>> Woman: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this cube conversation. Going to be digging in talking about how storage, in the software world, moving forward to cloud native containerized environment. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guests, Paul Sustman. He is the product manager for info scale storage and availability products with Veritas. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to talk about what we're doing for support for containers and Kubernetes. >> All right, so, Veritas I think, most people should be familiar with Veritas when it comes to the storage world of course, strong and long history. Why don't you level set us first on infoscale, I've got way too much history going back to, things like Veritas volume manager, and the like, but infoscale today in 2020, how should we be thinking of it, and kind of the region has out in the marketplace? >> Yeah. First off our infoscale, infoscale is a product that's used by very critical infrastructure, the top enterprises, the top 11 out of 12 airline reservation systems, the top 19 out of 20 investment banks, right? These are companies that use infoscale to drive their business, not just an application, but actually keep their business available and operational. So, we've had a long legacy. You talked about some of the history. We are formerly known as storage foundation, going back 25 years Veritas storage foundation, as it was known at that time was one of the first virtualization technologies, where we virtualized storage for hard drives, right? That's where the volume management came in. We really support for many different file systems, both clustered or shared storage, as well as non shared storage, came out with support for Unix to Linux migrations, added support for virtualization technologies, and came out with a lot of optimizations for storage efficiency and performance optimizations. And we've been building upon that legacy ever since. We've recently come out with a lot of support for AWS cloud as well as Azure cloud, and support for SAP HANA as well as SAP netWeaver for Azure. And, we have customers who are now migrating to their SAP environments up into the cloud. So, long history of this, we came out with Docker support back in 2016 for Docker containers. We made a bet that Docker was going to win. We actually built our net backup flex appliances around the Docker platform. It turns out that wasn't quite accurate. It turns out Kubernetes won, there's some standards now that have come out around storage and networking interfaces, and the world has shifted and it's picking up that standardized platform. So we're doing the same. So, what we're doing is a couple of different things. First off, we are, coming out with a persistent storage solution, for leveraging the CSI storage interface. And, we're coming out with a high availability solution, which is leveraging some of our legacy code around VCs and around the service group technology we have an intelligent monitoring framework, to monitor what's going on inside the container. And we're going to be adding that technology in the infoscale and releasing it later this year. So that's what we're actively working on. I'm really excited about the fact that we're able to bring forward this legacy that we have, where we've done it incredibly well on physical environments and virtual environments. And as customers move to the cloud, to also support containers. We're seeing that mission critical applications are starting to move to containers. We're having a large number of our customers come to us and saying, "what's your roadmap? Where are you going on containers? We've been talking about the flex appliance, on the net backup appliance where we've done really support for that years ago." And they're looking to actively start moving some of those mission critical apps. But what they're seeing is, is that in the container environment, it's missing a lot of the enterprise capabilities that exists on physical platforms. >> Paul. >> Yeah. >> Paul, if I could, so yeah, I'm glad we got the news in here. (mumbles) if we can level set our customers a little bit. >> Sure. >> The marketplace here. So, I think back to server virtualization and VMware. We spent about a decade as an industry going from, yeah it's supported and it works with it too. How do we really optimize it, and make sure it is really supported? When you talk about cloud environment, talk about containerization, we've gone through a maturation journey there also, and in some ways it's got a little bit faster, and we've learned from the past, but it has been a journey we've been on. So, you talk about Docker helped really, bring containers to the masses and the enterprise especially. But maybe give us a little bit as to, you throw it a couple of things like interfaces that are supported to enable a storage more how Kubernetes fits into things. Help us understand, how it's not just supporting the environment, but making sure that they're optimized and take advantage of the feature functionality that people are looking for. And why they go to these containerized Kubernetes environments. >> Yeah. That's a great thing. So, first off IDC called out that containerization is actually it has a potential of replacing what VMware has done around VMs and virtual machines, and that's, I think there's several driving factors for container adoption, right. It comes down to that term cattle not pets, which is often used around containers where you're able to manage things at larger scale or a larger number of items. And it comes down to the fact that the container itself is a much smaller image size than a VM. It's a fraction of the size of a VM, and that makes it possible to be more agile. It makes it possible to have a higher density of containers versus VMs. It makes it easier to manage as well. And because of that, there's faster adoption, with developers and speed and efficiency coming about where developers are making changes quicker in a container environment. And that's very appealing to customers. So, we're seeing a lot of interest in containers. The applications that went there first were applications that were not the typical mission critical application, but we're more of a web type application that didn't have a dependency on persistent data. The data was temporal. But what we're seeing now is, as adoption happens more and more in the container environment. And as people realize that there's a lot of advantages to this container versus a VM, there looking to take those applications and lift and shift them to a container environment, to take advantage of those benefits. So, that's what we're seeing it right now. >> Yeah. It's really interesting, right. You know, Paul, when you looked at that virtualization adoption, it was what a VM really did, is it brought the whole operating system along with me. So, inside that we have, not only the operating system, but typically one application but there'll be more, as opposed to a container gets closer to that atomic unit of the application, or even if it's microservices architecture, it might just be a service inside there. So, I guess that that brings us to the point when you talk about storage, what I really care about. I care about my data, I care about my applications. As you mentioned, often there are different type of applications. Developers are building new applications, using containers as an example. Help us understand where Veritas and infoscale fits in, what applications you're supporting today from a containerized environment. And are there any things you're saying is that, "hey, this is what you should do containers, and at least for certain enterprise environments, maybe we're not quite ready for certain things here yet." >> Yeah. So let, let me take a step back. If you look at the maturity in that technology shift, in my opinion, we're at today with containers where we were early on with VMs. So, early on with the VMs, a lot of people were saying that those virtual machines, they're not really suitable for production code, they're not suitable for mission critical applications. You really should run those on dedicated hardware. In what we've seen is actually a shift in VMs, when people run pretty much everything on VMs now. It's your first platform by default, instead of a physical server. And now the same thing is kind of happening with cloud as well. In containers, what we're seeing is that the early adopters, they weren't looking for those critical or enterprise data requirements, things like security and scale and performance. They were okay with the status quo. But as people are starting to move things that drive their business, or they're going to run their business on, they really need those requirements. They need the same level set of enterprise capabilities that exists today in VMs, on VMs and exists today on physical environments or even in the cloud, a lot of capabilities in the cloud, that's very secure. It's very resilient. The data is very durable. Those capabilities exist there, but on containers, they've been lacking until recently. And so, what we're doing, is we're trying to bring those same capabilities that our customers are used to, for those customers as they're moving those mission-critical applications to containers. >> Excellent, so, let's talk about the services that that infoscale offers. When we first moved to cloud, there were some that thought, "Oh, hey, wait, maybe I don't need to think about things like high availability and data protection, I'll just architect the cloud that way." I think we know from like a security standpoint, it's a shared responsibility model that everybody understands. When it comes to containerization also, I'm often architecting things differently. So, I have to think about things a little bit different, but I don't think it removes the need, for some of the services that we typically see, from solutions like you offer from Veritas. Maybe, give us a little bit of understanding as to, is it the same, Is it a little bit different, and what is needed in today's new architecture? >> Yeah. That's a great question. So, if you look at containers, and start reading a lot of their documentation around Kubernetes, what they claim and what they point out, is that the underlying storage is responsible for the high availability of the storage. It's not the requirement of the application. It's not the requirement of the IT administrator. (mumbles) push it back on the storage. And if you look at the way storage is used or consumed with containers, it's really, there's two types of storage. There is block-level storage, which is presented from the disk array. The challenge with block-level storage by itself is that there's no data management right there. What ends up happening is that, the database does the data management and the database in order to take advantage or compensate for that lack of data management. Often what happens is the database is oversubscribed. So, you present too much data, or the database in the end up wasting space. The other side of things, the common use cases around files, and the most common use case, or the most way that most people use with containers, is actually leveraging NFS. NFS was never designed for mission critical applications. It's really designed for very small IO, and it will guarantee or maintain right consistency. But if you have multiple applications accessing the same share, who knows who's going to actually win. Somebody will win, and it might not be who you want to win. So, you have data corruption or data integrity issues with them NFS, not to mention that you have huge performance challenges with NFS. Again, it was never designed for mission critical application. And so those are areas that our customers have looked to us in the past, and look to us right now, to present storage which is very high performance and very highly available, and is often replicated across the Metro or across geo locations, across availability zones, to other data centers. So that you have multiple redundant copies. And so that you just don't lose data, right. That's something that we've done really well with infoscale and we've done that for applications that require share resources. And we've done that for applications that require their own repository, their own data store. So, it's an opportunity for customers, to use or have other storage, which is persistent, highly available, higher performance, for use with their containers, other than NFS or block storage. >> Excellent. Well, we know that the storage, we always use to joke all, is that the only constant is change, in the cloud native world, we know that it accelerating change, is the norm. Give us the final takeaway, when they think of infoscale for Kubernetes in containers, how should we think about Veritas, and what differentiates you from really the rest of the marketplace? >> Yeah. If you look at it, it's really simple. I mean we have a solution which works very well for storage, very high performance, very highly available, scales really well. We are going to be releasing a plugin for Kubernetes that will install on storage nodes and make that storage persistent and available to the application running up as a container. We're also taking the technology that we've done around, our availability suite and we are taking some of the technology forward into containers. Now, understanding that Kubernetes does the orchestration, our key differentiation is that we're going to be, monitoring the dependencies of what's critical for that application, right? All the mount points, the network interfaces, all the different processes make up that critical application. We'll be monitoring those applications, actually inside the container and then working with Kubernetes to in collaborating as far as orchestration goes, so we'll tell Kubernetes when it needs to restart the container or restart a pod. Lots of it advantages come a solution. And the way we're building it, again it integrates with Kubernetes. We monitor the what's going on inside the container, and we'll notify Kubernetes of an event change and we'll do that instantaneously. Kubernetes looks at the pod, they don't look at inside the container, right. They don't look at the processes, they don't look at the mount points. So, the pod might be available, but the container itself, you might've lost a process, you might have lost one of the containers. One of your dependencies might have gone away, and we're taking that same availability offering that we've done very well with and the physical environment, and cloud in virtual environments, and bringing that forward to containers. >> Excellent. Paul, any minimum requirements, Kubernetes of course, being open source, there are dozens of distributions out there. So, if I choose >> Paul: Yeah. >> Any of the native services from the public cloud providers or from my vendor of choice, I don't have to be like on 1.16 or 1.17 to get this, what are any considerations there? >> Well the latest version I think is 1.18, they're coming out with 1.19 soon. (murmurs) Kubernetes in my view, they came out with the standards. They came out with a standard network interface and a standard storage interface. We're leveraging those standards, and we're building a plugin towards that standard. That same plugin will be used in Kubernetes and OpenShift and VMware, as well as all the different cloud container offerings. So, our intention is to support all those. We'll be supporting Kubernetes on day one. Out of the box for Linux platforms, with all the same storage capabilities that we have with impulse scale, and with the same agent framework and monitoring framework that we have with infoscale for our availability as well. >> Excellent. Well, Paul Sustman, thank you so much. It's been great to watch the maturation of the storage environments in the container and Kubernetes world. Thanks so much joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (rippling music) >> Welcome back to The Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who's my cohost for the week. Bob Swanson is here, he's the head of sales for dcVAST out of Chicago. Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE! >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> So, well first of all, the show, how's it going for you? We've now got enough data, it's been a couple of days, a few days perhaps for you. What's the vibe like, what are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's been a great week. This is the very tail end of the event, so a little exhausted. But it's been exciting, there's been a good buzz at the event and we get a lot of our customers here, and just kind of seeing the buzz and the pace of innovation that's goin on here with Veritas, you know, it has been exciting. >> Tell us more about dcVAST. You're focused on IT infrastructure services, but dig a little deeper. Right, yep, so we're headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and you're right, we do infrastructure and cloud services. So we do support-type services with a seven by 24 call center, have different managed service offerings, different cloud offerings, and certainly do consulting and project work as well. >> Yeah, and Bob, so what does multi-cloud mean to your customers? (chuckles) >> It's only natural that if they're not there today, then they're going to be multi-cloud at some point. So, Veritas here is pretty uniquely positioned. to be able to get customers there. It's all about flexibility and data portability. So, I think where infrastructure and storage and data protection is sometimes not that exciting of a conversation, now kind of changing the conversation, the data management, 'cause everybody needs their data to become more productive for them. It changes the conversation, has a little more sizzle. >> Okay, but you know, your primary area of focus is infrastructure services, so that means first and foremost, every year you got to help me lower my costs, right, you've been hearing that, I'm sure, for years, and help me improve my operational efficiency. And you do that, and really attack my labor problem, IT labor problem so I can focus on my business, right? Are those still the big overriding themes? Oh, yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think the public cloud has been probably the most disruptive thing in our space since the internet. And it's making customers re-evaluate all cost and really how they're doing things, and different consumption and financial models. So, the technology is cool, and we like that conversation, but it naturally brings a big financial and cost savings, and do-more-with-less element to all the conversations. >> So what are the big trends that you're seeing in marketplace, what are the conversations like with your customers? >> Yeah, and I'll give you an example. I think customers have different approaches to cloud, right, some cloud-first, everything's got to go. Others maybe want to keep more of their workloads on premise. And in one customer example, where they said, hey, we want to move all non-production out to the cloud and it was a single cloud provider. And they got about 40% of what they were looking to move out there and they reached what they thought their estimated budget was going to be. So at that point, having that portability and having the tool sets to be able to move those workloads around becomes very important from a financial standpoint. >> So, I wonder if we can unpack those. Cloud first, and then these other guys on-prem. The motivation for cloud first, and the type of company. Do they tend to be a smaller companies, or do you see larger companies saying hey, we're going all in? I mean, you've seen some stories in the press, you know, large company, GE's going all to the cloud, okay I'm sure there's still a lot of on-prem going on there. What do you see? >> Yeah, you're right. A lot of small business is certainly, it makes sense for them, any startups too are pretty much born in the cloud now. You're not going to have too many financial backers that are going to want a startup to be spending too much money on data center, or buying hardware. But the established large enterprises, too, are kind of all over the map, but there are already some of them that are taking this cloud first approach. But, the large enterprises and companies that have been around, where it's not kind of a clean slate, naturally it's going to be hybrid and ultimately there's probably a lot of predictable static workloads that are, at the end of the day, going to be cheaper to run on-prem than they are out in the public cloud. Public cloud's great for the stuff that's not predictable, or is very dynamic, so we're seeing, and I am from Chicago and so we say the coasts move faster, maybe, than the Midwest does as well, but we're seeing varying degrees of adoption and strategy. >> But the business in the data center's good right now, I mean, the market's sort of booming, but if you roll back a few years, you guys must have thought, and maybe you're still thinking it, okay, see this cloud that's coming. Like you said, it's one of the most disruptive, if not the most disruptive in a while, and it's aiming right at the heart of your business, infrastructure services. So how have you responded to that, you must be riding the wave now of data center growth and investment, but strategically, what are you thinking about in your firm? >> Yeah, I mean, there's no question. We've had to pivot. But it does create opportunity. And we do need to help our customers be able to be most cost-effectively managing their workload, right, helping them with that. So where there's challenge and change, there's certainly inopportunity. And we've seen it. >> So, but my understanding, your firm also offers managed cloud offerings. That's been one of the things we've looked at is the channel, can they get on board, can they offer that, how is it working with the big cloud providers, and yeah, let's start there. >> Yeah, that's a good question, and a lot of people have a misperception that the cloud is kind of the easy button. (laughter) But at the end of the day-- >> Stu: Maybe 10 years ago we thought that-- >> Dave: You have your hoodie. >> Right, but I mean, people need to realize the same architecture and security considerations are there as they are for on-premise, so it's not the easy button, and you can just kind of set it and forget it. So some people that are underestimating that still need help from a third party like ourselves to be able to help them manage it. >> Could you speak about the maturation of your support services? >> Yeah, we started doing a lot of hardware support years ago when the business was founded in 1989. And at that time, it was a lot of Unix-based engineering workstations and kind of morphed into servers and storage and other data center equipment, and then started doing a lot more software support, which all can be delivered remotely, for the most part. From time to time, you may need to be onsite for something, so that kind of changes the logistical model, and now with the cloud as well, we've just kind of evolved in that direction. >> And how about the Veritas relationship? What's that been like, you know, the Symantec sale, any comments on how that's evolved, and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, we've been a long-time Veritas partner, and really the reason why we first got started with them was because they were relatively platform-agnostic, and supported and endorsed heterogeneity. And in the old Foundation Suite days, which now their InfoScale product, it's obviously had some name changes, it didn't matter what operating system, didn't matter which array vendor you used. And it's good to have friends in the industry and alliances, but there's also some benefit of staying relatively agnostic like Veritas has, and that message resonates now more than ever with all the different cloud providers out there, and just being able to be interoperable with a lot of different technologies. >> What's your customer's reaction been to all the announcements that Veritas has been making here? >> Yeah, yeah, everyone's excited. Now it's getting the word out. And I mentioned pace of innovation earlier, and it seems to have gone from zero to 100, really, really fast. So, that's exciting. It shows commitment, I think, from the new executive leadership team at Veritas, and their backers at Carlyle as well. So, you know, I think it's an exciting time for Veritas, and for us as a partner as well, and our customers. >> And anything you want to see out of those guys? From your perspective, in the partner standpoint, in the voice of the customer, what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, and I mean, the concept of data management, looking at it holistically is important. After people and intellectual property, data's the most valuable asset a company has, and a lot of the intellectual property resides in the form of data as well. So, it's an exciting place to be as we kind of see the industry shift. >> Dave: Cubs or White Sox? >> Bob: Cubbies! >> Hey, well, congratulations on that! >> Yeah, it's been a-- >> Really, really Cubbies, not just White Sox, oh, the Cubbies won it? >> No, Cubbies all the way. >> Hardcore Cubbies fan. >> Diehard, absolutely, yep. >> Well, you're welcome for Theo Epstein. We gave Theo, and Lester, you know. And Lackey. (laughs) >> You know, Theo seems to have the Midas touch, you know, and it's interesting too, you can use sports analogies for a lot of things, and Theo's a guy who was a little disruptive by using data and analytics in his approach to managing a baseball team. >> Right, right, well, good. That's great. It was an exciting World Series last year. Hope it can be as exciting again. Must have been insane in Chicago. >> Absolutely, yep, getting ready for another run this year, hopefully. >> Excellent, well, Bob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks again, gentlemen. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back to wrap up Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (rippling music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017, #VtasVision. Jyothi Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas. Jyothi, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. I'm an officially an alum, now? >> A CUBE alum, absolutely! >> Two times! Three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge, you know, we give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. >> Five or six times, you'll be doing the interviews. >> I'm going to be following you guys around, then, for the next three events. >> So, good keynote this morning. >> Jyothi: Thank you. >> Meaty. There was a lot going on. Wasn't just high-level concepts, it was a lot of high-level messaging, but then, here's what we've done behind it. >> No, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. The world forgets that Veritas has only been out of Symantec, what, 20 months? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year. That was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, 'cause that's what Carlyle, our board, wants for us to do is invest in innovation and engineering, and build real products. So we took our time, 18 to 20 months to build these products out, and we launched them. And they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. >> Jyothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focused it on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you? You know, a lot of places you could've gone. Why Veritas, why now? >> Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years, and how the journey of IT, as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. That was one. Two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even midmarket customers have some sort of a Cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background, coming from other larger companies is, Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder, you know what I mean? It's just charge this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep holding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But, we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. It was refreshing, and I still remember the first interview with Veritas, and they were talking about, "Oh, we want to help move customers' data "into Azure and AWS and Google," and my brain from previous storage vendors is going, "Hang on a minute. "How are you going to make money "if you're just going to move all of this data "to everyone else?" But that's what is right for the customer. >> Okay, so, how are you going to make money? >> Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's a journey, it's not just a destination. Most customers are asking us, "On average, we adopt three clouds," is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average, they have about three separate clouds. What they say is, "Jyothi, our struggle is to move "an entire virtual business service "from on-prem to the Cloud." And once we've moved it, let's say Cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to Cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money, and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from Cloud A, anyway. If you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from Cloud A to Cloud B, and guess what. We can move it back onto on-prem on the fly. That's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. >> Let's see. The portfolio is large. Help us boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have 20 minutes, so how do we think about that in 15, 20 minutes? >> I'll focus on three tenets. Our 360 data management wheel, if you saw at the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last, but definitely not the least, storage. You want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. Visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already in the Cloud, somewhere. They have zero visibility, almost. Like, "What applications should I move into the Cloud? "If I have moved these applications, "are they giving me the right value? "Because I've invested heavily in the Cloud "to move these applications." They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. All that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the Cloud, then they lost half the battle even before they moved to the Cloud. That's one. We're giving complete visibility with the Info Map connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. >> That's matching the workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics, is that right? >> Absolutely. You could be a Vmware user, you're only interested in VM-based data that you want to move, and you want role-based access into that data, and you want to protect only that data and back it up into the Cloud. We give you that granularity. It's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to have policy-driven actions on that data. >> Jyothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, it's very heterogeneous, very siloed. You take that multi-cloud environment, most customers we talk to, if they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying. It's usually because, well, that group needed this, and somebody needed this, and it's very tactical. So, how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? >> That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, because we were going both top-down and bottoms-up in the customer's organization, and trying to find where's our sweet spot. What we figured is, it's not a one-strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time, we are talking to the CIOs, we are talking to the CXOs, and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want. We're coming top-down with our products, because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, he may not jump out of his seat the first thing. "Visibility's not what I care about, "the ease of use of this backup job "is what I care about, day one." But if you talk to the CIO, and I tell him, "I'll give you end-to-end visibility "of your entire infrastructure. "I don't care which cloud you're in." He'll be like, "I'm interested in that, "'cause I may not want to move 40% of this data "that I'm moving to Cloud A today. "I want to keep it back, or just delete it." 'Cause GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. Doesn't matter which company the data's present in. The citizen can go to that company and say, "You have to delete my data." How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? >> It's in 20 places in 15 different databases. Okay, so that's one. You had said there were three areas that you wanted to explore. >> The second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. Over the years, we had storage lock-ins. I'm not going to name names, but historically, there are lots of storage vendors that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage, or to the company, and they just get caught up in that stacked refresh every three years, and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen. You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider, and you get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data, and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit, or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore, I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as it did just to move the data into the Cloud in the first place. With VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks, if you watched the demo onstage. Literally, with a few mouse clicks, you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications, and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from Cloud A to Cloud B. >> Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. There's many reasons why with lock-in, you mentioned, kind of familiarity. But if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? >> It goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. If you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it, if we are able to tell them, "These are the 10 petabytes that you need to move, "based on what Information Map is telling you." They'll only move those 10 petabytes, so the workload comes down drastically, because they're able to visualize what they need to move. >> Stu: Third piece of storage? >> Third piece of storage. A lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched the software to find storage solution. Back in the VOS days, Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, we had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will, that was just a software layer. It would work with literally SAN/DAS, anything that's out there in the market, it would just be that file system that would work. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team. Like, for example, Abhijit, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. We are extending that beyond just a file system. We're going file, block, and object, just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware, so the customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently, though, is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage vendors, we wrote the storage ground-up. We wrote the code ground-up. We could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So, metadata standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters in it. It's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata, so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product. I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and FitBits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the Cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now, with all the Apple Watches and FitBits out there. What if the storage could predictively, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictively you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch, because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y? Combining all of the data and your history, based on the last month or last three months, I can tell you, "Jyothi, you should probably go see the doctor "or do something about it." So that's predictive, and it can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you paid millions of dollars for. >> So that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, Stu, have tried it, and they tried to make it the product, and it really isn't a product, it's a byproduct. And so, is that something I could buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap, or, what's the reaction been from customers? >> The reaction has been great, both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this. Obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have HyperScale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. That has its own roadmap. You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. Those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow, and we're going to go deep into that. Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem, object-based storage which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. It's just one single, software-defined, highly-intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. >> And the line on Veritas, the billboards, no hardware agenda. Ironic where that came from. Sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about, and when do you decide to do that? >> Great question. You know, it's all about choice. It's the cliched thing to say, I know, but Veritas, most people don't know this, has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do. We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to midmarket customers, or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. Their agility, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else, and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on, and it just works, and I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. This is for those people. Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to back up. >> To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software of course is, I want it to be fast, I want it to be simple, I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kinds of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked-in to start with? >> Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up. When you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer, and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years. It's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud-first world, where people are in the DevOps situation, where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day? That just doesn't work. We wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed onto any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, there were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations. When they tried to software-define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge, 'cause it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first. We test it on multiple hardware systems, and we keep fine-tuning it. Our ideal situation is to sell the software, and if the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. >> One of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix. Whether it was cloud, somebody's data store, that really is your focus, and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, basically, it's a TAM expansion strategy. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TAM expansion strategy, as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them. We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying, we go from the box and dropboxes of the world all the way to Dell EMC, even, with Info Map, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar-per-terabyte or dollar-per-petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. >> All right, Jyothi, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It's good to see you again. >> Jyothi: No, it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (fast electronic music)