>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCube covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here on the ground covering the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. Just a couple weeks ago we were in New York City at the iconic Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel. Jyothi Swaroop is here, he's the Vice President of Global Marketing for Veritas. Great to see you again. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> A few weeks ago we saw you in New York. Since then you've been around the globe talking to customers. You just gave a great presentation to about 60, 70 customers here in Chicago. Obviously a lot of your customers here, New York, one of the big NFL cities, so what have you learned in the last couple of weeks? >> Well, a lot. It's been exciting, right. Since New York I've been in Dubai, Milan, Rome, all over the place. Sounds exciting but a lot of jet lag and travel but a lot of exciting customers with interesting challenges that we can solve for. But I guess I would summarize it into three parts. Obviously there are data protection challenges that we solve at Veritas and have done so over 20 years. There are a lot of storage challenges that we talked about and how they're moving to the cloud and how we can assist with that. And lastly, interesting thing is the whole compliance in AI and ML related challenges as to how do they look ahead while staying compliant with what they have already. >> There are some major trends forcing people to rethink their data protection strategies. Obviously, cloud is one, the whole security and data protection world's coming together, the edge, just the whole distributed data trend. Machine intelligence is another one. There are things that you can do with all that data, machine plus data plus cloud really changes the game. You guys have some hard news in that area. Bring us up to date, what are you announcing? >> Right, so we're announcing Veritas Predictive Insights. Really excited about this announcement because when I joined Veritas about 16 months ago, I felt like Veritas sits on top of all these exabytes of data. We protect the largest number of exabytes of data, right. So we have access to the metadata of that data. So my question to the engineering team is what are we doing with that metadata? Are we going to use it, leverage it, so our customers can benefit from it? From all of this user data that we get from other customers. And the answer was, "Yes, we're working on something. Hold on, you're new." And now we have it. So at Veritas, yes it takes 12 to 16 months to build something at scale, right. We have hundreds of engineers that have worked on this. So what we have done now is, especially with our appliances portfolio, we're able to give our customers intuitive, predictive, and proactive maintenance and support of their systems. Now what does that mean? It means firmware upgrades, patches, things like that. They don't have to be a personalized, you know, fly in an engineer in to do kind of things. They can be automated. Oracle recently at Oracle OpenWorld announced this whole autonomous database. Why can't data protection be autonomous, right? So that's how we think, right. Make everything autonomous, make everything predictive and proactive and that's what Predictive Insights is about. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. So what are the enablers that allow you to actually take this next step. Obviously you've got the data, you've got a classification engine that allows you to put data in buckets, if you will. Explain what that is and why it's important. >> I'm glad you brought up the classification engine because that was at the heart of everything Veritas did for the last 20 years, right. We call it Big Veritas Information Classifier where we classified all of the data that came in on Ingest, unlike other people, other customers and other vendors. We classified all of the data that came in from that back up and we told our customers, "Here's PII numbers, your sensitive information is structured data, is unstructured data." We did this really well for a long time. Now we wanted to take that to the next level, right. We wanted to tell our customers what's actually going on with your infrastructure. You've classified the data, you've put it in here, what can you do with it next? Where can you put it? Can you optimize it after the cloud? How much will you pay for it? Can you remove something off of it? How much do you pay for that? Can you put some data retention on prem? How much would that cost you? So we would not only want to give them information about the classification of that data, but how to monetize that data, how much money would it cost to store that data in different areas. >> So this is a case where, if you go back to something you might remember, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandated that you were able to recover and deliver to a court of law electronic records. Well data classification was critical component there. This is one of those cases like, if you've got an older athlete, like Tom Brady, maybe he's not as fast as he used to be, but he's got it all up here, he knows the plays before he sees it. You guys have the experience around things like data classification which are table stakes to allow you to do this but it's still a challenge for many folks in the industry. It's a metadata problem, isn't it? >> Yup, it absolutely is. It is a metadata problem and it's a metadata advantage for us at Veritas because we sit on top of the highest amount of metadata. >> So how do I take advantage of the Veritas Predictive Insights? Where does it live? >> So where we've announced it, it'll be out there the beginning of the year, 2019. We're rolling out with our appliances portfolio first because we have more control over it because the appliances and the hardware have been integrated with our software. So we give our customers predictive insights on all of their appliances that they buy from Veritas and their systems. Going forward, we'll extend that to our software only sales motions, as well. As extending it to other software platforms and other hardware platforms from other vendors, as well. So we're working on some integrations that I can't talk about today but we want to essentially take predictive insights and move it beyond Veritas in the future. >> Okay, so, talk a little bit more about how it works. Using machine learning technology, you're building models and training the data for different customers, how does it all actually come to fruition? >> Sure, so the first thing is, you know, we're generating what we call SRS or a system reliability score, right. So our engine processes all of this information that comes from a customer's data, the usage data, and maps it to the hundreds of other customers, thousands of other customers usage data that we have to find patterns, right. So for example, if a disc hasn't had a firmware upgraded and hasn't done so for months, we can predicatively let the customer know this disc is going to fail if you didn't upgrade this. But that's not enough. We actually allow them to click a button and upgrade the firmware right there to that disc so it's done, right. So it's not only letting customers know that here's something that's going to go wrong, but here's how to fix it, as well. That's just one example of what we can do. >> Well that's key, it's like the old days. You know, you have a pager and you get an alert and then you got to go do something. You're saying you're actually building automation into the process. >> Right, it's like chat bots. You respond to the chat bot right there and it does the action for you. You don't actually have to go somewhere and figure it out. >> So you've got this SRS score. >> Jyothi: Right. >> So what happens when you cross that threshold, it tells the system, "Okay, take some remedial action," or does it allow the customer to sort of make that choice? What's next? >> Sure, so the SRS score is like a credit score, right. There's a lot of complexity underneath that score. So at the highest level we tell the score, the customer if your score is above a certain point, your systems are healthy, they're running well. If they go below a certain point, right, let's say a 700 score for a credit score, you got to go watch or widen your goal below and we'll give them the 10 or 20 reasons why the score went down. Whether it's a firmware thing or a support issue or a hard drive issue. We tell them exactly what's about to go wrong so they can go fix it before it actually goes wrong. >> What do you, actually, before we go there, just some examples, some use cases that you expect in the field, you've talked to customers about. Give us some more. >> Sure, so data, like we talk to a lot of companies with massive data centers. So one of the things that it says with our appliances, simple things like temperature changes. I was in Dubai, look, the temperature there can be crazy. It goes over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it says simple things like temperature changes can have massive effect on your hard drives and how that works. If my AI and ML algorithms or my software can proactively tell me the temperatures going up, this is what's going to happen, you increase the cooling, do something different, move the data somewhere, back it up. That's great for the customer. Can I take action just based on a simple thing like temperature. There's another interesting customer, here in New York actually, that came to me and said, we had this problem like every so many weeks, their discs would fail. And they thought it was their temperature because it was in the summer. It wasn't and after a lot of research, it turns out it was the fire alarms that were going off. So the fire alarm and the fire alarm testing that was going on was actually causing discs to fail. >> Because of the vibration or? >> For the vibration and the decibel level. It was interesting, right. And now our AI, ML knows that so it's recorded, we know it and we'll be better off going forward, right. We'll tell other customers now that have data centers with massive, loud, high decibel fire alarms that this could be a potential issue. I'm not saying that is the issue, but this could be a potential issue that they would have never thought of otherwise. >> So what do you expect the business impact to be? When you talk to customers about this capability, you know, under non-disclosure, etcetera, how are they seeing this impacting their business? >> So it's three things, right. Proactive support and maintenance, that's really important. The customers are tired of talking to large vendors where the support connections are horrible, right. They have to go in and raise a ticket and do certain things and then they will ship a guy over to their site who'll come and fix it. That's just too long. >> Dave: Slow and reactive. >> Slow and reactive. We want to make this proactive and autonomous, that's number one. Number two is total cost of ownership, right. So when customers are able to predict these failures, they don't have to have a certain set of money set aside for solving problems when the occur. They're like, "I know this problem has come up. I need to budget for it." So their TCO models get better and more predictable, right. And last but definitely not the least, you know, when we extend this to beyond Veritas, they will be able to do more with their data. Again, what is that more? We don't know yet today. But when we are able to extend this to beyond Veritas, customers will be able to do a lot more with their data centers. >> So a couple of things this plays into. Obviously digital transformation is all about being on all the time, you don't want to have, you don't want planned downtime or unplanned downtime. This allows you to at least plan more effectively and potentially eliminate any downtime so your data is always accessible. And it's also cloud-like in that you're automating a lot of the either recovery from failures, or you know, you're pushing a button and saying okay, remediate this, patch that so you don't have the failure. So that's a sort of cloud-like approach. So you said it's available the first part of '19. And it's available, is it in appliances or? How do I get this. >> So we'll be rolling it out in appliances first, all the Veritas appliances. And then we'll extend it to software only, as well as beyond Veritas going forward. >> Awesome, Jyothi, thanks very much for taking us through the new capability. AI brought to data protection, anticipating problems before they occur, remediating them in an autonomous way. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks for coming back on. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guess right after this short break. You're watching theCube from Chicago, Veritas Vision Solution Day. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, we're here covering the Veritas Vision Solution Day. Veritas last year had a big tent event thay thousands and thousands of customers. They decided this year to go out to the customers. Like us, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jeff Kroth is here, he's the manager of data management and analytics at Softchoice, which is a Veritas partner. Welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on, Jeff. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell me more about Softchoice, what's your sort of niche and differentiation in the market? >> Sure, so Softchoice is about a two billion dollar North American IT Solution proivder, we're actually the number three Global Midmarket Managed Service provider. We provide the breadth and coverage across a variety of vendors, helping our customers modernize their IT infrastructure. >> So Midmarket is unique, you know, it's not big enough to have like thousands of people do it, data protection for example, they're Generalists, typically, IT Generalists, they're not small, not like the CEO doing the back up. So talk a little bit about the unique aspects of Midmarket from your perspective. >> Well I think some of the things that we bring to the bare Midmarker is helping customers who don't have that deep IT staff with our technology mentorship, with our skills transfer that we provide our customers, we have a managed service that we provide which really helps our customers do more with what they have. >> So data protection is one of the hottest topics going here at VMworld in August, and for the last two years it's been probably one of the hottest topics. That along with Cloud and obviously the AWS partnership with VMWare. Why is data protection so hot right now? What are the factors? >> I would say data protection and data management is hot. It actually comes back to the underlying data behind it, they say, Gardener says data is the new gold and the new natural resource. Well if you don't have your data protected, available, and modernized, you can't leverage things like data analytics to get the most out of your data. Our customers, we see, customers use data as a competitive advantage. Go back look at Blockbuster and Netflix, they weren't able to take advantage of their data and understand that, so really to me data protection is the foundation and building block to grow into an analytics environment where you're really taking advantage of the underlying data for that competitive advantage. >> And I want to do a little tangent here, cause when you hear things like, "data is the new oil, its the new gold," it's actually, in our view, even more valuable, and here's why. Oil, you can put a quart of oil in your car or in your house, but you can't put the same quart in both. Data, using the Netflix example, you can use the same data in a variety of different ways. So in some regards, it's even more valuable. So I guess the bottom line here is digital transformation, which is real, is all about how you use data and that has direct implications on how you protect data, doesn't it? >> It does. >> And so, the other thing is Cloud. You hear a lot of talk about Cloud, and Multicloud, and we're moving into this world of more distributed data. What kind of challenges does that present for customers? >> I mean we are a big Microsoft partner and have a big partnership with Azure, you know, helping our customers on that Cloud journey I think is an important part. One of the things and one of the trends that we're finding is ensuring that you're monerizing your current data platform as you do that data migration to the Cloud. One of the things we see is customers really struggle with cost containment as they make that Cloud migration. So being able to understand what the data is and ensuring that you're only moving the right amount of data and the right workloads to the Cloud to keep costs down, I think is one of the important things, one of the things we're helping our customers, making sure they're getting real value out of the Cloud and doing that cost containment. >> We heard this morning Joe T was talking about some Cloud repatriation and you definitely are seeing it he gave an example of a large company in Dubai who said, "we're going all in on Cloud," and they went all in on Cloud and said, "wow, this is really expensive." Make sense, right? Renting is often times more expensive than owning. So I look at that as, you know, those that have had to repatriate, a lot of that is poor planning so how do you help your customers plan which work loads should be in the Cloud and follow those laws of economics, and physics, and governance, you know the law of the land, how do you help them? >> So it's really a couple of things, we have a couple of assessments that we use to help customers understand their existing workloads and what makes sense to move to the Cloud and what makes sense to keep on premise. So that's an assessment that Softchoice offers. The other thing is aligning to Veritas's 360 data management strategy is really getting a deeper understanding of what that data is that you have so you're aligning the right costs associated with that data to decide what you move to the Cloud and what stays on prem and I think that's a big thing, it's really understanding what that data is and aligning it to what needs to be moved. >> We talked to senior leaders in IT and business, they tell us that if you got to move to the Cloud you really want to change the operating model, that's where you're going to get the biggest bang for the buck. What does that mean in terms of data protection? If you're going to go digital, go Cloud, change your operating model, that's going to have implications on data protection, isn't it? And what do you see as the-- >> It is, and what I think we're seeing in Softchoice as a whole, you know we are a big proponent of the Cloud, what I think we see that, you really don't think that customers are going to go fully Cloud. It's really taking that hybrid approach and aligning what applications make sense to go to the Cloud, what applications make sense to stay on prem. So really having that full view of your environment so you can make intelligent decisions on what to move to the Cloud and what to keep on prem, aligning to the usage of that data. >> Now what about your partnership with Veritas? You kind of exclusive Veritas, you work with other back up vendors? Maybe talk about that a little bit and then what do you see as Veritas's strengths and what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, so we're a Veritas Gold Partner both in the US and in Canada. We're not an exclusive to Veritas, we like to take a very agnostic approach and really help customers understand what their environment looks like and what makes sense for them. Veritas is a key player as part of our data management strategy and going down the road of our analytics strategy, helping customers really understand the value of their data. You can't get into the analytics world unless your data is in the right place so, again we like to take an agnostic approach but Veritas does align very well from a data management strategy for Softchoice. >> Why, why is that? Is that their stack, they've just been around longer, they focus a lot on governance, and I heard things like categorization, throwing out Federal rules of civil procedure today, that's a long history, so why, what's so special? >> I would say it's the overall breadth of their portfolio, it's helping customers back up to Cloud, back up for the Cloud, it's helping customers do things like DR and replication. It's really getting that full 360 view, you know one of the things we're big on is things like Infomap and Data Insights and really helping customers really understand what the underlying data is, associating the cost with that, so as they move workloads to the Cloud they get a full understanding of what they're moving so they're just not blindly moving things to the Cloud, helping keep costs down. Again, when customers, like as in the example we saw earlier today, a lot of customers think that Cloud is a logical strategy for them but over time they see that it increases cost. So it's really about aligning the right sizing of your environment, moving the right applications, the right data to the Cloud and using that as part of your overall strategy. We really see customers really taking a hybrid approach, it's not ever going to be fully public Cloud, it's not going to be fully private Cloud, it's going to be a combination. >> So we're going to ask you about the competitive landscape cause you are sort of Switzerland here, even though got an affinity, it seems, to Veritas, but you've seen a lot of VC money move into the space, you're seeing a lot of specialists emerge, you've seen some startups come after the Incumbents like Veritas, certainly you know Commvault's another, IBM's another, of course DELL EMC, add those guys up they probably have three quarters on the market place so of course the startups are going to come after them. And they're got shiny new toys and probably developing in Cloud Native and probably talking all the right language. But how do you squint through the hype from the marketing side and sort of help customers figure out how they're going to have the greatest business impact? >> I mean I think that's a good point. I think we're seeing a lot of small niche players that are born in the Cloud or have this shiny new marketing collatoral that they're going to market with and I think what's important for us is making sure our customers understand a full road map on what they're trying to do. So, we do see a lot of upstarts that are going after some of the Veritas, the IBM, the DELL EMC businesses, the world. But it's really making sure you're not taking a point solution and trying to go forward with that, it's understanding Portfolio, like Veritas's that has that depth and breadth and really has that history and background. You know, Veritas has been doing this forever and they really know their stuff. >> Yeah, so we've stressed that platforms are important to pay attention to, you know an API based platform is going to beat a product every time and have some legs. It might be it might have other implications in terms of complexities, but it can drive your business forward as opposed to your point, being a point product. And I'm curious as to your thoughts, particularly as it relates to analytics, which is in your title. For years people have looked at back up as just insurance, people that are trying to get more out of it. But how are people using the corpus of back up data and analytics use cases, why the affinity between data protection and analytics? >> I think data protection and data management are kind of clumped into one category. If you don't have a modernized IT infrastructure and you don't have a good data management strategy, it's impossible, you know poor data in, poor data out. You can't make intelligent analytics decisions or have that data for your analytics team if the information isn't there and accessible and good data. So it's really having a very keen data management strategy enabling your analytics users to have the right data to make the right decisions, cause if you don't have the right data you can't make the right decisions, and no analytics tool can go in and make informed decisions based off bad data. So data management is definitely part of the overall analytic strategy cause it's really the first step. >> And why the, in the back up corpuses, because you've got visibility on that data and it's the logical-- >> Sure. >> The logical one place, even if it's virtual, to actually be able to do those analytics, right? >> Exactly. >> Okay, and then I'll give you the last word. Thing's that your learning here today at the Vision Event, customers obviously Chicago, big customer center, you're based in Atlanta another big customer center. We were just in New York a few weeks ago meeting some pretty senior level folks. What are you learning here, what's the conversation like? >> I think the one key thing that I've taken out is that really customers aren't going full Cloud. It's you know, I think I saw a stat and 92% of customers are taking a hybrid approach and leveraging a really full data management policy to be able to handle on prem, to be able to handle private Cloud, public Cloud, and the combination. Really having that tool set to give you visualizations across an entire hybrid IT infrastructure I think it important. And that's really one of the key takeaways. >> We would agree, we've talked for quite some time now, years actually how organizations can't just shove data into the Cloud, they can't just put their business up into the public Cloud, rather they need to move the Cloud operating model to their business. it's very clearly, that's the trend, you're seeing so many signs of that. AWS and VMware partnering up. You certainly saw Google do that and this summer with Istio on prem, Microsoft obviously with Azure Stack, huge presence in hybrid Cloud. So those predictions are coming true. Jeff thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Oh you're very welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we'll be back from Veritas Vision Day in Chicago at the Palmer House Hotel, you're watching theCube. (soft techno music)

>> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. (funky music) Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody, my name is Dave Vellante. We're here covering the Veritas Vision Solution days at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago right near the lake. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lurlene Brown is here. She's an independent security consultant with CJJFC. Lurlene, welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank You, thanks for inviting us. >> So CJJFC, what are you guys all about? >> Well, basically we're re-startup company, small, independent company. We work with SMBs and non-profits in dealing with their security issues basically. No matter how big, how small. It's the small companies that have one of those things that's, well it's not going to happen to us, or if it does happen to us, what do we do about it? Because they hear about the big breaches but it can happen to a small company as well an SMBs, especially if you have limited budgets and stuff, how do we deal with that? How do we deal with ransomware? How do we pay it off? A lot of questions and stuff like that that they are really concerned about, but a lot of them have the attitude that it's not going to happen to me, something like that, but it can happen. >> There's a lot to talk about there, so let's start with small business. Small business, there's often times not even a CEO, it's an owner, and the distance between the owner and the IT is very short. It's a flat organization. Like you said, they have so many things to worry about, the last thing they want to worry about is security. A lot of times they'll have the attitude of, well, I'm not really a target, which is, well yeah, you are. But let's hope. (chuckles) And a lot of them just clearly don't have, they don't have a SecOps team. >> That's true. >> Many of them just rely on cloud, they have a zillion different SaaS products. They'd rather not have IT. So that sort of paints a picture. >> That's true. >> How do you help them? And do they contact you, do you contact them? Both? >> Well, it goes both ways. Basically a lot of them don't even have an IT department or an IT person. They're going by somebody knows how to work a computer, turn it off and on. Make sure the stuff is backed up. (laughing) >> Fred's really good with this, ask him. >> And then turn it off at the end of the day. So you have to deal with that. You also have to deal with, if they do have an IT department, it's one person that's going to deal with a whole lot of issues. Back up, where is it going to go to? Do we have a cloud provider? If we do, who is it? What is it? Do we have anything else? Do we have on-site premise or off-sites? So it's a lot of stuff you got to do. And the main bottom line is budgeting. Do we have the money or the budget to get this stuff that we need, that we basically need in order for us to survive? Because it boils down to, if you don't have and then something happens to you, something major, a crash or whatever, do you have the backup? Do you have something viable to say to your clients, oh, we're okay, we got your data and we're secure, we can go on with business as usual; or will they just go off and find somebody else? >> So we always talk about on theCUBE people, process and technology, bad security practices by users can always trump good technology. So I presume a lot of your consulting is around people and processes. >> Mm-hmm, that's true, that's true And a lot of it is in transition, I'll give a good example. When Windows decided to go from XP to 7 and 8 and all this stuff, there was a big brouhaha about it. Some people still want to deal with XP. They don't want, because they hear about how good Windows 8 or 10 is and stuff like that. But a lot of people, it's a slow transition for a lot of people to move over from XP because it was very dependable, you didn't hear a lot of problems out of it. All of a sudden you hear, oh, Windows 10. We got some issues, we got some stuff we got to fix, and it kind of is like a panic attack mode. You're in panic modes. Do we want to go back to XP or do you want to, you know, one of our records are in XP and we want to go to 10, will they transfer over? How secure is going to be that? How secure is that? So it's like that kind of example. It takes time for people to slowly migrate from one thing to another to make sure it's safe and it's dependable. And also, it's secure enough, they can be comfortable with it so when the next phase comes up, they can be a little bit more comfortable and say, well, okay, we go to Windows 12 or something like that, and then we'll be okay from 10 to 12 and have no problems with it. >> So that's an example of just basically having core infrastructure that's kept up to date, you're up to date on patching. This is basic security hygiene. There's also the perimeter, and we always hear, well, people spend a lot of time and effort and money on the perimeter, but people are going to get through the perimeter. Phishing is a huge problem. >> Yes it is >> The threat matrix with mobile, you got a zillion mobile apps, and it's impossible to keep them up to date. So are small business owners, which I presume is your primary discussion point, how aware are they of this problem? On a scale from one to 10, is it a two? Because they have so many other things to worry about. Or is it escalating up to six, seven, eight? What do you-- >> It depends of the company. Some are twos and some are fives and sixes. One size doesn't fit all, and that's one thing they have to realize, that one can do more than the other and some can do less than the other. It all depends on the company, their attitude and it boils down to trust. Do we trust ourselves enough to go into that next phase of updating our security or updating our software and all that stuff, the patches and stuff? Do we have the equipment to do, to have that ability to do that as well too, because you got to look at your budget costs and your security. That goes hand-in-hand. >> Backup and security used to be largely two separate domains, sort of in their own little islands. They're certainly intertwined today. Why is that, and how are those two worlds coming together? >> Well, I think it was a gradual process because everybody wanted to keep things separate. But they found out there's a whole lot of commonality, a whole lot of links that they finally came to realize that it's together, dealing with security, because if you didn't have security we would have more than enough breaches than we have now. Especially with small businesses, you can't afford to have a breach because that makes or breaks your company. So you have to look at that and say, well, we need that. But like I said, within the perimeters of your business. Some can afford more, some can afford less or just stabilize what they have now. >> Mm-hmm, okay, so let's talk about ransomware a little bit. It's in the news. As a small business owner, you're like wow, oh god, I hope that never happens to me, but a lot of times they're thinking, well, that's never going to happen to me because I'm the small guy. But is could happen. >> Oh yeah! >> And so what do you advise people to do? You're trying to create air gaps. What role does backup and data protection play? >> Backup is a major thing especially if you have a lot of old data and you want to make sure you have that because once its lost, its lost. A lot of people are not really familiar with ransomware. They hear about it, they think oh, my, I have to, it's just like anything else, like if you kidnap somebody you hold them for ransom. You want this amount of money in order for them to get this person back. Ransomware is the same thing but you're using bitcoins instead of money. Well, it technically is money but a lot of them don't have that thing about it's not going to affect me. Like you was talking about earlier. Does it affect me? How will it affect me? I'll read up more about it. A lot of people have not really read up about it. They hear the word, it's like a buzz word and they say, oh ransomware, what is that? Is that a new software product? Or is that a new something like that, you know? So they have to really keep informed and keep up with what is going on, especially in small businesses. The possibility is, I think, is more greater than big businesses. Because big businesses can recover, small businesses can't. >> Big businesses, they've got the resources, they know what ransomware is, they maybe created some kind of air gap between their data center and their off-site. They've got something in the iron mountain and archived, Maybe they've got stuff on tapes. Small companies are like, they don't even think about that stuff-- >> No they don't, what resources do they have? Or do they have enough resources as well? And have they kept up with the different kind of resources that are available, especially gearing towards them? >> What's your relationship with Veritas? Why are you here? You're not a customer, you're not a big gold partner but what brought you here? >> Well, I want to see what's going on with Veritas, I've heard a lot about it. And we are here to get some information and how we're going to relate to what we're going to be dealing with future customers or present customers and stuff like that. So that's basically what we're here for. It's just to gather information, sort it out, how it will affect small business and non-profitS, and how it can help them and benefit them as much as for larger companies. >> My last question for you is could you summarize the advice that you would give to a small business owner or a non-profit, MD. What do you tell them in the context of security and data protection? >> Backup, especially backup and do your homework. A lot of them, do your due diligence because it makes or breaks you. >> And so they listen to that advice? >> Some of them do, and some of them... It's up to them. I have to say, everybody is an individual, you can't say, but just look at what happens to other people, find examples, talk to other people that you know and do your homework and backup, backup backup. >> Ignore that advice at your own peril. Lurlene, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you very much for inviting us. >> You're very welcome. Okay, you're watching theCUBE. We're here at Veritas Vision Day in Chicago, we'll be right back after this short break. (funky music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's The Cube. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're goin' out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. We're here at the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. We were just a few weeks ago we were at the iconic Tavern on the Green in New York City. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel, beautiful hotel right in downtown Chicago near the lake. It's just an awesome venue, it's great to be here. Arista Thurman III is here, he's the principle computer engineer at the Argonne National Labs. Great to see you, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Yah, good to be here, thanks. >> So tell the audience about Argonne National Labs. What do you guys all about? >> About science, so we're all about the advancement of science. We do a lot of different experiments from technology for batteries and chemistry. The project we're working on is the advanced photon source, which is a light source that's used to collect data in experiments with a photon source. >> OK, so you're an IT practitioner, >> Arista Thurman: That is correct. >> Serving scientists. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> What's that like? Is that like an IT guy serving doctors? Are they kind of particular? >> Arista Thurman: A little bit. >> There's some challenges there, but yah it's great. So basically you have a unique customer base, and they have additional requirements. So, it's not like a normal customer base. They're very smart people. They have a lot of demands and needs, and we do our best to provide all the services they require. >> Yah, so given that they're technical people, they may not be IT people but they have an affinity to technology. First of all, it must be hard to BS them, right? (laughter) >> Arista Thurman: No doubt, no doubt. >> They'd cut through that, so you got to be straight with them. And they're probably pretty demanding, right? I mean, they have limited resources and limited time and limited budgets, and they're probably pounding you pretty hard. Is that the case, or are they more forgiving? >> They're great people to work with, but there can be some challenges. I mean, it's unique in the idea that they work on multiple platforms. So it's from Unix to Linux to Mac. Multiple computers in their offices, multiple data requirements. And a lot of things happen without a lot of process and planning. Some things are ad hoc. So, it puts a little bit of strain sometimes on you to try to make everything happen in the amount of time they have. And everything is There's some challenges with regard to how to get things done in a timely fashion when you don't know what's going to happen with some of these experiments. >> I mean I imagine, right? They can probably deal with a lot of uncertain processes because that's kind of their lives, right? You must have to cobble things together for them to get them a solution sometimes, is that the case? >> We do sometimes. I think it's all about getting enough funding and enough resources to take care of all the different experiments. >> Dave Vellante: A balancing act. >> Yah. >> Dave Vellante: Ya so you look after, compute and storage. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> Right, so talk about what's happening generally there and then specifically data protection. >> So in general, my primary focus is Linux. Linus administration, Red Hat Linux. And we've seen a lot of data growth over the last five years and we've got projection for more growth as we are planning for an upgrade. So we're going to change our bmine and make it more efficient. Have a better light source and that's all planned in the next two to three years. And so, there's a lot of extra projects on top of our normal workload. We have a lot of equipment that probably needs to be refreshed. There's resources and with IT and any kind of data management things change. So whatever we're doing today, in the next three years we'll be doing something different because things change with regard to CPU speeds, performance of IO networking, storage requirements. All those things are continually growing exponentially. And when scientists want to do more experiments and they get new resources in, it's going to require more resources for us to maintain and keep them operational at the speeds and performance they want. >> Yah, we do hundreds of events with The Cube. We do about 130 events this year, and a lot of them are so-called "big data" orientation. And when you go to those data oriented events, you hear a lot of, sort of the roots of that. Or at least similarities to the scientific technical computing areas and it's sort of evolved into big data. A lot of the disciplines are similar. So, you're talking about a lot of data here. Sometimes it's really fast data, and there's a lot of variety, presumably, in that data. So how much data are we talking about? Is it huge volumes? Maybe you could describe your data environment. >> Primarily we have things broken up into different areas. So we have some block storage, and that provides a lot of our virtual the back-end for our virtualization environments which is either Microsoft or Red Hat RHV. I would estimate that's somewhere in a petabyte range. And then we also have our NAS file systems which spread across multiple environments providing NFS version three and four and also to Windows clients CIFS and some of the Mac clients also utilize that. And that's at about a little less than a petabyte. We also have high performance computing and that's a couple petabytes, at least. And all those numbers are just estimates because we're constantly growing. >> Any given time it's changing. But you're talking about multiple petabytes. So how do you back up, how do you protect multiple petabytes? >> Well I think it has to, it's all about a balancing act 'cause it's hard to back up everything in that same time window. So we have multiple backup environments providing resources for individual platforms. Like for Windows we'd do something a little different than we'd do for Linux. And we have different retention policies. Some environments need to be retained, retention is three years and some is six months, some three months, and so you have to have a system of migrating your storage to faster discs and then layer off the tape for long term retention. It's a challenge that we're constantly fighting with. >> How do you use Veritas? You're a customer obviously? >> Yah, we've been a Veritas customer for many years and we utilize Veritas in our virtualization environments. They kind of help us out with central platform. We've actually explored other things but the most cost effective thing to us at this point has been Veritas. We utilize them to back up primarily our NAS and our black files, our black file systems that provide most of the virtualization. >> Why Veritas? What is it about them that you have an affinity for? There's a zillion other backup software vendors out there, why Veritas? >> I think we have invested a lot in Veritas over the years. Predating my time at Argonne we've been using Veritas. In my previous career, in Sun Microsystems we also had some kind of relationship with Veritas. So it's easy and I think, like I mentioned earlier, we explored other things but it wasn't cost effective to make that kind of change. And it's been a reliable product. It does require work but it has been a reliable product. >> So, you'd mentioned your Linux, Red Hat Linux. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> So you saw this IBM announced it's going to buy Red Hat for 34 billion dollars. What were your thoughts when you heard that news? >> I was like, "Wow, what is going to happen now?" I was like, "How is that going to impact us?" Is it going to change our licensing model? Or is it going to be a good thing, or a bad thing? Right now we just don't really know. We're just kind of waiting and seeing. But it's like, OK, I mean that's a big deal. It is a biggest deal certainly from IBM. Their biggest previous deal was I think Cognos at five billion, so this dwarfs that. The deal of course doesn't close probably till the second half of 2019. So it's going to take a while. But look, IBM is known when it buys software companies, saw this with SPSS, you've seen it with other companies that it buys, it often times will change the pricing model. How do you license Red Hat? Do you have an enterprise license agreement? Do you know offhand? >> We do have an agreement with them. >> Dave Vellante: Lock that in. Lock that long term in now before the deal goes down. >> One of my counterparts is in charge of that part of it. So I'm sure we'll be having that conversation shortly. >> Yah, interesting. Well listen, Arista thanks very much for coming on The Cube, really appreciate your insight. >> Thank you. >> It's great to meet you, all right, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, it's a wrap from Chicago. This has been The Cube, Veritas Vision Days. Check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news. TheCube.net is where you'll find these videos and a lot of others. You'll see where The Cube is next. Wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for the team here, appreciate your help on the ground. We're out from Chicago, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see ya next time.