>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE in Las Vegas. VMworld 2018. Three days wall-to-wall coverage with two sets. We've got about 95 guests and so many sessions that people go to in this, happy to have one of the sessions that just went on come to give you a view into what people attending VMworld are talking about. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Justin Warren. Happy to welcome back to the program Sazzala Reddy, who's the Chief Technology Officer with Datrium. He's brought a customer along with him. His name is also Stuart like mine, spelled the proper Scottish way S-T-U-A-R-T, Lewallen, who is the Data Center Team Lead with Sonoma County. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Stuart, we're going to get to the tech and your role, but first of all Sonoma County. Some, I guess, interesting might not be the right thing to say, but it's been a lot of activity going on. Maybe you can share what's been happening in your neck of the woods. >> Last October, we had a little bit of excitement. We had some wildfires roll through. Burned about 140 square miles. Burned a little bit over 5,000 houses. Unfortunately, 42 people lost their life in the disaster. A lot of lessons were learned from that. >> Horrific. We've seen what's happened. I've got a lot of friends and some family in California. We've seen people far and wide that have been effected. How were you involved with this and I know you talked a little bit about it in your session? >> I was wakened in the middle of the night by a page, somebody letting me know hey, we got a problem here. They were telling me they were already evacuating. At that point, I knew it was something serious so I started getting my family ready for evacuation. Started trying to gather news about what was actually going on and what I had found was the fire had started in Napa County and was being driven by 16 mile an hour winds. It had moved 12 miles in the first three hours. Nobody was able to get a handle on it. Nobody really even knew which way it was going. That's what our emergency operations center was trying to track is where is it and where is it headed to try to get people there. >> We have a bit of familiarity with wildfires in Australia. It's well-known, it's horrific to be involved with. Tell us a little bit about how you were managing that situation day to day. What does that actually do to your normal day, it just goes out the window. What did that feel like, what was that like when you were in that situation? >> That's a fantastic question. My entire team was scattered all over Northern California. I was in San Anselmo, one of my guys was in Fresno, one of the guys had packed up his trailer and went to the beach. One of the guys was in an evacuation center and everybody was ready to go. Everybody was scattered. The county center, the fires had gotten within three blocks of our data center, so the county center had been evacuated and they wouldn't let us back. Everybody was working remote. That mostly worked OK, but again, we had a lot of learning points. From the after action, we learned a lot from what worked well and what didn't. >> Sazzala, people often talk about the human things, but technology's a lot of times involved in a lot of these emergencies, disaster recovery. I remember numerous times in my career when I worked on the vendor side where SWAT teams are helping and you've got the base product, but bring us in as to how technology plays in. >> If you talk to anybody and say what's your dream plan of DR, they can draw a nice picture, but the reality is it can be too expensive. Even if the money's not the problem, then it's painful to set up and it's fearful when you have a problem. You have fear, like is it going to work for me? If you still look at the innovation in the last decade, there was deduplication, VMware has changed infrastructure, cloud is here, AI is here, but still DR happens to be still one of those not moved forward in terms of innovation. That's something where we see the opportunity for us to help customers take to the next level. >> That's true, and maybe you can bring that in of going well how did Datrium actually help you in this situation with that DR aspect? What did that look like? >> During the event, there was really not a lot of involvement of Datrium other than the fact that one of their field engineers emailed me and said hey, do you need anything? Anything at all. I'll bring you a generator, water, food, whatever you need. Which was fantastic, you think who does that? Datrium does. Sorry, I had to get a little plug in there for you guys. Very happy with that. But, in the aftermath, when we were evaluating what we did good and what we did bad, what needs improvement and how do we do that? That's where they really came in and helped us. Helped us to get an easy way to move our data offsite. That was a fantastic product, and that's one we just started using and recently came out is the ability to back-up local data to AWS in a very simplistic way. >> If you have a data center, you also have a second data center most people set up so they can do DR for it. It's an expensive operation. It just sits there, does nothing, and then waiting for one day to show up and be used magically. If you change anything here, you got to go change something there. It is untenable kind of a model. It's a cost center for a CIOs. A lot of people I talk to, that's an easy one to eliminate and get rid of it. The cloud is here, let's take advantage of it. It's an on-demand infrastructure. Let's use that leverage for doing disaster recovery in the cloud. Because it's expensive, as you all know, cloud. There's a 80-page manual for AWS, just for pricing. It's expensive but for a week or two weeks of disaster, it is a perfectly awesome use case. There are a few things you need. It has to work well, it has to be cost effective, and it has to be operationally consistent. What I mean by that is that if you move from your workloads from your data center to the public cloud, it has to look the same. If it looks different from you, then you're not going to use it. Fundamentally, that's a thing where we have helped is that how do we bring that, how do you do back-ups to the cloud? How do you think about the orchestration software and how does that work? How do you bring up the workloads in the cloud so that it looks similar when you move from here to there? To some degree, cloud is a commodity, right? Let's use it that way. Let's take advantage of the hybrid cloud because it's already there. This is what Datrium is doing. >> A few more things that came out of our experience was we realized that failover had to be simple. The reason it had to be simple was exactly what I said before. You have no idea who you're going to have on your staff that's able to pull the trigger on this. It can't be some complex thing that only two people in your organization can do and it takes three days just to get it kicked off. It's got to be a push button, it really does these days. To make it effective. And it's got to be able to be tested. You've got to be able to validate that it's going to work. You can't wait and just hope and pray that when that day comes that it's going to work. I think, finally, it's got to be affordable. If it's not in your budget, it's not even a starter. You're going back to scripts and people running things. >> (laughing) The idea that you have to hope that that script that you wrote once is actually going to work in the middle of that disaster. You're going, oh yeah, that's right, I forgot to fix that bug. It's not something that you really want to do. Just being able to rely on something in that situation is really important. Stuart, you mentioned something before we went on to camera that you were quite interested in, which is coming from Datrium, which is around that movement of data into the cloud. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what that feature is and why you find it interesting. >> Think of it as like on offsite tape back-up, that's basically what it replaced. We used to spend, back in the day when we had mainframes, we spent a bazillion dollars having tapes shipped offsite. That's what everybody did back in the day. Then you went to on-site tapes that got moved, and then you went to disk arrays and you went to a remote disk array. That's kind of how things have transitioned and now instead of having a disk array somewhere else, why not just put it up in the cloud? AWS is very money-efficient as far as putting data there. If you don't need to do anything with it, which is what you're describing is your offsite back-up, it's a fantastic use case. >> This feature's coming out soon, I believe? >> It's coming out soon, we announced it-- >> And I'm sorry, I missed what it's called. >> Sorry? >> The feature? >> Yes, it's going to come out, it's called CloudShift. >> Thank you. >> It's going to be happening pretty soon. We're announcing it today. We have some demos in our booth, you can come by and check it out. If you look at applications, most people think about the application life cycle. There is the running of applications at high-performance, there's backing it up, and then doing DR. That's how the life cycle is. But if you look at the, no company has solved it end to end. I don't know why, but everybody seems to be doing piecemeal solutions, so you end up with five different products in your data center and they work together very well. Then you pray, like Murphy's Law, that it's all going to work together for you, when you actually have a problem, to get it resolved. That's kind of hoping for things to work well for you. >> Stuart, now you like five different products, right? >> No. (all laughing) I like one different product. The reality is everything's been cobbled together for years. Truly, if it was that simple, I'd be doing something else probably, they wouldn't pay me to do what I do. In this particular case, it's got to be simple. You can't rely on having your best or any particular people there in an emergency, so it's got to be simple. Has to be. >> Yeah. >> Having that (mumbles) platform really changes the game, basically. >> Stuart, talk to us, what are you looking for from the vendor community going forward? We talked about this one feature. Anything else on your wish list to make things simpler, as you've said, I think is one of the key criteria that you're looking for? >> You see all the commercials these days. Make it simple. People have simple buttons and everybody wants push button, everybody wants it simple. They want to make technology simple for everybody, for the average person. I think it's a laudable effort. I think that's where it has to go. It can't be all complex and it can't be the old days where you had guys that they were the only guys that knew anything and they became indispensable. These days, everybody has to know how to do things. You can't rely on one person cause, God forbid, what if they get hit by a bus? What if they just go to a different company and then you're left with this big hole? Simplicity is the key to any organization, really. >> You know what's simpler than one click? Zero clicks. Because one click requires you to read the manual. You'll just see what does it do for me? That's something, how we think about it, really try hard to do zero click. But it's very hard, though, because you have to build a lot more things into the system to imagine how this is going to work for the customer and imagine the best case scenario for the customer. >> It's certainly something, we're seeing a trend in a lot of companies here is automation and actually taking all of that manual effort out of things and having that automation actually be baked into the product as well, rather than relying on customers to have to automate their own environment. It just comes with it, which goes to that we just want an easy button. We want to have something which I don't even have to press the button, it presses its own buttons. >> We're living in the age of convenience. >> Yeah. >> (mumbles) Amazon to ship us products before we know it. (all laughing) >> I'll subscribe to that. >> I shudder to think what my house would fill up with there. (all laughing) >> Excellent. Sazzala and Stuart, really appreciate you giving the update. Stuart, we hope that things with the wildfires settle down, we know it's been challenging to deal with there. Thanks so much for sharing the story. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely. Justin Warren, and I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from VMworld 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)