>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you my Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeaamOn. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman, Duncan Epping is here, Chief Technologist, Storage and Availability at VMWare and the world's number one blogger in virtualization, Yellow Bricks, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much coming to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> No problem, my pleasure, it's been a while. I actually hoped to be on the show probably six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know how long it is, but I've watched many episodes. So it's great to be part of it. >> Well great, Duncan one of the biggest problems is you're so busy, every year at VM World you were totally booked up, so no thanks so much we're so glad we could do this. >> So Stu and I remember the peer insight we did many many years ago back when we had Boonyon on recently, and he was talking about when VMWare sort of created virtualization, it pushed the bottle neck around. It created a lot of stress on the storage systems. And WMWare for years dealt with that through API integration and the like and very well sort of covered. But I wonder if you could take us through your perspectives of the journey of storage at VMWare and generally, or specifically, and virtualization generally. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think everyone that has been part of the community has faced all of the different challenges from a storage perspective. I mean, Stu, you now what kind of problem EMC had when VMWare first started doing virtualization. And I think the key reasons for these were fairly straightforward. When we started virtualization and we started leveraging shared storage systems, those shared storage systems were never designed with virtualization in the back of their minds. They were designed for physical workloads, maybe one or two machines connected to it, you know in larger volume it may be 10 or 15, but not 10 or 15 physical hosts with hundred of virtual machines. So we started noticing is that from a performance perspective systems were lagging, we were doing all sorts of things to the storage systems that they weren't expecting, virtual machine snapshots. They were seeing IO patterns that they had never seen before. Instead of sequential IO we had a lot of random IOs so we had to start doing different things from a storage perspective so as you said, we started with APIs, we had the vSPhere APIs for IO filtering, we have the Divi APIs, the array integration, so that we can offload some of the functionality, but of course on top of that what we started doing within VMWare is we started exploring what we could do smarter from a storage point from our stance. So not just looking at how we can help the ecosystem, but also what we can do from our perspective, so there were two main efforts over the past couple of years. The first one is virtual volumes. It has taken a while before the adoption ramped up. I think part of that is mainly because a lot of our customer base was still on vSphere 5.5. Now that we're starting to see broader adoption of vSphere 6.0 and actually 6.5 and 6.7, we're starting to see the adoption of stuff like virtual volumes go up as well. That is also due to the fact that our partners like Pure Storage, Nimble, HP with 3PAR has been pushing or have been pushing VVols tremendously. So they've done a great job, and we're starting to see a lot of customers adopting VVols, and that way we're getting around some of the limitations that we have from a traditional storage perspective. >> Explain that, what are customers telling you about the benefits that they're getting out of VVols and VVol and VVol adoption? >> Well, there's two main things. It kind of depends on what kind of problems you're facing, but a lot of customers come to us with management issues and scalability issues. From a scalability perspective we have larger customers that literally have thousands of volumes. If you look at an E6 cluster today you're limited in terms of the numbers of volumes you can connect to a cluster. So that's one thing. As soon as they start moving to VVols now they're not managing those individual volumes anymore but they're managing the storage system as a whole, and they start creating policies, and that's where the management aspect comes into play. So it becomes a lot easier to manage, because instead of having thousands of volumes to select from, they don't normally have to look at a spreadsheet, for instance, to figure out where to place a virtual machine, now they simply make a policy and the policy engine will figure out where to place that virtual machine. >> Dave: It sounds like cloud. >> It actually is, you know, the cloud version of, cloudified version of storage I would say. But it brings a lot of benefits. And the funny thing is that we've been talking about policies and policy engines for a long time, even in the cloud, but try to come up with one cloud that actually has a decent policy engine. Hardly anyone has that today. From a storage perspective I think storage policy based management framework that VMWare has is quite unique. Well now we're starting to see that popping up in other areas, and that's the strange thing about it. >> Always back to the software mainframe Stu. >> Yeah, and Duncan one of the things we've really seen, a transition for, it took us about a decade to try and fix storage in a virtualized environment, and today most things are built either understanding virtualization, or at least that's part of the puzzle, and then of course VVols led us into was the ability for vSANs. Help us kind of transition that threshold as to how that's just kind of a given underneath for vSAN and other solutions like it. >> Yeah, if you look at vSAN it has been around for a while. The beta was in 2013, as you guys know. We have a large adoption, at least we saw a large increase over the last couple of years, I would say the last two years. You guys have spoken with Yangbing before, so you know about the business side of vSAN, I'm not going to cover that, but if you look at it from a technology perspective we stared developing this 2008, 2009, that's when we started thinking about what we could do different from a storage perspective. There were already some companies doing something in the hyperverge space and we figured we could do something significantly different than they were doing. They had a storage solution that sat on top of the hypervisor, we own the hypervisor so we can create something that sits within the hypervisor, and that's when we started looking at including these different technologies, so we started looking in how can we introduce things like deduplication and compression? What can we do with for ROBO solutions? Can we do something like stretch clustering in an easy way? There are a lot of stretch cluster solutions out there, but if you look at a stretch clustering solution today it typically takes weeks to implement that. If you look at something like vSAN, it was our aim to actually to be able to deploy something like that from a storage perspective within hours instead of weeks, right? And we've been able to achieve that, and it has been a huge undertaking, but I think it's fair to say that it has been rather successful. >> All right, Duncan, help connect the dots to where we are here at VeeamOn. It's funny, I think Veeam started out heavily in virtualization, still heavily involved in virtualization, they've got a v in the beginning of their name. When I hear the keynote this morning, a lot of hyper, reminded me of before we had, before hyperconverge fully took over, VMWare tried to call it a hypervisor converge system around VMWare, so talk to us a little bit about data protection, the Veeam relationship and how that fits into things like vSAN and vSphere? >> Yeah I think, I talk to a lot of customers as a Chief Technologist, it's part of my role to talk to customers and have discussions about what's on top of their mind. Data protection is always one of those things that comes up. I would say it's always in the top three. Whenever you talk to a CIO, a CTO, protection of the data, availability of data, resiliency, reliability, it's fairly important. Veeam of course, for us, is a great partner. Primarily because of the simplicity of the features and the products that they offer. Whenever I talk to a customer and they explain how difficult it is to manage their backup and recovery solutions I always point them to a partner like Veeam simply because it's going to make their life a lot easier if you ask me. And I can see that Veeam is slowly transitioning. As you mentioned, the v is in front of the name. The v is in front of our name as well, but we know that it's not, the whole world isn't just VMWare and the whole world isn't just virtual. There's a lot of other different solutions out there, and actually Veeam's looking at other revenue streams as well. I would argue, though, if you're looking at something like the edge space which I think that more or less exploring at looking at things like IoT, there's going to be some form of virtualization within that, whether that's VMWare based or another solution of course is going to be the question. That is something that we'll need to figure out in the upcoming years, but I think there's a big opportunity out there. If you ask me, the keynote was really interesting. I kind of missed the end of details. I'm hoping that the closing keynote is going to give some more details on what they will be doing in the IoT space, how they see their solution evolving from that point of view because it's a market that's still being developed, but that's definitely going to be interesting. >> So Duncan it's interesting to hear you say that when you talk to customers data protection is in the top three, even amongst CIOs. It used to not be that way. Data protection was always a bolt on, it was an afterthought, it was kind of one size fits all. What's changed? >> Well I think the importance of the data has changed. If you look over the last 10 years whenever you talk to any company out there that has lost any significant amount of data they understand what the value was of the data that they were hosting. I think the big difference over the past 10 years is in the past we had applications like email, maybe some file services and that's it. But now everything revolves around applications, and that's also the shift that I'm seeing in the industry. Also from an IT perspective, right? In the past, over the past decade I think everyone has been focused on the infrastructure layer. If you look at something like VBlock, very much infrastructure focused. If you look at something like hyperconverged solutions, very much infrastructure focused. But now whenever we talk to customers, customers are more and more interested in what we can do for the application layer. What kind of benefits do we have for Exchange, for Oracle, for SAP, you name it? I think that's also a big change that's happening in the industry right now. One of the things from a technical perspective, and there may be others, but when VMWare really became prominent it was wonderful but we were reducing the number of physical resources, and the one workload that took a lot of physical resources was backup, and then sort of Veeam swept in and took advantage of that sea change. What's the technical constraint now when you think about things like multi cloud and SaaS and IoT, data's much more distributed, it's out of the control necessarily of a single platform. So from a technicals perspective, what's the big challenge and sort of the gate to architectures today? >> Well as you said, the distribution of data is the big challenge as it stands right now from a technical perspective. I think the biggest challenge that most of the players in this space, and not just Veeam, some other players as well, will have is trying to figure out how to control and manage their data. Other platforms are facing similar challenges. And no one really has solved this problem yet. We're starting to see some players in this space that have solutions that sit out in Azure, that sit out in Google Cloud, but it's a very challenging solution, and I think if you ask me, and this is something that I've said internally as well, the company that is capable of managing and owning the data is the company that's probably going to be most successful in the cloud war that's now happening. I think that's the most critical aspect. Workloads can move around, but data is very difficult to move around and own as well. >> Duncan one of the discontinuities we see in the marketplace that you mentioned earlier, wondering if you can talk to, in the enterprise in the data center, how do we get them to get to that next version? Comfortable with it, it's stable, it works. I look at the cloud, I'm running Microsoft Azure or AWS I'm running the version that they want. How do we help close that gap? Because from a security standpoint, from a features standpoint, we need to move there, but you know it seems to be just one of the greatest disconnects we see between kind of my data center and somebody else's cloud. >> That is a great question. I think we had a lot of challenges in the past. I think it's fair to say with vSphere 5.0 it was a great release, 5.5 among great releases. But the challenges that we have from an upgrade perspective was typically V centered and all of the components connected to it. It's not just the vSphere platform but if you look at the vSphere platform, the challenges that we had were all of the components integrating with it, whether that's something like vROps, VRA's, or VREalize Automation, but it could also be something like Evermar or maybe Veeam. So there were so many different components we had to take into account. So what we started doing within VMWare was simplifying the architecture from a vSPhere perspective. If you look at vSAN for instance, it used to be a solution where we had multiple functions spread out across different virtual machines. I'm now trying to bring that back into a single virtual machine again. Actually dumbing it down, making it easier to upgrade. So that is something that is actively happening within VMWare, and it is something that we started with 6.0, and that's also the reason why we see the adoption from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6.5 to 6.7, is at a must faster pace than 5, in the 5 code stream, so 5 to 5.1, for instance, took a lot longer for a lot of customers or 5.1 to 6.0, took extremely long for a lot of customers. It's the key reason is complexity from our infrastructure stand. While we're changing that, we're evolving that in the upcoming years. >> Duncan it's the last question here, but as the technologist, things that you're looking at that are exciting to you, that you know, get your juices flowing? >> Yeah, that's an interesting one because it's something that I've been thinking about recently. I've been doing vSphere for the last, well wasn't even called vSphere back then, but I've been doing this for the last 12 years, virtualization. Thirteen years maybe something like that. At least as a consultant and then as a technologist and technical marketing, but recently I'm starting to look more and more at the edge space. For computing, IoT, I think that's a really interesting space, especially because there isn't really significant market. Well, there is a significant market out there, but there isn't really one player out there that really stands out. No one has really figured out what customers would like to do with it and how our customers are going to use it. So the edge computing space and IoT's a really interesting thing and especially because of the distributed aspect is one of the things that I've been always been passionate about, vSphere clusters, which is a distributed mechanism. So distributed computing is definitely something that has my interest. >> All right if you care about virtualization, VMWare, follow the yellow brick road, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)