(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Moscone Center in San Francisco everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our coverage of Google Cloud Next #GoogleNext19. I'm here with my co-host Stuart Miniman and I'm Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also here. Dominic Preuss is here, he's the Director of Product Management, Storage and Databases at Google. Dominic, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks to be here. >> Gosh, 15, 20 years ago there were like three databases and now there's like, I feel like there's 300. It's exploding, all this innovation. You guys made some announcements yesterday, we're gonna get into, but let's start with, I mean, data, we were just talking at the open, is the critical part of any IT transformation, business value, it's at the heart of it. Your job is at the heart of it and it's important to Google. >> Yes. Yeah, you know, Google has a long history of building businesses based on data. We understand the importance of it, we understand how critical it is. And so, really, that ethos is carried over into Google Cloud platform. We think about it very much as a data platform and we have a very strong responsibility to our customers to make sure that we provide the most secure, the most reliable, the most available data platform for their data. And it's a key part of any decision when a customer chooses a hyper cloud vendor. >> So summarize your strategy. You guys had some announcements yesterday really embracing open source. There's certainly been a lot of discussion in the software industry about other cloud service providers who were sort of bogarting open source and not giving back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How would you characterize Google's strategy with regard to open source, data storage, data management and how do you differentiate from other cloud service providers? >> Yeah, Google has always been the open cloud. We have a long history in our commitment to open source. Whether be Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Angular, Golang. Pick any one of these that we've been contributing heavily back to open source. Google's entire history is built on the success of open source. So we believe very strongly that it's an important part of the success. We also believe that we can take a different approach to open source. We're in a very pivotal point in the open source industry, as these companies are understanding and deciding how to monetize in a hyper cloud world. So we think we can take a fundamentally different approach and be very collaborative and support the open source community without taking advantage or not giving back. >> So, somebody might say, okay, but Google's got its own operational databases, you got analytic databases, relational, non-relational. I guess Google Spanner kind of fits in between those. It was an amazing product. I remember that that first came out, it was making my eyes bleed reading the white paper on it but awesome tech. You certainly own a lot of your own database technology and do a lot of innovation there. So, square that circle with regard to partnerships with open source vendors. >> Yeah, I think you alluded to a little bit earlier there are hundreds of database technologies out there today. And there's really been a proliferation of new technology, specifically databases, for very specific use cases. Whether it be graph or time series, all these other things. As a hyper cloud vendor, we're gonna try to do the most common things that people need. We're gonna do manage MySQL, and PostgreS and SQL Server. But for other databases that people wanna run we want to make sure that those solutions are first class opportunities on the platform. So we've engaged with seven of the top and leading open source companies to make sure that they can provide a managed service on Google Cloud Platform that is first class. What that means is that as a GCP customer I can choose a Google offered service or a third-party offered service and I'm gonna have the same, seamless, frictionless, integrated experience. So I'm gonna get unified billing, I'm gonna get one bill at the end of the day. I'm gonna have unified support, I'm gonna reach out to Google support and they're going to figure out what the problem is, without blaming the third-party or saying that isn't our problem. We take ownership of the issue and we'll go and figure out what's happening to make sure you get an answer. Then thirdly, a unified experience so that the GCP customer can manage that experience, inside a cloud console, just like they would their Google offered serves. >> A fully-managed database as a service essentially. >> Yes, so of the seven vendors, a number of them are databases. But also for Kafka, to manage Kafka or any other solutions that are out there as well. >> All right, so we could spend the whole time talking about databases. I wanna spend a couple minutes talking about the other piece of your business, which is storage. >> Dominic: Absolutely. >> Dave and I have a long history in what we'd call traditional storage. And the dialog over the last few years has been we're actually talking about data more than the storing of information. A few years back, I called cloud the silent killer of the old storage market. Because, you know, I'm not looking at buying a storage array or building something in the cloud. I use storage is one of the many services that I leverage. Can you just give us some of the latest updates as to what's new and interesting in your world. As well as when customers come to Google where does storage fit in that overall discussion? >> I think that the amazing opportunity that we see for for large enterprises right now is today, a lot of that data that they have in their company are in silos. It's not properly documented, they don't necessarily know where it is or who owns it or the data lineage. When we pick all that date up across the enterprise and bring it in to Google Cloud Platform, what's so great about is regardless of what storage solution you choose to put your data in it's in a centralized place. It's all integrated, then you can really start to understand what data you have, how do I do connections across it? How do I try to drive value by correlating it? For us, we're trying to make sure that whatever data comes across, customers can choose whatever storage solution they want. Whichever is most appropriate for their workload. Then once the data's in the platform we help them take advantage of it. We are very proud of the fact that when you bring data into object storage, we have a single unified API. There's only one product to use. If you would have really cold data, or really fast data, you don't have to wait hours to get the data, it's all available within milliseconds. Now we're really excited that we announced today is a new storage class. So, in Google Cloud Storage, which is our object storage product, we're now gonna have a very cold, archival storage option, that's going to start at $0.12 per gigabyte, per month. We think that that's really going to change the game in terms of customers that are trying to retire their old tape backup systems or are really looking for the most cost efficient, long term storage option for their data. >> The other thing that we've heard a lot about this week is that hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Google laid out a lot of the partnerships. I think you had VMware up on stage. You had Cisco up on stage, I see Nutanix is here. How does that storage, the hybrid multi-cloud, fit together for your world. >> I think the way that we view hybrid is that every customer, at some point, is hybrid. Like, no one ever picks up all their data on day one and on day two, it's on the cloud. It's gonna be a journey of bringing that data across. So, it's always going to be hybrid for that period of time. So for us, it's making sure that all of our storage solutions, we support open standards. So if you're using an an S3 compliant storage solution on-premise, you can use Google Cloud Storage with our S3 compatible API. If you are doing block, we work with all the large vendors, whether be NetApp or EMC or any of the other vendors you're used to having on-premise, making sure we can support those. I'm personally very excited about the work that we've done with NetApp around NetApp cloud buying for Google Cloud Platform. If you're a NetApp shop and you've been leveraging that technology and you're really comfortable and really like it on-premise, we make it really easy to bring that data to the cloud and have the same exact experience. You get all the the wonderful features that NetApp offers you on-premise in a cloud native service where you're paying on a consumption based service. So, it really takes, kind of, the decision away for the customers. You like NetApp on-premise but you want cloud native features and pricing? Great, we'll give you NetApp in the cloud. It really makes it to be an easy transition. So, for us it's making sure that we're engaged and that we have a story with all the storage vendors that you used to using on-premise today. >> Let me ask you a question, about go back, to the very cold, ice cold storage. You said $0.12 per gigabyte per month, which is kinda in between your other two major competitors. What was your thinking on the pricing strategy there? >> Yeah, basically everything we do is based on customer demand. So after talking to a bunch of customers, understanding the workloads, understanding the cost structure that they need, we think that that's the right price to meet all of those needs and allow us to basically compete for all the deals. We think that that's a really great price-point for our customers. And it really unlocks all those workloads for the cloud. >> It's dirt cheap, it's easy to store and then it takes a while to get it back, right, that's the concept? >> No, it is not at all. We are very different than other storage vendors or other public cloud offerings. When you drop your data into our system, basically, the trade up that you're making is saying, I will give you a cheaper price in exchange for agreeing to leave the data in the platform, for a longer time. So, basically you're making a time-based commitment to us, at which point we're giving you a cheaper price. But, what's fundamentally different about Google Cloud Storage, is that regardless of which storage class you use, everything is available within milliseconds. You don't have to wait hours or any amount of time to be able to get that data. It's all available to you. So, this is really important, if you have long-term archival data and then, let's say, that you got a compliance request or regulatory requests and you need to analyze all the data and get to all your data, you're not waiting hours to get access to that data. We're actually giving you, within milliseconds, giving you access to that data, so that you can get the answers you need. >> And the quid pro quo is I commit to storing it there for some period of time, is that you said? >> Correct. So, we have four storage classes. We have our Standard, our Nearline, our Coldline and this new Archival. Each of them has a lower price point, in exchange for a longer, committed time the you'll leave the product. >> That's cool. I think that adds real business value there. So, obviously, it's not sitting on tape somewhere. >> We have a number of solutions for how we store the data. For us, it's indifferent, how we store the data. It's all about how long you're willing to tell us it'll be there and that allows us to plan for those resources long term. >> That's a great story. Now, you also have this pay-as-you-go pricing tiers, can you talk about that a little bit? >> For which, for Google Cloud Storage? >> Dave: Yes. >> Yeah, everything is pay-as-you-go and so basically you write data to us and there's a charge for the operations you do and then you charge for however long you leave the data in the system. So, if you're using our Standard class, you're just paying our standard price. You can either use Regional or Multi-Regional, depending on the disaster recovery and the durability and availability requirements that you have. Then you're just paying us for that for however long you leave the data in the system. Once you delete it, you stop paying. >> So it must be, I'm not sure what kind of customer discussions are going on in terms of storage optionality. It used to be just, okay, I got block and I got file, but now you've got all different kind of. You just mentioned several different tiers of performance. What's the customer conversation like, specifically in terms of optionality and what are they asking you to deliver? >> I think within the storage space, there's really three things, there's object, block and file. So, on the object side, or on the block side we have our persistence product. Customers are asking for better price performance, more performance, more IOPS, more throughput. We're continuing to deliver a higher-performance, block device for them and that's going very, very well. For those that need file, we have our first-party service, which is Cloud Filestore, which is our manage NFS. So if you need managed NFS, we can provide that for you at a really low price point. We also partner with, you mentioned Elastifile earlier. We partner with NetApp, we're partnering with EMC. So all those options are also available for file. Then on the object side, if you can accept the object API, it's not POSIX-compliant it's a very different model. If your workloads can support that model then we give you a bunch of options with the Object Model API. >> So, data management is another hot topic and it means a lot of things to a lot of people. You hear the backup guys talking about data management. The database guys talk about data management. What is data management to Google and what your philosophy and strategy there? >> I think for us, again, I spend a lot of time making sure that the solutions are unified and consistent across. So, for us, the idea is that if you bring data into the platform, you're gonna get a consistent experience. So you're gonna have consistent backup options you're gonna have consistent pricing models. Everything should be very similar across the various products So, number one, we're just making sure that it's not confusing by making everything very simple and very consistent. Then over time, we're providing additional features that help you manage that. I'm really excited about all the work we're doing on the security side. So, you heard Orr's talk about access transparency and access approvals right. So basically, we can have a unified way to know whether or not anyone, either Google or if a third-party offer, a third-party request has come in about if we're having to access the data for any reason. So we're giving you full transparency as to what's going on with your data. And that's across the data platform. That's not on a per-product basis. We can basically layer in all these amazing security features on top of your data. The way that we view our business is that we are stewards of your data. You've given us your data and asked us to take care of it, right, don't lose it. Give it back to me when I want it and let me know when anything's happening to it. We take that very seriously and we see all the things we're able to bring to bear on the security side, to really help us be good stewards of that data. >> The other thing you said is I get those access logs in near real time, which is, again, nuanced but it's very important. Dominic, great story, really. I think clear thinking and you, obviously, delivered some value for the customers there. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing that with us. >> Absolutely, happy to be here. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this. You're watching theCUBE live from Google Cloud Next from Moscone. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, John Furrier. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (techno music) >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Dave Nettleton is here. He's the group product manager at Google. Dave, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, really excited to be here. >> Alright, let's talk storage and cloud. So Google Cloud Platform, we were at your show in March. Kind of the second coming out party. Diane Green at the helm. Obviously you guys are making serious moves in the enterprise. Give us the update overall and then we'll get into the storage piece. >> Yeah. Well as you say, over the last couple of years a big focus for Google has actually been shifting and focusing on enterprise customers. I think Gartner reflects that about a trillion dollars of IT spend is going to be affected by the cloud over the next three to five years. And Google has some amazing assets that its developed over the last 10 or 15 years that we can bring to bat will really help meet enterprise customers' needs, help them where they are, and really help transform their businesses for the future. So we're excited about that. >> So how's that going? One of the big thrusts that we heard in March was and we saw it. You guys have made some moves bringing in people from enterprise companies In particular, you came from Microsoft. See a lot of guys from Cisco. We saw a lot of guys running around from EMC. Diane herself from VMware, bringing a lot of that enterprise DNA. How is the the patient assimilating with those organs? >> Yeah, actually that's been one of the most exciting parts I think of the journey has been watching the team come together over the last year or two. As you say, bringing together that pool of talent that has entered one and created even new business in the past, it's amazing to see that talent group come together. Diane is doing an amazing job bringing the team together and building out all of the sales functions and other parts of the business that we need for the enterprise. Building out the partner ecosystem, as well, is obviously super critical. And when you marry that together with the technology assets that Google has, it really is giving customers unprecedented levels of capabilities in the cloud to operate their business in new, more efficient ways. >> So Google is really well known for kind of the analytics piece of the business. Look at all the pieces that have spun out of what Google has done. I'm a networking guy by background. I said when PCP was launched I said, "Google's network is second to none." Best network. Really understand when the whole wave of SDN came out. Storage on the other hand, one of those foundational pieces, but it's not the first thing that comes to mind. So give us a little bit of a pedigree of the group, what you're building, what differentiates Google from the other infrastructure as a service and cloud players. >> Yeah, and actually you teed it up beautifully, because one of our in storage big differentiators is actually our ability to leverage the network. So, let me talk you through that a little bit. So Google internally has been building out massive, scalable storage systems for years to power the rest of Google. And as we take those to our enterprise customers we find that we're able to leverage that core infrastructure together with global assets like our network. Two parts of the network actually I talk about. One is our wide area network. That allows us to actually not only store data in regions around the world, but distribute that content through hundreds of points of presence direct to customers very, very quickly. Inside of our data centers we have software defined networks that allow us to separate out compute and storage to really help us then scale these independently so that we can give massive flexibility and cost savings and pass that through to our customers. And how this shows up in our products, perhaps the best example is if you take something like Google Cloud Storage, which is our object storage product, that product is very differentiated in the industry in that it provides a single API that will meet use cases from global content serving for customers like Spotify and Vimeo who want to stream media content around the world, streaming news, web, media, videos, all the way through to archival storage. Last year we launched our cold line storage class, and this is unique in the industry because it is archival storage that's online, and it has the same API and access as all of the rest of Google Cloud Storage. So I can take a single piece of data, a video for example, I could be streaming it out to customers around the world globally, and then after a month or two I might decide that I want to archive it. I can archive that down to our colder storage class, and if a customer wants to set it up again they have instant access to it. >> What we're hearing from customers is something we heard in the keynotes here at the Veritas show is customers' cloud strategy is rather fragmented, and by that I mean they're not all in on one place to spot. Certain companies say that. How does that impact your relationship with customers on storage? How do you interact with their SaaS environment, their on premises solutions, as well as what you have inside Google? >> Yeah. I think fundamentally we believe the world is going to evolve to sort of a multi cloud world, and that includes both on premises and public clouds. And as part of that our strategy is to be, be the most open. And by being the most open that means we need to help customers be portable with their workloads. We need to help them bring their workloads to the cloud for when that's appropriate, but also if it's appropriate to take it back to say on premises to enable them to do that in a very first class way, as well. And we think what will happen is some customers will go all in on a particular cloud. There will be particular use cases and platform capabilities that will be very differentiated that they want to go all in on, and others will take a more portfolio approach. And then partners, such as Veritas and others, are great for helping customers through their information map helping manage that overall portfolio. >> Could you explain that portability? Is Kubernetes a piece of it? Is that the primary piece of it? And maybe explain a little bit more how Veritas fits in, too. >> Yeah, so the overall ecosystem is evolving. Kubernetes is obviously a huge part of that, that environment, for being able to portably move your compute around. In terms of relationship with Veritas, you know, for me it's all about helping customers solve the problems that they have and meet customers where they are. And if customers are leveraging multiple clouds, either because they use investor breed solutions through acquisitions, etc., they need the ability to be able to manage their data across all of those environments. And someone like Veritas with information map is a key partner for us in helping customers meet and manage their needs. >> So what does that mean for storage? So containers obviously for the application portability, mobility. Kubernetes is sort of Google's little lever. Everybody wants to do Kubernetes and you guys are front and center there. So that gives you credibly in the cloud world, not that you didn't have it before, but everybody now wants to belly up to you on that. What does that mean for storage? Is that just sort of like an ice breaker for you guys? Are there other things that you're doing specific to storage to take advantage of your expertise there? >> Yeah, we want to make sure that customers have a really great integrated experience as they build out their application platforms. So we're always working with them to better define and understand their needs and build that out. It is a fast emerging, fast evolving space. APIs are still evolving fast. Different layers of the stack are evolving fast. So we continue to work with customers and just meet their needs through partnerships and also first party platform. >> And as you move up the stack sort of beyond the networking storage and compute into even database, Google has got some amazing database technologies. Are you doing specific things in storage to take advantage of that, making things run faster or more available or recover faster? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah. The underlying infrastructure at Google powers a lot of our external facing services. So we actually are able to reap very interesting benefits by managing on a single shared TI, technical infrastructure, that we have at Google. But as that surfaces up to customers we have to make sure obviously that they can use it in the ways that best meet their needs. But we want to make sure that we integrate their solutions as easy as possible. So for example, Google Cloud Storage (mumbles) talking about is really well integrated with Dataproc, which is our managed Hadoop product for running big data workloads, and also with something like BigQuery, which is our massively scalable data warehousing solution. So, I can store a lot of my own structured data in Google Cloud Storage and then leverage my entire analytics portfolio to operate over that. And again, a key part of that is the separation of computer networking that we were talking about. When storage is separate from compute and we've used that very powerful software defined network, then that lets us spin up thousands of nodes in something like BigQuery to operate over data and make a very seamless experience for customers. >> So Stu kind of touched on it before. People talk about Google and Google Cloud they point to two things. Obviously the Google app suite, okay, boom. We're a customer. We love it. Everybody is familiar with it. And the other is data, the data king. And they kind of put you in those two boxes. Are you comfortable with that? Is that fair? Is that really the brand that you want? Are you trying to extend that? I wonder if you can comment. >> Yeah. Obviously our strengths have been in analytics and machine learning, and we find that that's a thing that customers are really looking to find ways to add new value to their business. But we also wanted to make sure, we also want to make sure that we're a very trusted provider offering the various high levels of services. And it's not just the capabilities but overall TCO. We want to make it much easier for people to develop new applications on the platform. We talked a little bit about some of our open capabilities, but just in general we want to make it easy for customers to get the best value out of their cloud. So you'll see us doing more and more of that. Things we've done have been like being able to create a custom, custom VM images. You can dial up your memory and size, give you a lot of flexibility to really just hone in and solve the problems that you have. >> So help us square a circle there. When you talk to the cloud, we'll call pure cloud folks, people that, you know, born in the cloud, they developed cloud from day one, no legacy infrastructure. You talk to those guys they're like, "Wow, TCO advantages "from a developer advantage, the speed, etc." When you talk to the legacy enterprise guys they'll tell you, "Oh it's expensive in that cloud. "A lot of people moving back from the cloud." Now of course we know the cloud growth is astronomical. The enterprise growth is flat at best. But there's two different exact polar opposites. Which is the truth? >> I mean the truth is it depends on what you need, right? We think cloud will be a huge disruptor to IT spend over the next several years, it already is. Wind back five or 10 years ago, I don't think people would even be thinking we'd be having the conversations that we have today. People were like, "Security, "I'm not even sure this cloud thing. "Seems like a shared colo facility to me. "I don't think I want to go near that." And it's taken us awhile collectively as an industry to educate really what the cloud is, that it's actually a much more integrated set of services that helps people up level what it is that they can do. But you know, one of the biggest challenges we still face in the industry is just education, skills. You know, it takes time to learn new skills. It's encouraging developers, working with partners, providing solutions to IT that make it much more turnkey for them to use solutions so they don't have to learn deep developer skills or super high end data science skills to get value out of their data. >> One of the hot button topics at this show has been GDPR. How does Google fit into the discussion? How are you helping customers get ready for that? >> Yeah, well obviously we're very well aware of GDPR and are working really hard to make sure that we're going to be meeting the requirements for our customers as we move forward. We take security and compliance incredibly seriously. So yes, expect us to see see us having full GDPR compliance, and then working with partners to make sure that customers can get the confidence that they need for their business. >> So Dave, as a storage technology guy, what are the big trends that you're tracking as it relates to storage that sort of are driving Google's thinking? >> Yeah, great question. So ... So, you know, more and more data is going to be coming out. Like data has traditionally been siloed. People haven't known where their data is. More and more of that data is now going to be shared within a single environment, and it's not just going to be in the cloud. That data is going to reach both onto on premises and also all the way out to the edge. IoT is going to be a huge generator of data. Being able to gather that data, manage that data, provide rich analytics over that data with machine learning and then push that intelligence back out to the edge so that actually data that's produced can just be analyzed right there is going to be super important. I love to say that data is the fuel for analytics and ML, and that fuel is going to be not just in the cloud, on prem, and all the way to the edge and managing that. It's going to be super, super, super interesting. I think network again. Network, once you start to bring low latency networks to your storage you can actually start to do really new and interesting things with your data that you'd never thought of before. If your data, if you can't access it quickly, your data is dark to you. It might as well not be there, right? >> Have things like ... How have things like Flash affected sort of bottlenecks and you mentioned the network. People talk about the network is now the new bottleneck. How is that shaping your thinking? >> Yeah, so storage trends continue, densities get higher, speeds get faster. That's a trend that's been continuing. We've been tracking it, continuing to track it. For me that just means then people will store more data and look to get more value out of that data. Sort of like the latent value of, the latent value of your data is often a function of how quickly you can run machine learning and analytics over that data and get value out of it. And you know we can do things now to analyze data faster than ever before. I was just thinking of an example the other day. I was running a query myself to look at storage usage. It's something I do regularly. And I ran the query and looked at the results. "Oh, that's cool." And then I was like, "Oh, "how many rows of data am I querying here?" And I run that query. Oh, that was like several billion rows of data that I just analyzed in like four seconds. I have no idea how much compute power was ran up in the background to meet that query, but that's the power that these new capabilities will enable over that data. >> Dave, how are customers doing with ... Kind of the thing I want to poke at is in the room data centers utilization is usually abysmal. And the biggest problem we have is when you do a technology you do it the old way. How are they doing at really taking advantage of cloud, getting utilization, utility? I'm sure if they go all serverless and per micro second it would be much better, but how are they doing? >> Well, so one of the beauties of the cloud is of course that it's a pay as you go model, right? And with storage and compute being disaggregated we see customers can provision storage, pay per gig as they go, and then when they need to run compute they just pay for the compute as they need it. They can shape custom compute instances in GCP, so they only pay for the compute that they need. When they finish they can shut them down. And if you're running something like for example a Hadoop workload where traditionally you were provisioning large amounts of compute and storage, sizing for maximum capacity, you no longer need to think about that anymore. You can just store data super cheaply. When you want to run a large 100, 1,000, 10,000 node Hadoop cluster over that data no problem. You spin it up. It spins up in under a minute. Run huge amounts of compute, shut it down, and you're done. And actually what we're finding is that like this is leading ... People are now having to ask new questions of how they manage custom controls in their business, because this is an incredible power that you can give to businesses, but they also want their controls to say, "Hey yeah, don't do that too often, "or if you do I want to manage it "and manage the cost and controls "for departments inside of organizations." So, we're building out the capabilities to help customers with that. >> Last question. Veritas were here. What do you look for in a partner like Veritas? What do you want from Veritas partnership? >> So Veritas is a fantastic partner for us. They really help us do the two things that we strive for, which is meet customers where they are today and help them transform their business for the future. So for our integration with NetBackup really helps customers in the enterprise just use existing products that they know and love and in a very turnkey way use the cloud. That helps them manage the costs and meet a lot of demands they have in their IT environments today super easily, so we love that. It also empowers them to do new things in the future. So the integration with information map we love. Helps customers identify new opportunities in their data and add new value to their business. >> Great, Dave Nettleton, Google, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, been a pleasure. >> Alright, we'll keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is Veritas Vision 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)