS instance to back up their data, you know, using a subscription model, and you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware Cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. >> Fantastic! Yanbing Li, VMware, back to you, Dave! >> Thanks, Peter. We're back for the deep dive, Beth Phalen and joining us again, and Ruya Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division, thanks guys for coming on. Ruya, let me start with you. Why are customers, and what are they telling you, in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort, and collaboration we've been putting in place, and so did Yanbing with VMware, so whether that's integration into vCenter, or vSphere, or vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation or vCloud Director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort, and engineering hours is really to do two things: deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers >> But what do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Where as 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer, but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing Hypervisor Direct to application storage. So it really is to automate, and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels, so automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users, it really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores, so, our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So, when you talk about power, is that performance, you reference performance, but is it just performance, or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question, Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three fold, it's power in making sure that you have a single, powerful solution, that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on-premise, or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection, and more importantly restores, is really critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market, that coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> Alright, I wanna bring Beth Phalen into the conversation, Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true; it's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing cloud into that IT environment, they have to know where their data is, and how is protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here for a long time, we've had our hyper cloud extensions, you can do cloud tiering directly from Data Domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud on AWS customer, so that you can use that for you cloud DR configuartion, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with vMotion if you choose to; and that's great for customers who don't wanna have a second site, but they do wanna have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great with VMware, with vCloud Director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy, it's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks, and your data protection tasks, from one UI in the Cloud Director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing, comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud, is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement, the IDPA DP4400, Ruya what's it all about? Explain. >> Absolutely, so, what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance, turnkey, purpose-built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers, it's really, to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities, so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included; as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UI's. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, could you talk about the motivation for this product? Why did you build it, and why is relevant to mid-sized customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection we're known for our world-class dedupe, best in class, best in the world dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that's served enterprise customers for all of these years, and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers And there were so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company, may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection, that they can have what we bring to the market with best-in-class data protection. >> I wanna follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection, simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection day-to-day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easy to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add in 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So, when I hear powerful and here mid-sized customers, I'm thinking okay I wanna bring enterprise-class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what you means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> Yeah. If I'm an IT admin I wanna make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so, we have the broadest support matrix in the industry, I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications, that's key, that's one thing. The other thing is I wanna be able to scale, and I don't wanna have to be forced to bring in new products with this you have a logical five terabytes on-prem, you can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalability. >> Petabytes, sorry. >> And then-- >> Sorry. Petabytes-- >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> You live in a petabyte world! >> Of course, yes, what am I thinking. (all laugh) and then last but not least, it's just performance, right? This runs on a 14GB PowerEdge server; you're gonna get the efficiency, you can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So, all of those things come together with power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this IT operations person, what does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're gonna get your weekends back, right? So, the product is just faster, we talked about it's simpler, you're not gonna have to get a PhD on how to do data protection, to be able to do your business. You're gonna enable your vAdmins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that you know sound mind that data protection's just happening, it works! We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service-level requirements; it's just gonna work. And, by the way, you're gonna look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're gonna be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center, so your boss is gonna think your just a superhero. >> Petabytes. >> Yeah exactly, petabytes, exactly. (all laugh) So it's tremendous for the IT user, and also the business user. >> By the way, what about the boss? What about the line of business, what does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really wanna think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel? And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't wanna overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business, you need it, but you don't wanna overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind, and the trust that this is just gonna work, then I'm gonna be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario; and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm gonna rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much, don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. Alright, let's take a look at the product, and then we're gonna come back and get the analysts perspective, keep it right there. (intense music) >> Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity; driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness, in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and, easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA System Manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver breakneck backup speeds, more efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to one average deduplication. The IDPA DP400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention. And, also enables simple, and cost effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint, with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost-to-protect. It includes a three year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to one data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection, in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-sized environments. It's simply powerful. (upbeat music and rhythmic claps) >> Cool video! Alright, we're back, with Vinny Choinski, who is the Senior Analyst for the Validation Practice at ESG, Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research, and one of the areas is they have these lab reports, and they basically validate vendor claims, it's an awesome service, they've had it for a number of years and Vinny is an expert in this area. Vinny Choinski, welcome to theCUBE great to see you. >> How you doin' Dave? Great to see you. >> So, when you talk to customers they tell you they hate complexity, first of all, and specifically in the context of data protection, they want high performance, they don't wanna have to mess with this stuff, and they want low cost. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> So our research is lining up with those challenges; and that's why I've recently done three reports. We talked to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they are making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do data protection. >> So people don't wanna do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So, what did you find, hands on, what'd you find with regards to deployment? >> Yeah, so for the deployment, we really yeah, we focused on the DP4400 and you know how that's making it easier for the IT generalist to do data protection deployment, and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes, so, it's a service sized appliance, pretty easy, easy to install. Spent 10 minutes in the server room kinda configuring it to the network, and then we went up to an office, and finished the configuration. After that I basically hit go on the configuration button, completely automated. And I simply monitored the process until the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance, hit go, and at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for on-site, and backups extended to the cloud. >> So, that met your expectations? It meshed with the vendors claims? >> It was real easy. We actually had to move it around a couple times, and you know, this stuff used to be huge you know, big box, metal gear. >> Refrigerators. (laughs) >> Refrigerators. It was a small appliance, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack, the configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters, that's about it. >> How about your performance testing, what did that show? >> So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA Dell appliances to the industry recognized server grid scaled architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box, CPU, memory, disk, network, flash, so once we had the boxes configured apples to apples shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. >> Okay. So again, you're kind of expectations tied into the vendor claims? >> Yep. You know the reduction in backup time was pretty significant that's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, right, you got the hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer, and we found that IDPA outperformed the competitor there as well, significantly. And we found that this is do to the the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies will, the VMware Changed Block Tracking API, but it has it's own client-side software that really reduces, significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. >> What about the economics, it's the one of the key paying points obviously for IT professionals. What did you see there? >> Yep, so, there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we call the cost to protect. We actually collected call home data from 15,000 Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. >> Oh cool, real data. >> Real data. So, we had the real data, we got it from 15,000 different environments, we took that data and we we used some of the stuff that we analyzed, the price that they paid for it, how long has it been in service, what the deduplication rates they're getting, and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to to distill that into this InstaGraphic that we see up here, which takes 12, shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures, on the far left of this InstaGraphic you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third-party backup application, still performing economically, quite well. On the far right we have the fully integrated IDPA solution, you'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So, what we found was that both data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per month. >> Okay. Important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here, right, it's just. >> It's metadata that's correct. >> Right, okay. Summarize your impressions based on your research, and your hands on lab work. >> Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years, I've been in the data protection space, I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments, I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG, taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there, and, you know data protection has never been easy, and there's always a lot of moving parts, and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance, and they've put the right components in there they have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here, so it's not an easy thing in my opinion, and I think they've nailed this one. >> Excellent. Well Vinny, thanks so much for for comin' on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. Alright, let's hear from the customer, and then we're gonna come back with Beth Phalen and wrap, keep it right there. (upbeat techno music) >> I was a fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services, and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own, and there are those that want an integrated solution, they want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment, and also, ease-of-management over time. >> Vollrath is a food service industry manufacturer, it's been in business for 144 years, in some way we probably touch your life everyday. From a semantic perspective, things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours, and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns, shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour, maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's single interface, really does help. So when you take into account how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions that's another unparalleled piece. >> I'm the IT Director for Melanson Heath, we are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400 simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can rack it, stack it, and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure, and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B, that can be deployed quickly and easily. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back, it's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth let's summarize, bring it home for us, this announcement. >> We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise, and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. >> Awesome, well thanks so much Beth for sharing the innovations, and we're not done yet, so jump into the crowd chat, as I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, ask any questions, we're gonna be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you in the crowd chat.