from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to a special cube conversation here in our Boston area studio the one constant that we know for customers is change and how they manage their data there are applications in this ever-changing world is something that is always interesting to dig into and helping me with this conversation first time guests on the program Joe DeAngelo who is a distinguished engineer and national practice lead of availability solutions with Veritas is here with me Joe thanks so much for joining us it's - thanks for having me yours is great all right so first before we get into it give us a little bit about you know your background what you work on how long you been with Veritas sure so I've been with Veritas for nine years in various different roles I was a product manager when I joined the company since then I joined the field sales technical or technical field sales organization working as an advocate with some of our more strategic customers sort of like the liaison back to the product team before that I was a consultant sort of as a implementing these technologies from Veritas and of course it was a customer - so always had sort of that round out that full full spectrum of experience with love that we can draw on some of your experience as a customer right let's start there if we will now you're working with a lot of customers and the space you're working on the availability solutions I kind of teed it up with we know that there's change happening you know when I talk about customers in their cloud journey it is an ever moving thing it's not a one-way thing there's data centers there's cloud there's edge there's all of these environments and what you know figuring out what application what application goes where and how that's changing over time is there's a real challenge for customers these days is it not it absolutely is and really one of the sort of the foundational tenants of the availability solutions at Veritas is that we give customers the ability to sort of decouple their applications from all of that sort of chaos that's in the in their infrastructure whether it's in the cloud whether it's hyper-converged physical virtual different storage technologies they can run their application where they need to run it when they need to run it and be to know that it'll be performance yeah well we know from Veritas as legacy I remember seeing the billboards and the t-shirts there are no hardware agenda so you understand Veritas has always been a software share company when you look at that kind of wave of you know software-defined storage and the like help us understand you know today here's 2020 we're living in the future you know what that means for you know customers data is customers application what the availability solution in the product lines that you work yeah I mean that's that's a terrific question well what it means is you have a myriad of choices you have to decide on so it's not just the individual application but really the the composition of those apps and the relationships they have with other different other applications you mentioned software-defined storage I mean we cut our teeth on software-defined storage back when that wasn't even a term you know thirty years ago all right I like to think that it's almost in our DNA that you know taking and virtualizing storage is one of the first things we did as a technology today we we've taken that same sort of approach to commoditizing most of the infrastructure so that it doesn't matter what operating system it doesn't matter what storage vendor you use doesn't matter what cloud provider you use our technology gives you the luxury or I like to say breathing room in many cases to make those decisions so that they can align with your business outcomes more effectively all right so Joe the the product we're going to be talking a bit about is info scale for people that aren't familiar you know what is info scale how does it fit in this ever-changing landscape you mentioned you know cloud and operating systems and hypervisors and everything so help us tee up we're in for a scale fits sure thing so info scale is really a moniker if nothing else on top of our storage foundation veritos volume manager Veritas file system veritas cluster server technologies and those have been industry staples for decades right being able to address the needs of the most critical applications and so most stringent and high demanding workloads be at the top financial institutions health care providers etc the the technology itself really addresses resiliency and availability from sort of three areas we'd like to think that you can provide the ability to keep your services online with our with our high availability and disaster recovery solutions but we also wanna make sure that those applications and those data sets that you're using the technology with making sure that they're performing right because an underperforming application is just as detrimental to availability as would be a simply going offline and we also want to give you the ability to migrate workloads and move those applications among different technologies so that's really where the the focus of impost scalable it ok so you know Joe when you have customers that are trying to figure out ok I'm taking an application do I take that from my data center do I move that to the cloud I'm building a new application where do I do that how does in fel scale fit into that discussion and how is the discussion of info scale fit with the infrastructure discussion that they are having yeah absolutely so inevitably what the choice a lot of the customers I have conversations with struggle with just what's the first step to get to the cloud and many of them are locked into a proprietary solution or some technology that doesn't really have an analogue or some sort of equivalency in the cloud with info scale what we allowed them to do is actually replicate that data anywhere they want to go because you said we don't have a hardware agenda it doesn't matter what the storage underneath the covers might be so we can go from physical storage on Prem into the public cloud across any variety of different tiers of storage that exists there and this works at not just the from a data set standpoint but the applications as well so if you've got something as critical as a database a relational database that's Oracle them as a sequel database whatever may be you can very easily replicate those and move those workloads into the public cloud for purposes of migrations or disaster recovery with truth be told of the exact same thing you know migrations just a one-way ticket a dr is a roundtrip ticket but the technology is exactly the same so that's how you're able to achieve those goals ok we talked about application in general you mentioned some specific is there you know you know a compatibility list or you know what sorts of classes of applications how do I know if my application today is something that fits under this certainly so we have a catalogue of agents that we support what we call our bundled agents or agent framework and it it's a list of roughly over 500 different infrastructure components applications and services that we monitor and protect for the purposes of again for disaster recovery and migration capabilities pretty much all the enterprise applications the most prolific workloads that are in the in the industry today so are your databases or middleware to your application servers those are all included but we also have the ability to very easily introduce custom applications so a customer can take and say they may have written something homegrown and it has any number of different components to it if you could tell me how to start it how to stop it how to monitor it we can put it into info skill okay Joe I think we paint a pretty good picture of what info scale is maybe if you have a customer example that might help us understand a little bit about kind of the use cases and commonly why they're using it now that work well I can I have a little bit of an anecdote that I like to tell a story about a customer a state agency that was a big info scale user just happened to be on Windows and we've gotten through a deployment and everything was looking great and they were able to move all of their their their applications in this particular these Windows applications all in it being particularly info scale being replicated and having both high availability as well as disaster recovery and everything was looking great I finished the project on a Friday afternoon and bye-bye Sunday morning I was getting frantic phone calls from the people that I was working with at the time I was actually a consultant and they're asking me what what happened what's going on why what's what's what's the issue here I go I left the customer just fine on Friday there were no issues at all and they said you need to reach out to your team there and see what's going on so we're getting some phone calls that there's some problems like okay so I got on the phone and I spoke to my contact there and he said oh no nothing's wrong with the environment but we might have some issues with who's gonna be maintaining it come Monday morning and I go why it was well I think half the team well pretty much all the team's gonna be calling in rich Monday morning and I go what are you talking about goes the entire IT staff hit the Mega Millions jackpot so the this is the entire staff this was the DBAs the network admins the manager the managers manager all had the Mega Man jackpot so needless to say they weren't too concerned about coming into work on Monday morning but this poor person that was left he was holding the bag he said we already reached out to support your guys are on the call we're confident knowing that you know that that veritas is going to be there to help us through this transitional period because we've got this consistent layer so I used that example because it's a fantastic story but too it addresses the fact that disasters come in many different flavors and many different you know they can produce and manifest in many different ways and your people that to me that that's always your most critical asset and when those suffer that you know this technology is there really helped address me well Joe I like that example rather than I think going forward rather than saying well what happens if one of your critical staff gets hit by a bus yeah what if your entire support team you know it did happen all right what would you say are some of the kind of misconceptions that but maybe people don't understand if they're that they haven't look closely at in post-game lately yeah great question so I think some of the misconceptions about it is that it's tied to a very specific sort of heritage big iron unix only workloads admittedly we cut our teeth in that space right whether it's going back in the days of the original Sun OS and some of the the big iron systems we gained a lot of traction a lot of you know we earned our stripes in that space but in reality that that space is shrunk tremendously over the last you know 10 or 15 years for a variety of reasons and I think there's still some misconception that that info scale or veritas you know volume management file system only is relevant in that space and truth be told nothing could be further from nothing to be further from the truth because if you go back to what I comment I made earlier about this idea of commoditizing that infrastructure we can help customers transition throughout all those different sort of points of inflection so if going from the big iron to go into the more commodity commoditized you know x86 hardware going from physical to virtual going from virtual to the cloud going from virtual to hyper-converged and even back in some cases we have the capabilities and the wherewithal to be able to help customers do those kinds of transitions yeah I've been in the industry long enough I remember a lot of those UNIX migrations you know whether it going over to Windows whether I'm going over the Linux what would you say are some of the similarities some of the differences from what we did in those environments compared to what's often a cloud discussion today yeah so truth be told is that we we we tend to not reinvent the wheel at Veritas we look and say okay what are some of the really you know tremendously powerful tools and capabilities that we have how do we apply those to new platforms you take the cloud for example one of the things that we've always prided ourselves on is giving customers again that breathing room to make a decision and say I'm gonna move to a new platform so I can literally take a worker that was running on UNIX and I can move it over to Linux well that same model now can be applied where I can take that legacy work load running in Solaris I can move that directly into the public cloud and that's something that turns a lot of heads because I asked a lot of customers I know would it be compelling if I had a means for you to be able to take that legacy Solaris environment or that UNIX workload and I can write it directly into say ec2 in AWS and they're all there it's it's they're incredulous they're thinking no this can't happen there's no way you can do this and I said yes it can because we look at the cloud is another platform and we want to be able to have customers take full advantage of it exploit it but at the same time not be fearful that they won't have a way to move data in and out yeah oh it's Veritas helping with some of the the management pieces when you talk about going through those migrations it's one thing about what platform I live on but how do I manage that environment what skills that do I need yeah how are you working hand-in-hand with your customers on that well the great thing about it is is that there is a there's a sense of parity between what we do on Prem and what you do in the public cloud when you're using info scale because again we consume cloud resources just like they were any other platform so whether you were going from physical to virtual virtual to hyper converts or into the public cloud the same operations the same configurations the same the same scripts the same user interface all the things all of the the the machinery and the tooling that's around those applications can can can be consistent and in many cases that is it is invaluable because a lot of customers while they want to adopt the public cloud they don't want to have to redefine their operational paradigm they want to be able to take those workloads and I want to just be able to scoop them up and say put me in the public cloud I don't want to change everything around it because I don't have the bandwidth to do that to take on a whole new react of texture using the cloud that's that's basically starting your IT from from zero and building only backup and they don't have the time or the money or the resources to make that happen so looking for that consistency looking for that parity between the on-prem the public cloud all right what are some of the features that are most resonating with your customers well I would say first and foremost the the the fact that that our core technology around volume management helps you to virtualize storage all the capabilities you have there the fact that our file system can transition between different different Indians rate going from UNIX to Linux going from from Solaris to Red Hat and so on that gives you that flexibility our Hardware agnostic replication with volume replicator giving you the ability to not only provide dr over any geographic distance but also the ability to migrate between those platforms so being able to take and replicate data that's on a UNIX system today into the public cloud running Linux so that's with volume replicator we also have capabilities that allow you to utilize local storage in the sense that and treat it like it's shared storage some of the challenges with the public cloud are around some of the restrictive storage architectures so you take like a an availability zone inside of AWS all that storage is only available inside of at that particular availability zone if you want to move an application over to the other node you can't share storage between those availability zones we didn't focus Caleb you can and you can basically address some of those gaps or shoot through some of those blind spots yeah how was your team helping your customers keep up with all those changes you know we look at the public cloud there there's always new instances there's new zones there's it's it's a constant reinvention happening and day out yeah absolutely so a couple of things were happening first and foremost we're in the marketplace we have CF T's we've got you know a.m. eyes for that product so that you can further info scale so you can spin those up much more quickly working to get in the same thing for the azure marketplace we integrate with a lot of the automation and orchestration tools that are in the market today the ansible is the Puppets the chef's making sure that what I call the time to value for our technology is as short as possible so that you get out of the business of becoming you know a very tossed admin but focusing more on your on your business and what Veritas can do to help you improve that yeah it's interesting stuff a lot of automation going on in this space you know it's a very different world for your customers you know is is there some that you need to kind of react eight customers as do you know what Veritas is doing today versus what they might yeah there's there's a we're we're not your father's Veritas kind of mentality that we try to promote and I think you you've seen over the last 12 to 18 months that our our messaging our corporate strategy in general has had a tremendous sort of resurgence of info scale being a big part of that because recognize that when you talk about Veritas as a whole with our API strategy of availability protection and insights availability of your services in your data are critical to your success as an enterprise not just from an IT perspective and it's where info scale really plays sort of the the sort of the critical role in achieving that any other what sort of outcomes do you do your customers find once they've rolled these solutions out well I think operationally that there is a significant reduction in the overhead needed to make some of the more complex and and and really challenging operations you know cookie cutter I had a customer just last week you know this might sound like a little bit of you know self-promotion but he said storage foundation is the single greatest software-defined storage technology that's ever been written and because they are able to achieve a migration on a scale that they never would have been able to achieve without without a technology like this and of course I know there's no way to vet that statement but you're just going to if the customer is gonna has said it we will take them on there he did it it was I took pause I'm like wow I was like can I quote you on that he was just like yes you may Joe what else what other features underneath or kind of lesser-known things from info scale do you want to make sure customers know about oh yeah I mean listen there there are so many incredible capabilities that are included with info scale I would say that most important is that you know we can do things like transparently tear storage between on-prem and the public cloud and that can be something as granular as and as an Oracle database or something is you know general-purpose is just a shared you know NFS file system we have intelligent caching mechanisms to accelerate performance of workloads that again address the issues of performance on Prem as well as the public cloud we can help you transition your applications we have a migration wizard framework inside of our dashboard our info scale operations manager that allows you to on you know on the fly establish all of the necessary relationships between the different different clusters to be able to move applications from from from UNIX to the Linux move it from physical to virtual to go from a virtual and a hyper-converged we identify all those pieces and you know I said in an on-demand fashion build all the components for you we have you know a number of different you know what's most common talk about today is ransomware right this idea that how do we insulate our data from the from the threats of ransomware you can do so many different off host snapshot recovery method methodologies with info scale right creating an air gap between your data and secondary data sets that you can recover instantly from but has that enough gap so that that something that would corrupt the primary data set would not infiltrate your secondary copies so I mean there's just so many cool things that it can do it's just the use cases are just pretty you know innumerable yeah so last question Joe is a let's go up level a little bit you talk about you know the application portfolios really changing for a lot of customers lift relational databases we talked about you know virtual and physical and and cloud environments ever changing so when customers think about Veritas how should they when and how should they be thinking about Veritas well especially from from the from an availability standpoint it's really about abstracting your applications from the underlying infrastructure providing a resilient and performant storage layer to achieve really the the goals of your business not just the goals of your IT because at the end of the day we want to make sure that there is a direct line of sight between what you're trying to do is an enterprise what you're trying to do as a business be it a financial service institution healthcare provider doesn't matter what the industry is and that that the investments you make an IT can directly contribute to that and with Veritas we really help customers to make that a reality and we do it tactically with the idea of protecting your applications and ensuring that you have resilient services and we do it strategically by giving a platform to be able to host any number of different applications across all different operating systems and technologies so DeAngelo thank you so much for all the updates really a pleasure all right be sure to check out the cube net for all of the interviews we have go hit the search you can find past interviews we've done with Veritas as well as all the shows that we'll be at at 2020 and beyond I'm Stu minimun and thank you for watching the Q