welcome back to los angeles lisa martin here with dave nicholson day three of the cube's coverage of kubecon cloud native con north america 2020 we've been having some great comp live conversations in the last three days with actual guests on set we're very pleased to welcome to for the first time to our program shimon ben david the cto of weka welcome hey nice to be here nice to be here great to be at an in-person event isn't it no it's awesome they've done a great job i think you're green you're green like we're green fully green which is fantastic actually purple and hearts wake up yeah good to know green means you're shaking hands and maybe the occasional hug so talk to us about weka what's going on we'll kind of dig into what you guys are doing with kubernetes but give us that overview of what's going on at weka io okay so weka has been around for several years already uh we actually jade our product of 2016 so it's been out there uh actually eight of the fortune 50 are using weka um for those of you that don't know weka by the way we're a fully software defined parallel file system cloud native i know it's a mouthful and it's buzzword compliant but we actually baked all of that into the product from day one because we did other storage companies in the past and we actually wanted to take the best of all worlds and put that into one storage that is is not another me too it's not another compromise so we built the the environment we built weka to actually accommodate for upcoming technologies so we identified also that cloud technology is upcoming network actually exploded in a good way one gig 10 gig 100 gig 200 gig came out so we knew that that's going to be a trend and also cloud we saw cloud being utilized more and more and we kind of like bet that being able to be a parallel file system for the cloud would be amazing and it does how are you not on me too tell me tell us that when you're talking with customers what are the like the top three things that really differentiate weka speed scale and simplicity speed skills i like how fast you said that like quicker so speed sorry you see a lot of file system a lot of storage environments that are very um throughput oriented so speed how many gigabytes can you do to be honest a lot of storage environments are saying we can do that in that many gigabytes when we designed weka actually we wanted to provide an environment that would actually be faster than your local nvme on your local server because that's what we see are actually customers using for performance they're copying the data for their local to their local nvmes and process it we created an environment that is actually throughput oriented iops oriented latency sensitive and metadata performance so it's kind of like the best of all worlds and it's just not just a claim we actually showed it in many benchmarks uh top 500s supercomputing centers can talk for hours about performance but that's performance um scalability we actually are able to scale uh and we did show that we scaled to multiple petabytes we actually uh took some projects from scale-out nas appliances that actually got to their limit of their scale out and we we just continued from there double digit triple digits petabytes upcoming um and also scale is also how many clients can you service at once so it's not only how much capacity but also how many clients can you can you work with concurrently and simplicity all of that we from the initial design points were let's make something that is usable by users and not like so my mother can really use it right and so we have a very simple intuitive user interface but it's also api driven so you can automate around it so simplicity speed and scale love it so shimon it's interesting you said that your company was founded in 2016 in that in that time period because uh before jade ga ga 2016. um but but in those in in those surrounding years uh there were a lot of companies that were coming out at sort of the tail end of the legacy storage world yeah trying to just cannibalize that business you came out looking into the future where are we in that future now because you could argue that you guys maybe started a little early you could have taken a couple of years off and waited for uh for for the wave in the world of containerization as an example to come through but this is really this is like your time to shine isn't it exactly and being fully software defined we can always um adapt and we're always adapting so we bet on new technologies networking flash environments and these keep just keep on going and improving right when we went out we were like in 10 gig environments with ssds but we already knew that we're going to go to 100 and we also designed already for nvmes so kind like hardware constantly improved uh cpus for example the new intel cpus the new amd cpus we just accommodated for them because being software defined means that we actually bypass most of their inner workings and do things ourselves so that's awesome and then the cloud environment is growing massively and containers we see containers now in everyday uh use cases where initially it was maybe vms maybe bare metal but now everything is containerized and we're actually starting to see more and more kubernetes orchestrated environment uh coming out as well i still have a feeling that this is still a bit of dev property hey i'm a developer i'm a devops engineer i'm going to do it uh and it's there is i actually saw a lot of exciting things here um taking it to the next level to the it environment so um that's where we will show benefit as well so talk about how kubernetes users are are working with weka what is what superpower does that give them so um i think if you look at the current storage solutions that you have for kubernetes um they're interesting but they're more of like the let's take what we have today and plug it in right um so what kind of has a csi uh plug-in so it's easy to integrate and work with but also when you look at it um block is still being used in in kubernetes environments that i'm familiar with block was still being used for high performance so i i used uh pvs and pvcs to manage my pods uh claims and then but then i mounted them as read write once right because i couldn't share them then if a pod failed i had to reclaim the pvc and connect it to multiple environments because i wanted block storage because it's fast and then nfs environments was were used as read write many uh to be a shared environment but low performance so by being able to say hey we now have an environment that is fully covered kubernetes integrated and it provides all the performance aspects that you need you don't need to choose just run your fleet of pods your cluster of pods read write many you don't need to to manage old reclamations just to create new pods you get the best of all words ease of use and also uh the performance additionally because there's always more right we now see more and more uh cloud environments right so weka also has the ability and i didn't focus on that but it's it's really uh amazing it has the ability to move data around between different environments so imagine and we see that imagine on-prem environments that are now using weka you're in the terabytes or petabyte scale obviously you can copy and rsync and rclone right but nobody really does it because it doesn't work for these capacities so weka has the ability to say hey i can move data around between different environments so create more copies or simply burst so we see customers that are working on-prem throwing data to the cloud we see customers working on the cloud and and then we actually now see customers starting to bridge the gap because cloud bursting is again is a very nice buzzword we see some customers exploring it we don't really see customers doing it at the moment but the customers that are exploring it are exploring uh throwing the compute out to the cloud using the kubernetes cluster and throwing the data to the cloud using the weka cluster so there's and and one last thing because that's another interesting use case weka can be run converged on the same kubernetes cluster so there is no need to have even it's so in essence it's a zero footprint storage you don't need to even add more servers so i don't need to buy a box and connect my cluster to that box i just run it on the same servers and if i want more compute nodes i add more nodes and i'll add more storage by doing that so it's that simple so i was just looking at the website and see that waka was just this was just announced last week a visionary in the gartner mq for what's the mq4 distributed file systems and object storage talk to me talk talk to us about that what does that distinction mean for the company and how does the voice of the customer validate that great so actually this is interesting this is a culmination of a lot of hard work that all of the team did writing the product and all of the customers by adopting the product because it was in order to get to that i know we don't know if anybody is familiar with the criteria but you need to have a large footprint a distinguished footprint worldwide so we worked hard on getting that and we see that and we see that in multiple markets by the way financials we see a massive amounts of aiml projects containerized kubernetes orchestrated so getting to that was a huge achievement you could see other storage devices not being there because not not every storage appliance is is a parallel file system usually i think uh when you look at parallel file systems you you you attribute complexity and i need an army of people to manage it and to tweak it so that's again one of the things that we did and that's why we really think that we're a cool vendor in that magikarp magic quarter right because you it's that simple to manage uh you don't have any uh find you you cannot you don't need to find unity in like a bazillion different ways just install it we work it works you map it to your containers simple so we're here at kubecon a lot of talk about cloud native a lot of projects a lot of integration a lot of community development you've described installing weka into a kubernetes cluster where you know are there are there integrations that are being worked on what are the is there connective tissue between essentially this parallel file system that's spanning you say you have five nodes you have weka running on those five nodes you have a kubernetes cluster spanning those five nodes um what kinds of things are happening in the community maybe that you're supporting or that you're participating in to connect those together so right now you you don't uh we only have the csi plugin we didn't invest in in anything more actually one of the reasons that i'm here is to get to know the community a bit more and to get more involved and we're definitely looking into how more can we help customers utilize kubernetes and and enjoy the worker storage uh do we need to do some sort of integration i'm actually exploring that and i think you'll see some well so we got interesting so we got you at a good time now exactly yeah because you can say with with it with an api approach um you have the you have the connectivity and you're providing this storage layer that provides all the attributes that you described but you are here live living proof green wristband and all showing that the future will be even more interesting voting on the future yeah and and seeing how we can help the community and what can we do together and actually i'm really impressed by the the conference it's been amazing we've been talking about that all week being impressed with the fact that there's we've been hearing between 2 700 and 3 100 people here which is amazing in person of course there's many more that are participating virtually but they've done a great job of these green wristbands by the way we've talked about these a minute ago um this you have a red yellow or green option to to tell others are you comfortable with contact handshakes hugs etc i love that the fact that i am i'm sandwiched by two grains but they've done a great job of making this safe and i hope that this is a message this is a big community um the cncf has 138 000 contributors i hope this is a message that shows that you can do these events we can get together in person again because there's nothing like the hallway track you can't replicate that on video exactly grabbing people in the hallway in the hotel in the lobby talking about their problems seeing what they need what we do it's amazing right so so give us a little bit in our last few minutes here about the go to market what is the the gtm strategy for weka so that's an interesting question so being fully software defined when we started we we thought do we do another me too another storage appliance even though we're storage defined could we just go to market with our own boxes and we actually uh decided to go differently because our market was actually the storage vendors sorry the server vendors we actually decided to go and enable other bare metal environments manufacturers to now create storage solutions so we now have a great partnership with hpe with supermicro with hitachi uh and and more as well with aws because again being software defined we we can run on the cloud we do have massive projects on the clouds some of the we're all familiar with some but i can't mention um so and we we chose that as our go to market because we we are fully software defined we don't need any specific hardware for we just need a server with nvmes or an instance with nvmes and that's it there's no usually when i talk about what we need is as a product i also talk about the list of what we don't need is longer we don't need j bar j buffs servers ups we don't need all of that raid arrays we just need the servers so a lot of the server vendors actually identify that and then when we approach them and say hey this is what we can do on your bare metal on your environment is that valuable of course so so that's mostly our go to market another thing is that we chose to to focus on the markets that we're going after we're not another me too we're not another storage for your home directories even though obviously we are in some cases uh by customers but we're the storage where if you could shrink your wall clock time of your pipeline from two weeks to four hours and we did that's like 84 times faster if you could do that how valuable is that that's what we do that we see that more and more in modern enterprises so when we started doing that people were saying hey so your go to market is only hpc uh no all if you look at ai email life science um financials and the list goes on right modern environments are now being what hpc was a few years ago so there's massive amounts of data so our go to market is to be very targeted toward uh these markets and then we can say that they also uh push us to to other sides of the hey i have a worker so i might put my vmware on it i might put my i'll do my distributed compilation on this it's it's growing organically so that's fun to see awesome tremendous amount of growth i love that you talked about it very clearly simplicity speed and scale i think you did a great job of articulating why waka is not a me too last question are there any upcoming webinars or events or announcements that that folks can go to learn more about weka uh great question um i didn't come with my marketing hat but we we constantly have events and uh we usually what we usually do we we talk about the markets that we go after so for example a while ago we were in bioit so we published some uh life science articles um i need to see what's in the pipeline and definitely share it with you well i know you guys are going to be at re invent we do so hopefully we'll see you re-invent we're very in super computing as well if you'll be there fantastic i see that on your website there um i don't think we're there but we will see you we're a strong believer of of these conferences of these communities of being on the ground talking with people obviously if you can do it we'll do it with zoom but this is prices yeah it is there's nothing like it shimon it's been great to have you on the program thank you so much for giving us an update on weka sharing what you guys are doing how you're helping kubernetes users and what differentiates the technology we appreciate all your insights and your energy too no it's not me it's the product ah i love it for dave nicholson i'm lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles this is kubecon cloudnativecon north america 21 coverage on the cube wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage we thank you for watching we hope you stay well

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World here at the Venetian fifteen thousand attendees. One of the biggest, most important tech conferences all year long. I'm Rebecca, not your host. Along with my co host, stew Minutemen. We're joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP product marketing at Delhi Emcee. Thanks so much for coming back on the cute Kate. I >> know This is so nice. Maybe we'LL have to make it three days in a row. >> I would we would love that. All right, so the last year at this very comforted you lunch power, Max, what's Tet Walker viewers through Sort of. The new capability is the latest and greatest. What's going on with power Max this year? >> Yeah, My favorite thing to talk about his power, Max. So we couldn't miss that today. Yeah, So a couple of updates in the Power Mac's front couple on the software side and then on more on the hardware side as well. S o from ah software side. We've got a couple pieces, which is a lot of our customers, really starting with the largest of our customers, are looking to add more automation into their data centers, and storage is no exception. And how do I automate some of those storage work clothes? Teo, make things run more seamlessly, get into more of a cloud operating model. So we had a couple of announcements on that front. We have a new V R. Oh, plug in, um, to automate work clothes through the r o A. CZ. Well, as ants will play books coming this summer, a couple important automation hand spins and obviously a lot more to come there in the future. The other one in a similar vein, is that containers, right. We've seen the increase adoption of container. So, um, and that the container is being used in production applications means that external storage is actually become a reality in that world, and the support for a C. S. I plug in on power Max, is something that we're seeing more interest from. So we have announced that's coming this summer as well. >> So, Caitlyn, I remember a year ago when Power Mask got announced. I heard things like intelligence and automation. And I went to add non, you know who's been working on this kind of technology for decades? Is that non how we've been talking about this for decades? Tell me why it's different and he lit up like I hadn't seen him in awhile, told me, What's going on for I want you to connect now a year later is what's this mean for customers? What does that automation? You know, an intelligence mean, is there a certain KP eyes or hero metrics who have is two customers using this today that they couldn't have done? And with you, no last generation intelligence storage? >> Yeah. Hey, think about it. It's really about moving to this concept of the Autonomous Data center. And how does this become an autonomous storage system? So both the intelligence within the system that we talked about last year and the decisions that the system is making itself every single day all by itself, that's that has really changed. And it's a completely new evolution of its making billions of decisions a day for customers so they don't have to do that means you're gonna have fewer people managing storage and they can invest in other things. Then when you move that up the stack, some of that the bureau, the answer will play books really enables you to then automate more of the work flows within that so again gets you more into that operating model, and you can automate not just the storage infrastructure, but then get to this autonomous data center >> So way talk to Travis briefly about Dev ops and you're mentioning answerable playbooks. You know, for years we've been talking to customers and saying, Okay, we we need to get two more agile environments, you know, Dev ops there, but enterprise storage specifically, there's a little bit slowed up, so it sounds like we're starting to get to greater adoption. What? What, what what got us over that you know, Hurdle, and where our customers with it today? >> Yeah, and I think it's really the maturity of our largest global customers that have gotten to a place where, for the workloads that will continue to remain on these thes on from infrastructure on our purpose built storage on our high end arrays, they need to run that as efficiently as possible. Um, and a lot of the work we've done to build in a. I does part of that, but really, ultimately they're looking at in there. Three. Terek protector. How do they run things more smoothly? Um, and it's really our customers that have brought that us is a requirement, and we've been able to to support that. >> So how do you work with customers? Mean innovation is, of course, an underlying theme of this of this conference. Talk about how you collaborate with customers to to solve their problems and how you help them. Think ahead what their future needs are. >> Yeah, and certainly Travis, I myself, might our teams, as well as the engineering team, spend a lot of time with our customers in the briefing centre. A lot of in the field, um, really talking about their challenges and the privilege that we have, especially with something like a Power Max platform, is the customers we have. There are the ones that are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do for them today, so they always need the best performance. The best efficiency and what has changed is they also now we need that simplicity. They need that operational simplicity, even on their high resiliency. High performance systems. Um, and we spend a lot of time understanding those requirements on DH, the problems that they're trying to solve and how we can help them get there and that that could be automation that could be containers. But it could also be cloud right, And that's the other piece that we've we made a lot of investments across our portfolio is how do we support that cloud consumption cloud operating model, leveraging public cloud? Um, and and a lot of it really just comes from how do we help our oppressors continue to solve their problems? >> It's a competitive marketplace, and, as you said, customers, they want everything. They want efficiency. They want simplicity. They wanted to not cost them too much money. What what's your unique selling point? How do you message this is This is why our solution is >> that I mean, our overall strategy delancy from a storage perspective is that we're way. We'LL have a single product in each segment with which we've compete and each one will be architected for very specific requirements so that we can meet the combination of a price points and it features and capabilities across all these different perspectives and that each one of our platforms is designed to be industry leading in that category. Which is why we have power Max on the high end, the resiliency, that performance, the availability that you know, banks, hospitals, governments around the world expect. But the same time we have mid range pot for us. We have an entry platform that could be sold for under twenty five thousand dollars, right and has a different set of requirements. We have the unstructured business, which is supporting the data. Aaron. That data explosion in a file data, Um, so the The fact is the matter is this. That is all about having the right actor architecture's so customers can have the data in the right place at the right time with the right service level. Um, and that's why we have this portfolio and within each portfolio that were leading in each one of those categories, That's kind of the bigger perspective we have on it. We do not just have a hammer. Not everything is a nail for us. Um, and that's an important part of how we can partner with with our customers to help themselves. Not one challenge, but all the challenges they have >> killing one of the interesting shifts we saw the show is clouds being talked at more than ever at this show. One of the earlier segments we had on we talked about the cloud enabled infrastructure. So things like power, Max, you know, I asked J. Crone, you know, tell me why this is cloud watching, and he gave me a good answer. What I want to ask you your angle on is when you talk to customers, you know how to storage fit into the overall discussion of their cloud strategy. You know what, some of the key business drivers and you know how how's Del technology? >> And I'm glad you said that because Jay and I have had this cloud washing conversation as well as I think that's the unfortunate thing in the reality in the market in the past, probably ten years is a lot of cloud washing, and where we're really focused today is, and we talked a little about this yesterday as well as they say. There's one piece of the how do we fit into overall Del technologies cloud strategy with the Del Tech Cloud. I'm in the VCF integration. We kind of covered that the other pieces that when we look at cloud enabled infrastructure, we're focused on solving really specific use cases that we hear our customers trying to solve today of connecting that data center into a public cloud. So that could be what we call cloud connected systems. The tearing of data from your own promises, infrastructure into the public cloud. Really, that's more of an archiving. This case, a kind of a tape replacement use case that could be dead, remain cloud tear, cloud tearing cloud pools. All the different pieces we have there could be CLO Data Services, right. Offering storage Data services is in a public cloud. Unity Cloud Edition will be one or the New Delhi emcee. Cloud storage services could be another one or even that cloud data insights piece of it. So it's really about solving that solving real challenges about disaster recovery Analytics in the cloud. How do you do that? In a really impactful way? That's simple and easy for customers. >> Yeah, the other Claude related thing wanted to get your take on is many of solutions. I heard on there is, you know, it's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail under >> you. Notice that >> I did, and you know a way. We had a number of people. V X ray. Lt's doing great, but, you know, if you talk about cloud and the infrastructure that I have in my data center, you know, we've talked Teo, talk to Dell for years. You know, the new power Max last year is underneath some of those admire. Where does that fit in? Kind of CIA and cloud, you know, infrastructure piece. >> Yeah, in a lot of different places. And for Roddy, for reasons, right? Some of us just the high value workloads you need. The scalability, the resiliency, the performance you need the ability to scale your computing your capacity separately. You want to be able to consolidate not just your applications, but actually all your file and sew something like unity or even power. Max, you can have your block workloads and your file workloads there. So we have a lot of customers looking to use traditional three tier architecture, but leverage that in a true cloud operating model from an automation standpoint, cloud consumption model, but also leveraging public cloud computing, right, leveraging the public cloud and really impactful ways, for example, for disaster recovery, eh? So it's really that combining what people love about our industry leading best of reed storage. Um, with that agility of the public cloud is a combination that we certainly hear a lot from our customers of How can I make the best use of clouds? Everyone walks in and say that club first strategy, but it's really about well, how do you actually think about data first and then how do you have a cloud strategy that supports that? >> So So let's talk about the future. I mean, ahs, You said This is what the customer is thinking about right now, but it's your job to think ahead and make sure that you are giving them solutions that fit their future need. So what are you thinking about the solutions that are available today that were really unimaginable five years ago. I think about ahead to twenty twenty five when there is enough data to fill the Empire State Building thirteen times over. How are you helping companies manage the tsunami of data? >> Yeah, and I think part of that is really about again the operations we talked about. Part of that really just comes back to having the right architecture for that type of workload. So this is where I salon actually well before the data era actually was designed for this specifically. So Iceland, created in the early two thousand's, was designed of one file system from terabytes and two petabytes. A single administrator can manage now up to fifty eight petabytes in a single file system. That's game changing when you think about the scale that we're seeing today. So the reason we went to that capacity isn't certainly just cause we thought we could. It was cause our customers were asking for it. Is these workloads in that data that we're talking about autonomous driving center that are just driving the scale? Ability limits, And they're asking for more and more in the most efficient floor print possible. And if you think about that, especially even in the cloud context, there's a There's a combination of How do you leverage that in the in the data center right? And physics means you can't get it up into the cloud necessarily. Um, but then also, there are use cases. They're like analytics of How do you leverage public cloud computing? But then you have that industry leading scale out now, as on the from the storage side so you can combine that. So you talk about something that we talked about here last year, and now we're talking about it a little bit more as well as our integration with Google Cloud platforms. So a lot of our customers are looking to use G. C p for compute for analytics workloads on DH. It's really almost rent your compute for analytics, but you have to have the right storage platform with the right architecture on the back end of that. So what we've done is fully integrated. Iceland, uh, platform and file system through G C P portal. So you could actually combine that public hug, compute and that file system that can support that type of scale. So it's a really unique combination that can help support not only the scale of that data, but also that some of the unique use cases and work loads that are coming out of that >> So Caitlin lot of products here that that would be talking about. Last thing I want to ask is customer customer conversation you have, you know, is data the center of the challenge and opportunity. They have something else that kind of bubbling up. As you look across the conversations you're having that you could have your audience. >> I think at the center of what I hear from customers, Data's in there, but they don't come in saying its data, right? They'll come in thinking about, you know, just trying to figure out how to use cloud properly there. Think about how Doe I simplify things. How do I, um, operate in a way to meet the service levels with a budget that's definitely not getting bigger? Um, and really be as efficient as possible. And it's not, um, some people are looking to go public. Cloud thinking. It's an easy button are there, but it's it's really about How do we change things? Teo run more efficiently and customers inherently to understand, right that the data is at the center of it, and that's increasingly the most valuable asset in the organization. And then they need to optimize their infrastructure to support that, so it really does come down to what? What can we help them to simplify? Optimize. Secure that so that they can truly unlock that. David Capital. >> Well, thank you so much, Caitlin, for coming back on the Cube. That's thanks for having me. Rebecca Knight for stew Minutemen. There is so much more coming up of the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World in just a little bit.

(lively pop music) >> Live from Mountain View, California. It's the Cube covering DevNet Create 2019. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we're here at day two coverage live of coverage at Mountain View, Cube coverage of Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, your host, where all the action is in the creation side of two communities, DevNet, Cisco developers and then the open cloud native world entrepreneurship coming together to create products. Our next guest is Nik Kalyani, co-founder of WhenHub and TryCrypto. He's a builder, he's a creator, he's an entrepreneur. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on >> John, thanks for having me. >> You just gave a long talk so I'll let you breathe a little bit. You're an entrepreneur, you're an inventor, you see things early. You got a lot of your hands on lots of good stuff here. This is the perfect place for you to be giving talks and hanging out. >> Absolutely I love the fact that people are here to learn. They're here to find out about the new innovative things that they can experience hands-on. I just gave a workshop on smart contracts, on the blockchain and I loved the questions I got and the energy that's there. >> What sort of questions were you getting? What was the interest? Where are people going at it? Because networking's a supply chain problem you can almost imagine applying blockchain to networking constructs. >> Yeah absolutely, you know blockchain is one of those technologies that is misunderstood quite a bit and some of the questions I got really helped me, help reinforce that. Ultimately, what I was trying to do is make sure that people understand that blockchain is not a solution for everything. There are certain things where there are scenarios where there are multiple un-trusted parties where blockchain is great, but otherwise it's just a slow database. So you want to make sure that you use it in the right scenarios and supply chain is a very common example where it's used, especially private blockchains. >> If latency's not a concern blockchain might be a solution if other things line up. Great point, I'm glad you brought that up. I want to just ask you because your profile as a person you're a visionary, you see things early. The part of the show here that's interesting is it's not like there's this research kind of thinking, although researchers tends to think about the waves coming. It's about what's here and now and what's coming but it's also making things real and creating. So a lot of the conversations are fun, exploratory, discovery orientated but also there's a lot of reality kind of grounded in it. You know entrepreneurs make some mistakes if you're too early, you're misunderstood for a long time. It's got to be a little bit early at the right time, timing's everything. Talk about the dynamic of timing and building and creating with big waves that are coming. You got cloud, you got blockchain, you got AI, you got machine learning. Talk about this dynamic. >> Absolutely, yeah so timing is so important, especially when you have start-ups right? You could have the greatest technology and maybe the market's not ready for it and so yeah it fails. My first start up was like that. I created something that the market was not ready for but fortunately the stuff I'm working on the market is ready for. So I think one of the things that developers, engineers can do is really look at how not necessarily how a technology is being marketed but what the adoption rate is. If there are more people jumping on it, and a good way to look at that is to look at GitHub and see how many people are creating samples, boilerplates, how many people are writing blog posts et cetera. That I think is a better indicator of whether a technology is ready for prime time or if it's just all vaporware. >> Tell about what you're working on now you're working on some very interesting projects. Where are they? What's the status, size of the team, collaborative open source. What's going on? >> So I have two start-ups I'm working on. the first one is called WhenHub. So we have a product called Interface that allows anyone to be an expert on any topic, and promote themselves through the platform. And allows anyone who's looking for expertise on any topic to find them and then pay for them and do a video call, get their questions answered and the whole transaction is handled via blockchain with either our cryptocurrency or you can use Apple Pay or Google Pay. So we launched a few months ago, we have about 75,000 users, it's growing very fast. We are just at the point right now where we are trying to scale-up. Our crypto token is called WHEN token. It's listed on five different exchanges. So that's one thing. While building that product one thing became very clear to me. Mainstream users have a very challenging time with using anything blockchain or cryptocurrency related. And it's through no fault of theirs, the ecosystem has been created for developers by developers and the tools lack empathy for the users. And that lead me to create an open source project called TryCrypto. The mission is to create free open source content and tools to make blockchain and cryptocurrency more accessible to users. >> To mainstream not the killer dorks and the guys coding. >> Yeah we want it to be like non-technical folks >> Is it the wallet that's the problem or is it just overall too techy? >> You know what John, the very word wallet is the problem. (John laughs) Because it gives this idea that there's something within it. As we were talking earlier, you know about blockchain, there's nothing in a wallet. It's just a placeholder for all of your addresses, right? So in fact, I'm trying to solve that problem with a new tool I've created called Photoblock, where I use a photo and emoji's to replace that. Yes, wallets are problems. The fact that it requires you to have all these parts in place before you can do anything useful, that's a big problem also. People really need to step back and look at the user experience and say what are the friction points and how can we eliminate them and that needs to happen before blockchain and cryptocurrency can have mass adoption. >> Talk about the choice of smart contract language used. Ethereum which was the hottest development oriented the most traction. A lot of ICOs kind of watered that down, it's still under 300. Other ones are emerging, NEO, EO, a bunch of other ones. It seems to be kind of like a NASCAR race, one's in the lead, someone's coming up. How do you look at that marketplace as other developers start to kick the tires? As people start building these real-world apps is that important to have a selector? Does it matter? What's your thoughts on selection? >> That's a great question. I think going back to what I said about how to evaluate a technology. You can see that Ethereum is still continues to be the leader, by far. So while EO and other blockchains have what appears to be a lot of momentum, if you dig down below the surface you don't find as much. So I continue to remain a big fan of Ethereum. Which doesn't mean I don't care for the other blockchains but I find that right now Serenity and Ethereum are a good way to move forward. I think EO is also a good platform to build on but I think their developing tools need to reach some level of maturity. On Ethereum, the folks that have created the truffle stack, the truffle and ganache package, have done a great service for developers because they make them so simple and easy. Something like that needs to evolve. >> Yeah and your point earlier I think it's important to know for the developers out there don't confuse the protocol and the token selection on smart contracts with blockchain. Again, you don't have to anything on blockchain 'cause it's a slow database. You're doing smart contracts which doesn't really require a lot of overhead. I mean it's a contract, it does. You want to have it reliable, but you're not doing zillions of contracts per second. The IOPs are not that high. >> Yeah, actually smart contracts is also a very misunderstood term. In fact, someone asked me is it legal contracts or medical contracts, what is it? A smart contract is really just an application. A programming code that runs on the virtual machines on blockchain. They call it a contract because once it's out there it's immutable. Which means the rules are defined, known and fixed and can't be changed. So when you create a smart contract, really what you're doing is handling a very small amount of data that you want to persist forever that runs with some rules. >> And in a decentralized world, as we call it in our community, it's a digital handshake. You agreed that we would do this, there it is, it's un-hackable. What are the cool things you're working on? What else you got? Opensource project's awesome. You got a lot going on. Life's good. >> Life is good. As I mentioned, Photoblock is the thing that I'm really excited about. Another app that we are building is called Public Record. The problem we are solving there is that in areas where there is strife, or maybe there's dictators et cetera, sometimes when you have people who have photos of some crime occurring or some event occurring, they are reluctant to share it because it could be traced back and have adverse consequences. With Public Record we are building a smart contract driven blockchain app. Where you can just take a photo and it will push that photo on to IPFS. Which stands for the InterPlanetary File System, which is a decentralized file system. It will anonymize the photo. It will strip all the stuff that your camera puts on there like GPS, the camera model et cetera. It'll manipulate that photo and it will then put a hash of that on the blockchain and make it available by location. So you can go to any location look at all the photos that people have taken there that are completely anonymous and impossible to track back to the >> And what about tampering proof? You have origination data, you strip out the real origination data, that's really important for some of these countries where people get killed for sharing or trying to get the backdoor out of the country for political revolution or just simply I don't want anybody to know. How about tamper proof? >> It is, it's on IPFS, which is immutable file system. What we also do is we manipulate the colors and tones of the photo a little bit so it's impossible to even use AI to go back and reverse engineer and figure out who created the photo. The location, the time and the actual content of the photo is not tampered. So Public Record will do that. >> Just a little quick Q and A on your company. Did you do an ICO, did you finance it yourself? >> With WhenHub we did do an ICO, but it was at a time when the market was at its bare things so our ICO was moderately successful. In addition to the ICO funds, we are primarily funded by one of my co-founders, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. We are doing quite well. >> He's a cool guy to hang out with, huh? >> He is. >> Never a dull moment? >> Never a dull moment, I learn quite a bit. >> Congratulations. How do people find out how to hang out with you? You got some good things going on here. Where do you hang out? What do you do for fun? What events do you go to? What's going on with you? >> I'm on Twitter quite a bit. >> Say your Twitter handle. >> It's @techbubble. I'm there. I like to blog. on TryCrypto and also my own personal blog. I go to meet-up events here in Silicon Valley and I do make an effort to speak at least five to six conferences each year. >> Aim it forward. >> Yep. >> A lot more action going on in crypto and token economics not just from an ICO standpoint always been some negative scams out there and global fraud, but generally, blockchain and token economics is real and getting more traction and soon I think it will be clearer. Your thoughts on that, if you could share your perspective in terms of the opportunities around those two areas. >> Like any other new and exciting technology goes through the hype cycle, they've gone through that now. I think there's really two types of people in this ecosystem. The ones that are focused on the cryptocurrency and the pricing around it et cetera. But I'd really like to separate that from the blockchain aspect of it. Blockchain is a very real technology, it's a really different technology that the world has never seen before. Yes, it's very true that not everything is a good candidate for the blockchain. But there are many, many scenarios where there are multiple un-trusted parties that are excellent for blockchain. I think what needs to happen is persons in leadership position need to really evaluate: what are the scenarios where there are un-trusted entities involved? And limit their blockchain involvement, test pilots, all of that they're more likely to see more success. Versus just throwing blockchain into it, replace the database, 'cause that's guaranteed to be a fail. >> Nik, great to have you on. I totally agree with you. The team here we were in Puerto Rico, we've been in the Bahamas, we've been Toronto we've been to all the blockchain events. Consensus is coming up in New York. We might be there, May 14th. Patrick, getting ready to head down to New York. Maybe go down there. Great to have your perspective. Great to see the blockchain conversation coming in here as the emerging tech and the creation here at DevNet Create continues. Thanks for coming out. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here. >> More Cube coverage here coming live here at Mountain View after this short break. (pop music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. The conference season is just about ready to take off so we still have some time to get some Cube conversations in before we hit the road and spend the next several days and weeks and months in Las Vegas, Orlando, and points on the compass. So, we're excited to have our next guest. She's Lynn Lucas, Cube alumni, CMO of Cohesity, Lynn, great to see you again. >> Jeff, super to be here for the first time in Palo Alto. >> Yeah, how do you like the studio? >> I love it! >> It's a little different than the vibe at the conferences. >> A little quieter-- >> A little quieter. >> Than the conferences but I like it. >> Well good, good, welcome, so you have relatively recently joined a new company, Cohesity, so congratulations on that. >> Thanks, yeah. >> And just curious, one, give us just a quick overview on Cohesity but more importantly, what did you see that attracted you, to get you to join? >> Great, yeah, so Cohesity, just joined at the beginning of January, having a blast. And really what I saw that attracted me to Cohesity was three things. It's an incredible founder, Mohit Aron, who was formerly the CTO and co-founder of Nutanix called the Father of Hyperconvergence and before that the lead developer at Google File System. And, he really is doing what a lot of Silicon Valley is known for, which is he took a step back and is looking at this space in the data center that we call secondary data, back up, archives, replications, test dev, analytics, and said, "You know what? "The world doesn't need a better point solution. "We need to take a step back and look "at how this gold mine of data can be used "in a much more efficient way." Because data is after all, is what's powering the worlds businesses and their differentiation. So, the technology, Mohit himself is a founder and then it's just an incredible start up culture. It's fast growing, we're having fun every day, I love going to work. >> It's amazing, I was just doing some background and you guys have raised $160 million. The list of leadership and board and advisory is pretty amazing. It's like a who's who from this industry. So he pulled together a helluva team. >> He really has and you know Carl Eschenbach, former COO of VM Ware is on our board. >> Cube alumni, Patrick Rogers. >> Rob Salmon. >> Cube alumni, we could go on and on. >> Yes, Ned App, Dan Wormehoven, Google Ventures is invested, Sequoia. I think Sequoia said we're the fastest growing company in their portfolio. We grew 600% year over year last year, 40 to 50% growth in new customers every quarter, cause they're is just such a pent up demand to really solve some of the problems that haven't been addressed over the last, really, couple of decades for the inefficiencies and how all of this data for these secondary workloads is managed. >> So you got an interesting graphic on the website talking about secondary data. And that it's really the ugly part of the iceberg below the water and significantly bigger, heavier, and more expensive to manage than the primary data. So I wonder if you could take us into that a little bit deeper, how did it get to be such a problem? And why is this new approach a better way to attack that problem? >> Sure and an iceberg is really kind of a good metaphor when you think about the data center. You know, we've got our production, and applications, primary storage and that's what's floating above the water and we see that 20% but below is another 80%. And, according to most industry analysts, IDC, Gartner, that represents not just 80% of the data but 80% of the cost. On average, IDC says every organization has 12 to 14 copies of each piece of data. And that happens because what's grown up over time is point solutions for all the various work loads. You got one set of hardware and software for backup. You've got another set for test dev. You've got another set for analytics. There's been no sharing of the data. There's no single infrastructure, knowing even or operations knowing what you have and being able to tell you where the inefficiencies are and so you think about a developer in retail or in a bank organization, they're requesting a copy of a data to develop the new applications that copy gets instantiated. They do their work, never gets erased, just like in our consumer life. >> Right, Right. >> Do you ever erase photos off your phone? >> I can't tell you how many copies and copies and copies of, cause it's, cause it's often-- >> It's easy. >> You figure, it's easier to make another copy just in case, right? >> Exactly, so that never goes away and then you've got yet another copy for the next time they need an updated set. And so, this has been multiplying and it creates just an incredible expense to maintain and operate. And it also creates a lot of risk these days for organizations because of new regulations like GDPR. >> Right. >> Where are all those copies of personal information from e-use citizens, people don't even know anymore. >> Right, and then there's, you know, two other big factors that have come into play in recent years. Software to find and public cloud. Two really big, huge tidal waves of change that were not accommodated in prior architectures so you guys, obviously, saw that opportunity glommed on and are now offering something that can take care of the different types of needs based on what type of infrastructure you need, really not at a company level. But really at the application or the workload level right? >> Yeah, so I think it's a great point and I won't claim any credit for this, this is Mehit and his team of developers and really, as you pointed out, what do we see organizations looking for now? They now realize that, hey, if I can get a software to find platform, a lot of commodity hardware does a really good job for me and I want to have that flexibility to choose, you know, what vendor I might be using. So, Mohit developed a software to find platform that addresses, how do you bring all of these data and these workloads together in one platform so I can have a consistent set of infrastructure and a consistent operational model and, because of his heritage, working at Google, being one of the lead developers for Google File System, it comes with this cloud first mentality. So this is not a bolt on with a gateway to get to Amazon or get to Azure. >> Right. >> This is a software platform that natively understands and spans both your private cloud and your on premises data center and the public cloud. So it gives an IT organization the flexibility to choose how do I want to use the public cloud with my private data center and not have to think really about, kind of, that plumbing below. >> Right. >> Below the water line anymore. >> Because, because there is no either or, right? It's really workload specific where that particular workload lives and the storage that supports that. >> Yeah, so so let me be specific about what Cohesity offers. It's software defined and we offer a appliance so that it's very easy for an organization to go in and say, you know what, data protection, backup frankly, legacy architectures built 20 years ago, before the advent of the cloud. Biggest pain point we see right now can move in a Cohesity hyperconverged appliance and solve that problem and gain massive business benefits right away. We offer global deduplication, very advanced compression and erasure coding and we have customers that are telling us that they're seeing eight to one, ten to one, even 14 to one ratios that really then give them-- >> 14:1 ratio and a reduction of capacity to store the same amount of stuff? >> Versus from some of the current customer, or current vendors that they have been using, from what I would call these legacy architectures. >> Right, right, that's pretty significant. >> So they're getting an amazing storage efficiency. Then, they often next say, wow I'd like to give my developers the flexibility of spinning this up in the cloud. So we offer a cloud edition that allows them to choose whether they want to operate on Azure on Amazon on Google cloud and be able to move that data into the cloud, use it for a test dev instance, but again all under the same software interface all looks like one operating system. No bolt on gateway to manage. >> Right, so you get it-- >> And then. >> I'm sorry go ahead. >> And I was going to say in the third part is many organizations obviously have remote offices, branch offices so there's a virtual edition too. >> Right. So I'm just curious on the cloud side. So Andy Chassis' been on a ton of times, great guy. >> Yes. >> You know, one of the promises of cloud is spin up what you need and spin down when you - don't, as you said. >> Right. >> Nobody ever spins anything down so are you seeing customers have the same type of, of economic impact in managing their storage that's in the public clouds? Because now they're actually spinning down what they don't need or consolidating more efficiently. >> Yeah, so I think that we've seen, in general, in the industry that if you likened the data center it'd kind of been a messy garage where there was a lot of things in the garage and you weren't really sure what it was. A lot of folks, I would say five plus years ago, were like, kind of ran to the cloud cause it was clean and new and it was like that new shiny storage box. >> Right. >> You know, that you see parked on people's driveways sometimes and then realize that there can be a lot of expense, cause you're really replicating in the cloud, some of these same silos if you're not careful. >> Right. >> We're going to help customers avoid that. I think customers are much more sophisticated now than say five years ago. And they're now looking at what's the best way for me to incorporate public cloud. >> Right. >> So really common use case right now would be what I mentioned before test dev, let's move something there, get the benefit of the compute, do some analytics on it, build some new application, maybe get spun down after that but another really common use case is a lot of organizations worried about disaster recovery, bringing the cloud in as their second site. Because that's a very efficient way for them to do that and not build yet another on premises data center. >> Silo. >> Yeah. >> So, the company's been around, the a round is 2013, you're coming in as a CMO. You're brand new and fresh, what's your charter? You know, you didn't come in at a low level you came in with the C, what are you excited about, what you know, again why did they bring you in and what are you going to bring to the table and what are your priorities for the rest of 2018 and beyond? I still can't believe we're a third, a quarter of the way through 2018. >> Yes we are. We're going to be at those shows pretty soon. >> (laughing) I know, they're comin'. >> They are, so I'm here really to build on the good work that the team has done and I'm just really thrilled to be at the company. I think what my charter is is to continue the company's expansion. So, they've seen tremendous growth and in fact, we've just really launched into Asia so we now have a large sales presence in Australia, New Zealand and we're going to continue to expand into the rest of Asia. Significantly expanded in Europe as well recently. So part of my charter is to bring the marketing programs to all of these new regions and in general, to up our awareness level. I think Cohesity has an incredible opportunity to really be one of those companies that changes the data center landscape. >> Right. >> And I want to make sure the world knows about the incredible benefits the customers are seeing already with us. And do that in a way that really features the customer voice. I've been on theCUBE before and I talked about that. For me, that is all about ensuring that the customer voice is really front and center and so hopefully we'll bring a Cohesity customer here. >> Good, well and I just want to ask you kind of from a marketing professional in B2B business, it's a really challenging time in terms of, of the scarcity now is not information, which it used to be. Now the scarcity is in attention and people can get a lot of information before they ever make it to your website within peer groups and hopefully watching some Cube interviews, et cetera. So I'm just curious to get your perspective from a Chief Marketing Officer how are you kind of looking at the challenges of getting the message out. It's a really different world than it was years and years ago. >> Yeah. >> People aren't reading white paper so much and it's a different challenge. >> Yeah, and it's part of the fun actually in being in marketing and being in marketing and tech because a lot of that cool technology for marketing is invented right here in the Valley too. So, you know, I think that word of mouth still actually plays an incredible role and it is that customer voice but bringing that out in ways that are accessible for customers. You and I know, we're all very ADD, very time sliced-- >> Right. >> And so those small moments on social media where you can feature bits of information that get people's attention. In fact, we're running something right now, which I think has a lot of legs because at the end of the day I'm selling to a human. >> Right? >> Right. >> Right. >> So we've got B2B monikers but at the end of the day, folks are people that laugh, they cry, they want to have fun. >> Right. >> So we're running a break up with your legacy backup campaign right now. And I encourage the audience to go check it out. It's pinned on our Twitter feed at Cohesity but it pokes a little bit of fun at how you might break up with your older vendor-- >> Right. >> And that's a moment that we think captures folks attention and gets them interested so that maybe they do want to move down and read the white paper and so forth. So I look to do that through combinations of just, you know, bringing out Cohesity's incredible voice, our customer voice, and then sharing it on social because that's the way people really get their information these days. >> Right, this is really interesting cause I think the voice of the customer or the trusted referral's actually more valuable now because it's just a different problem. Before, I couldn't get information, so that was a good valuable sort, now it's really that person's my trusted filter cause I have too much information. >> Right. >> I can't, I can't take it in so that continues to be that trusted filter and conduit so I could just focus on my peers and not necessarily try to read everything that comes out. >> Exactly, you know, so as an example, Manhattan Associates is one of Cohesity's customers and we've been super thrilled to be able to feature them you know, through social, through our website, and let them talk about the benefits of moving to the platform and what they've seen. And I know, I hate to say it, but Gartner as well continues to be an incredible influence on most organizations and, but we're pleased to say that our customers chose Cohesity and we won the Gartner peer insights for data center backup software, just about a month ago. So, that again is another example of customers looking at the options that they have and voting with their voice and we'll continue to drive that message out in the variety of ways and hopefully get people engaged so that they can see that there really is a completely different way of managing your secondary data and getting a lot better efficiencies and a lot lower cost. >> Yeah, good exciting times, challenging times. The old marketing mantra, right? Half of my marketing budget's wasted, I just don't know which half. (laughing) So, you know you got to cover all your bases from the old school Gartner to the new school, having some fun, and some comedy. Well Lynn, really fun to sit down and spend a few minutes and to get deeper into the Cohesity story. >> Likewise, thank you and I'll be seeing you in Orlando, Vegas, and those other points on the compass. >> Alright, she's Lynn Lucas, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watchin' theCUBE from the Palo Alto studios. Great to see ya, we'll see ya next time. Thanks for watchin'. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> And we're back, here on the show floor in the exhibit hall at Sands Expo, live at re:Invent for AWS along with Justin Warren. I'm John Walls. We're joined by a couple of executives now from Weka IO, to my immediate right is Liran Zvibel, who is the co-founder and CEO and then Maor Ben Dayan who's the chief architect at IO. Gentleman thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate you being here on theCube. First off tell the viewers a little bit about your company and I think a little about the unusual origination of the name. You were sharing that with me as well. So let's start with that, and then tell us a little bit more about what you do. >> Alright, so the name is Weka IO. Weka is actually a greek unit, like mega and terra and peta so it's actually a trillion exobytes, ten to the power of thirty, it's a huge capacity, so it works well for a storage company. Hopefully we will end up storing wekabytes. It will take some time. >> I think a little bit of time to get there. >> A little bit. >> We're working on it. >> One customer at a time. >> Give a little more about what you do, in terms of your relationship with AWS. >> Okay, so at Weka IO we create the highest performance file system, either on prem or in the cloud. So we have a parallel file system over NVME. Like no previous generation file system did parallel work over hard drives. But these are 20 years old technology. We're the first file system to bring new paralleled rhythms to NVME so we get you lowest latency, highest throughput either on prem or in the cloud. We are perfect for machine learning and life sciences applications. Also you've mentioned media and entertainment earlier. We can run on your hardware on prem, we can run on our instances, I3 instances, in AWS and we can also take snapshots that are native performance so they don't take away performance and we also have the ability to take these snapshots and push them to S3 based object storage. This allows you to have DR or backup functionality if you look on prem but if your object storage is actually AWSS3, it also lets you do cloud bursting, so it can take your on prem cluster, connect it to AWSS3, take a snapshot, push it to AS3 and now if you have a huge amount of computation that you need to do, your local GPU servers don't have enough capacity or you just want to get the results faster, you would build a big enough cluster on AWS, get the results and bring them back. >> You were explaining before that it's a big challenge to be able to do something that can do both low latency with millions and millions of small files but also be able to do high throughput for some large files, like media and entertainment tends to be very few but very, very large files with something like genomics research, you'll have millions and millions of files but they're all quite tiny. That's quite hard, but you were saying it's actually easier to do the high throughput than it is for low latency, maybe explain some of that. >> You want to take it? >> Sure, on the one hand, streaming lots of data is easy when you distribute the data over many servers or instances in the AWS like luster dust or other solutions, but then doing small files becomes really hard. Now this is where Weka innovated and really solved this bottleneck so it really frees you to do whatever you want with the storage system without hitting any bottlenecks. This is the secret sauce of Weka. >> Right and you were mentioning before, it's a file system so it's an NFS and SMB access to this data but you're also saying that you can export to S3. >> Actually we have NFS, we have SMB, but we also have native posits so any application that you could up until now only run on the local file system such as EXT4 or ZFS, you can actually run in assured manner. Anything that's written on the many pages we do, so adjust works, locking, everything. That's one thing we're showing for life sciences, genomic workflows that we can scale their workflows without losing any performance, so if one server doing one kind of transformation takes time x, if you use 10 servers, it will take 10x the time to get 10x the results. If you have 100 servers, it's gonna take 100x servers to get 100x the results, what customers see with other storage solutions, either on prem or in the cloud, that they're adding servers but they're getting way less results. We're giving the customers five to 20 times more results than what they did on what they thought were high performance file systems prior to the Weka IO solution. >> Can you give me a real life example of this, when you talk about life sciences, you talk about genomic research and we talk about the itty bitty files and millions of samples and whatever, but exactly whatever, translate it for me, when it comes down to a real job task, a real chore, what exactly are you bringing to the table that will enable whatever research is being done or whatever examination's being done. >> I'll give you a general example, not out of specifically of life sciences, we were doing a POC at a very large customer last week and we were compared head to head with best of breed, all flash file system, they did a simple test. They created a large file system on both storage solutions filled with many many millions of small files, maybe even billions of small files and they wanted to go through all the files, they just ran the find command, so the leading competitor finished the work in six and a half hours. We finished the same work in just under two hours. More than 3x time difference compared to a solution that is currently considered probably the fastest. >> Gold standard allegedly, right? Allegedly. >> It's a big difference. During the same comparison, that customer just did an ALS of a directory with a million files that other leading solution took 55 seconds and it took just under 10 seconds for us. >> We just get you the results faster, meaning your compute remains occupied and working. If you're working with let's say GPU servers that are costly, but usually they are just idling around, waiting for the data to come to them. We just unstarve these GPU servers and let's you get what you paid for. >> And particularly with something like the elasticity of AWS, if it takes me only two hours instead of six, that's gonna save me a lot of money because I don't have to pay for that extra six hours. >> It does and if you look at the price of the P3 instances, for reason those voltage GPUs aren't inexpensive, any second they're not idling around is a second you saved and you're actually saving a lot of money, so we're showing customers that by deploying Weka IO on AWS and on premises, they're actually saving a lot of money. >> Explain some more about how you're able to bridge between both on premises and the cloud workloads, because I think you mentioned before that you would actually snapshot and then you could send the data as a cloud bursting capability. Is that the primary use case you see customers using or is it another way of getting your data from your side into the cloud? >> Actually we have a slightly more complex feature, it's called tiering through the object storage. Now customers have humongous name spaces, hundreds of petabytes some of them and it doesn't make sense to keep them all on NVME flash, it's too expensive so a big feature that we have is that we let you tier between your flash and object storage and let's you manage economics and actually we're chopping down large files and doing it to many objects, similarly to how a traditional file system treat hard drives so we treat NVMEs in a parallel fashion, that's world first but we also do all the tricks that a traditional parallel file system do to get good performance out of hard drives to the object storage. Now we take that tiering functionality and we couple it with our highest performance snapshotting abilities so you can take the snapshot and just push it completely into the object storage in a way that you don't require the original cluster anymore >> So you've mentioned a few of the areas that you're expertise now and certainly where you're working, what are some other verticals that you're looking at? What are some other areas where you think that you can bring what you're doing for maybe in the life science space and provide equal if not superior value? >> Currently. >> Like where are you going? >> Currently we focus on GPU based execution because that's where we save the most money to the customers, we give the biggest bang for the buck. Also genomics because they have severe performance problems around building, we've shown a huge semiconductor company that was trying to build and read, they were forced to building on local file system, it took them 35 minutes, they tried their fastest was actually on RAM battery backed RAM based shared file system using NFS V4, it took them four hours. It was too long, you only got to compile the day. It doesn't make sense. We showed them that they can actually compile in 38 minutes, show assured file system that is fully coherent, consistent and protected only took 10% more time, but it didn't take 10% more time because what we enabled them to do is now share the build cache, so the next build coming in only took 10 minutes. A full build took slightly longer, but if you take the average now their build was 13 or 14 minutes, so we've actually showed that assured file system can save time. Other use cases are media and entertainment, for rendering use cases, you have these use cases, they parallelize amazingly well. You can have tons of render nodes rendering your scenes and the more rendering nodes you have, the quicker you can come up with your videos, with your movies or they look nicer. We enable our customers to scale their clusters to sizes they couldn't even imagine prior to us. >> It's impressive, really impressive, great work and thanks for sharing it with us here on theCube, first time for each right? You're now Cube alumni, congratulations. >> Okay, thanks for having us. >> Thank you for being with us here. Again, we're live here at re:Invent and back with more live coverage here on theCube right after this time out.

>> 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)