>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, It's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. We're here at day one at VeeamON 2019. This is CUBE's 3rd year of doing VeeamON. We started in New Orleans, it was a great show. Last year was Chicago, and here, Miami at the Fontainbleau hotel. Marc Crespi is here, he's the vice president of sales engineering for the Americas at ExaGrid Systems Cube. Hello Marc, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks for coming on. So, give us the update. What's happening with ExaGrid? You guys got new headquarters in Marlborough. Marlborough's happening these days, right? We got the new shopping spa, and the mayor's going crazy, so give us the update on ExaGrid. >> Yes, so we just moved into a beautiful new headquarters in Marlborough and share it with some great other companies. The company continues to grow rapidly, double digit growth year over year, one of the few companies in this category that's growing that quickly. So everything's great. >> What's driving the growth? >> Well, customers are looking to fix the economics of backup. They've been spending too much money on it for a lot of years, so they look at products now, they want them to be simple, easy to use, and very cost-effective and we drive that trend very hard. >> Yeah I mean that doesn't really describe- what you just described, simple, easy to use, and cost-effective really doesn't describe backup for the past 20 years. So what are you doing specifically to make it simple, cost-effective, and easy to use? >> Well, first of all, by working with companies like Veeam. Veeam is a very easy-to-use product, it's very intuitive and then our product integrates very well with it so the products work together very well and makes just a very simple solution. >> What do you see as other big trends in backup? showed a slide today, 15 billion dollars. A big chunk of that, maybe close to half of it was backup and recovery, there's all kind of other stuff: data management, analytics, etc, etc, etc. What do you see, obviously cloud, you talked about the big superpowers, what are the big trends that are driving your business and more importantly, your customers transformation? >> Well, customers are looking to reduce the amount of data that they actually have to move. So, incremental technology's a really big- themes of pioneer in that, obviously doing incremental backups and that saves time and effort, saves space, along with data deduplication, it really makes for cost-effective storage solution. >> Talk a little bit more about why you're growing, how you sort of uniquely compete in the marketplace with some of the big whales. >> Sure, so our most unique feature is our architecture, and it has both technical aspects and economic aspects. Because we're a scale-out architecture, meaning that with every capacity increase of your data, we're not just adding storage, we're adding CompuPower network memory, etc. so that we keep the backup times very, very, very low. That also makes for a very cost-effective architecture because what we've done is you can scale out pretty much infinitely and we've also eliminated the concept of the end of a life of products. So we never force our customers into mandatory refreshes so their economics are very predictable over a long period of time. >> What do you see as the biggest use cases today that are driving your business? I mean, obviously, backup and recovery, I talked earlier about some of these emerging data management, cloud obviously, is this big, Edge, you seeing much going on there. What are some of those workloads and use cases that you see? >> I think probably one of the biggest use cases these days is what I would call instant recoveries, meaning that rather than doing a traditional restore, which could take a long number of minutes to hours. Customers will actually run production workloads off of the backup target as a way to get users back productive more quickly than would've been done in the past. >> Yeah, and that's key because you see in RPO and RTO's sort of companies putting more and more pressure on the IT groups to shrink those times, presuming you're seeing that in conjunction with digital, digital business, digital transformation. You talked about architecture before. What about your architecture and maybe with your partnership with Veeam allows customers to shrink those RPO and RTO times? >> I think the other aspect of our architecture that's very unique is what we called adaptive deduplication. One of the things we looked at when we architected the product was deduplication is obviously a very effective technology, but what are potential cons. Things that would make it less effective in backup. And one of the things we realized was if you put deduplication in the middle of the backup window and due to deduplication while the backups are running, then you could interfere with the speed of disk. So we do something called adaptive deduplication which means that we allow the object from the backup software to land and then we deduplicate and replicate them in parallel, but we make sure that we're not throttling the backups. So, we provide disk speeds even though we use deduplication. >> Okay. So, that's an example of one of the things you're doing to sort of improve it. How about Veeam integration? Is there anything specific there that you're doing that we should know about? >> Well, part of it is because of adaptive deduplication and because we maintain complete copies of backups. We uniquely support instant Veeam recovery like no other vendor can. Furthermore, we run what's called the Veeam data remover which is actually Veeam technology runs inside of our appliance and sets up a optimized communication protocol with the Veeam software that allows us to do a number of great things. >> Wait, double click on on that. So, is it an efficient protocol or is there other sort of accelerators that you've got in there? >> The protocol is optimized, and then we do some other acceleration around how you do synthetic folds and things of that sort that are unique to the data mover. >> And you have news with Veeam this week, do you not? >> Yes, we do. We're announcing something called ExaGrid backup with Veemam and what it is in a nutshell is the ability for a customer to purchase both technologies from their preferred reseller by just ordering one part number. So it dramatically simplifies the acquisition of the two technologies and allows customers to simplify the buying process. >> So Veeam, I know, is all channel sales. How about you guys? How do you go to market? >> We also are, yes. >> So, talk more about your go-to market. What do you have? Like, an overlay sales force that it helps facilitate? You got partners? Maybe you can talk more about your ecosystem. >> Well, we have a worldwide sales force and our sales people, the people that do the selling, work directly with our partners, so we don't have a specialized channel workforce, but we have a specialized channel strategy, and our entire sales team is very well trained on the channel, how to work with the channel, and make them happy and successful. >> So, backup for a long time time was kind of an afterthought. It was non-differentiated. You just did what you needed to make sure the devices could be recovered. >> Yeah, you bolted it on. >> You bolted it on. >> Right. >> Increasingly, it's becoming recognized as a central capability to any digital business, because if your data goes away or your data's no longer available, your digital business is gone. >> Right. >> That suggests we're going to get a greater degree of differentiation in the types of devices, in the types of systems, etc, that are going to become part of a backup solution. First of all, do you agree with that? And then secondly, go back to the use cases, where do you guys see yourselves fitting into that increasingly federated backup capability? >> Well, I certainly do agree with it. I mean, it's always been a necessity, but now even with things like Ransomware and the cryptoviruses, and things of that sort, it's even more important than it's ever been. It's no longer just data loss, etc. So, we fit into that trend and we'll continue to fit into that trend by continuing to drive the economics through the floor. Customers want that level of protection, it's a little bit like insurance. You need the protection, but you don't want to pay a dollar more than you have to, right? So you want to put it on an economic diet, and the way our technology evolves, we come out with denser, faster systems at a lower cost per terabyte just about every year. And we'll continue to do that. >> So do you anticipate then that there's going to be specialized use cases or are you just going after taking costs out of the equation? >> It's not so specialized because it's very horizontal. Everybody does it and everybody backs up all their data. So, we don't specialize in any one area of the data center like database or anything of that sort. We go wherever the customer needs us to go inside their data center. >> It's in the data center, sorry David, it's in the data center. >> In the data center, we also have a cloud offering, we have partners that will offer disaster recovery as a service, so they'll have data centers that manage on behalf of the customers, and we also have an offering that goes into Amazon web services. And, shortly, we'll be coming out with one for Azure. >> And that is what? A software based offering that uses the cloud as a target? >> Correct, it's a virtual appliance that you can replicate into the cloud. >> All right. We don't have much time left tonight, we have a really important topic to cover, which is, we talked about last year, but I want to bring it up again, which is sports. >> Yup. Why don't we talk Boston sports, we could talk about Warriors. I got a question for you, but- >> I'll watch >> I asked you last year, and I think it was May, we were in Chicago, I said "Would you have traded Tom Brady?" At a time when the sentiment was, he was done. And you said "No way, absolutely not." You, Peter McKay, and Patrick Osmond all said emphatically no, you made the right call. So good job. >> Thank you. >> Your thoughts? >> Would never trade him. He can play until he's 100 for all I care. As long as he keeps performing at such a high level, why would you lose him? >> And then, of course, the Red Sox, 108 wins, that was an amazing gift that they gave us. So, I don't know if you're a baseball fan. >> I am. >> All right, I got to ask you, Peter. Are the Warriors the greatest basketball team in the history of basketball? >> Well, let's see... >> Brendan says yes. >> They are the best basketball team at a time of the most competitive NBA. Some of the rules have changed, but the athletes are better, they're more conditioned, they are more knowledgeable by how to play this game, and they are the best team in basketball without Kevin Durant and without Boogie Cousins. >> Yeah. >> So ... hard to argue. >> They're sweeping Portland without Durant which is pretty amazing. So Brendan, for years, has been trying to tell me that. You know, Brendan is our local basketball genius so, I don't know. >> Now, would the Warriors have beaten say a Bill Russell Celtics team with the Celtics- Bill Russell Celtics team rules? Maybe not. >> Yeah, I don't know. I would say I'm starting to come around to Brendan's way of thinking. But, Marc, we'll give you the last word here. VeeamON 2019, great venue here in Miami, very hip, hip company, hip venue, ExaGrid growing, double digit growth rate, so congratulations on that. Your final thoughts? >> Just great to be here, I always like coming to Veeam events, they're always very well attended, I get to meet a lot of customers and really enjoy it. >> Marc Crespi, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Peter and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is VeeamON 2019 and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by VeeamOn. >> We're back. VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman and Marc Crespi is here. He's the Vice President of Sales Engineering at ExaGrid, another Mass boy. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again, Marc. >> Thanks, great to be with you guys again. Great to be on another fantastic VeeamOn in the world-class city of Chicago. >> Yeah, it's a great city. What's happening at VeeamOn for ExaGrid this year? >> Quite a few executive meetings, a lot of customer contact, existing customers, prospective customers, meeting with the joint sales teams and so on. We coordinate a lot with VeeamOn in the field and on an engineering level, so great to get off the phone and see each other face to face and really deepen the relationship. >> So, talk a little bit about what the conversation is like with customers, particularly as it relates to data protection. We're hearing a lot on cloud, multi-cloud, intelligent data management. What does that all mean to your customers? >> Sure. So, obviously VeeamOn provides a wealth of different functionality in all of those areas, whether it be the intelligent data management, which includes cloud components, et cetera. We at ExaGrid play a role, mostly on the on-premise side, to be honest, of the equation. And because we typically deal with a quite large customers, the use of the cloud is really, typically relegated for older, more archive oriented data, or long-term retention backup data than it is for primary data, or even primary copy for disaster recovery simply because of the logistics of managing that much data when you may need it. However, the cloud plays a very important role in those types of customers, as many of them have regulatory requirements, compliance requirements to keep data long-term that they may never need to access, or never need to touch. In which case tiering that out to the cloud is a potentially good strategy. >> Marc, one of the things we're watching at this show is how VeeamOn's trying to get deeper and broader into the enterprise. If you can, give us a little color as to how you're seeing, where is VeeamOn being successful, what are customers liking for that kind of solution? >> Sure. We're seeing a significant amount of traction with VeeamOn and enterprise customers. In fact, we met with a large travel agency out here at the show who's looking at both VeeamOn and ExaGrid as a combined solution. So we're working very closely. VeeamOn has a dedicated enterprise team in the field, and they're breaking down doors to a number of the different enterprises. And our solution, the way it scales and its performance profile is very well-suited to the enterprise. We are an enterprise-class company as well, so we're doing cross-introductions for each other and to each other's enterprise customer base as we go. >> Talk a little bit more about your solution, where the sweet spot is. We always talk about horses for courses on theCUBE. >> Marc: Sure. Yeah. >> What's your favorite course? >> So, we define a target customer, the first demographic that we use is typically the amount of data they have under management. Put another way, the amount of primary data they have, or the utilization on their primary storage. And where we typically live, these days is 50 terabyte is kind of the low end, all the way up to multiple petabytes of data being backed up. And we can store many, many weeks, or months, or years of that data because of the data deduplication impact. But that's our sweet spot. And typically that's the most key demographic for us to look at, is how much data they're managing. >> And you're an infrastructure provider, obviously. You have software, but you don't do backup software. That's not your specialty, right? >> That's correct. That's one of the reasons we have such a close relationship with VeeamOn. And, quite honestly, we partner with a number of folks, but VeeamOn is clearly one of our key, if not our key partner because they provide the data protection functionality, the management, et cetera, and we provide the intelligent hyperconverged secondary storage that can store all of that data, deduplicate it, replicate it, and also provide, uniquely, I might add; support for some of VeeamOn's really critical features, like Instant VM Recovery and Virtual Lab and SureBackup. Because of the way our product is architected those features work extremely well with us, where in some cases, in some solutions they don't quite work as well. >> I think back to a number of years ago deduplication was all the talk in the storage industry. How are the latest trends in everything from Flash's adoption, NVMe, and NVMe over fabric coming soon, how's that going to impact what customers are doing in your space? >> Sure, so first I'll tackle the deduplication part of it. There's no question that it's now become an accepted norm. It's rare these days that you're explaining what it is, or what it does. But there still is one left over misconception that I think it's really important for all of us who have deduplication to educate customers. And that is that not every type of deduplication is created equal. Sometimes people conflate it with compression. You know, all compression's kind of the same to a certain extent. The way deduplication is implemented, there are certain characteristics that will either increase the amount of data reduction you get or lessen the amount of data reduction you get. For customers it's really important to know what type of algorithm you're dealing with 'cause that's going to translate to cost over the long term. So that's the first thing. The other trends, the adoption of Flash and so on, really has been more on the primary storage side, where that level of performance is required for high transaction, high performance requiring applications and so on. Because Flash remains quite a bit more expensive than spinning disc is, it's inroads into backup or secondary storage have been somewhat more on a limited basis. >> So, if I understand you correctly, a large part of the data reduction is a function of the algorithm... I don't want to say not so much the workload, but I was always under the impression that the workload determined the sort of data reduction efficacy. >> Marc: Sure. >> Which I'm sure is true, but you're saying the algorithm also has a huge impact. >> It's a combination. So, there's no question that certain data types deduplicate extremely well, other types not as well, and some not at all. You know, pre-compressed, pre-encrypted data tends not to deduplicate well at all. Where the algorithm comes in is there's a couple of elements, not to get to get too much in the weeds, but something called block size, which is basically the size of the objects that you examine when you deduplicate, and then whether or not you do what's called variable-length analysis, which is adjusting to the fact that the data is expanding and shrinking as it's changing. Algorithm's that implement very large block sizes and avoid variable-length technology are going to get much lower deduplication ratios than algorithms that implement both of those elements, smaller object sizes, and variable-length technology. And we're in the latter category of the more aggressive form of deduplication. >> So, you've got greater granularity and the greater ability to drive data reduction ratios, assuming the workload is favorable to that. >> Exactly right. If you were to compare the same workload across the two algorithms, the less aggressive and the more aggressive, the more aggressive is going to do better on that workload than the less aggressive. >> And again, I know it depends on the workload, but are we talking about on a percentage basis 10% better, 20%, 50%, a 100%? >> Marc: Multiples better. Some cases five to 10 times better. >> Even an order of magnitude in some cases. >> Marc: An order of magnitude better, yes, in some cases. >> What about encryption? What's the state of encryption these days? What are you advising customers with regard to encryption? >> Well, for years we've been under the impression that everything's going to have to be encrypted at some point. It's been a slow journey. You know, there's PCI compliance, HIPPA compliance. Obviously, there's been some pretty infamous hacks that have happened and so on. So the way we look at encryption, we have encryption solutions, self-encrypting appliances, and we recommend to customers, even if you don't need encryption today, if there is a slight chance that you'll need it in the future, then go with our encrypting line of appliances. The cost difference is nominal. It's in single-digit, low single-digit percentages, and it's there when you need it. So you don't have to potentially swap after that. We also do encryption any time we move data over the LAN. So we're fully ready for all of these compliances. It's certified encryption, you know, federal level certification, et cetera, so-- >> Yeah, Marc, let us know what companies aren't aware of the need for encryption and I'm going to short those stocks. (laughing) >> Okay, you got it. Yeah, you might want to change your bank. >> All right. Got to ask you. Brady, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> Absolutely not. >> That's unanimous, there. Three for three on that. >> Absolutely, no. >> Okay, why not? What would the rationale be? >> I think he's got a lot more to give yet. I think it would have been on par with the Babe Ruth trade. It would have been a historical disaster. You know, he got us to the Super Bowl last year. Granted, Philly inched us out, but I still think he's the GOAT and he's going to stay the GOAT. >> Giselle said Tom Brady can't catch the ball. I would say also, he can't play defense, so-- >> I would agree with that as well. >> All right, what about Garoppolo? Do you think it was the right move to hold onto him, essentially as an insurance policy in case Brady went down before the trade deadline, or should they have been more proactive and gotten more for him? >> I think it probably would have been the right move for the Patriots to hang on to Garoppolo, however, for Garoppolo himself, and for the fact that they needed to get at least something for him, I think it was the right move at the right time. He needs to play. He's a great quarterback. He's already turning that San Francisco franchise around. >> Right. >> So I'm happy to see him play. I actually now start watching 49ers games 'cause I want to root for him. >> Me, too. I'm a fan of Garoppolo. >> Marc: He's a son of the Patriots. >> I agree. I think it was the smart move, Stu to keep him as an insurance policy, just in case. You don't know. I mean, Brady, you know, 40 plus years old. I mean, look what happened last year. >> It's the economics, Dave, though. They weren't going to pay him what he needed to be able to be a backup, and I agree with Marc. He was ready to play, obviously and it is fun to watch him on the 49ers. >> No, we agree. One of 'em had to go, right? Okay, and now we're three for three. So Peter McKay, Patrick Osborne, and now Marc Crespi all say Brady should stay. Right move. We'll see. Hey, they're the favorite to win the Super Bowl next year. Hopefully, they can get there. >> Sounds like I'm in good company. >> Marc, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's always a pleasure to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE, from VeeamOn 2018. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Marc Crespi is here, he's the vice president of SEs at Exagrid Systems, big partner of Veeam's, big presence on the show floor here. Mark, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So what's doing with Exagrid, we were talking off camera, kind of know you guys a little bit, you guys are right around the corner from us in Massachusetts, but give us the update in the company and what's new? >> Yeah, be happy to. So, first I'd like to thank Veeam for putting on a terrific show, and it's great to be in the beautiful city of New Orleans with you guys. So, if you look at the Exagrid business, Exagrid is a leader in disbase backup with data deduplication business. And we've been a Veeam partner for a decade now, and right from the early days when we started talking and working with Veeam, we realized that our two architectures had a natural fit. So when we talked to joint Veeam customers, whether they're new customers or existing customers, they're experiencing an exponential benefit over just using Veeam with some other disk player as result. If you look at how our business has evolved over the last decade or so, we were originally in the tape replacement business, you know, the dinosaur tape libraries that were still roaming the earth back then, and what we find now is, a lot of customers have moved on from tape, tape is a minority of the backup storage media that we see in the market today. And most of our business in fact is replacing other disk based implementations, either with or without native data deduplication, about 80% of our business now. And it's all the names you hear in the disk based backup with data deduplication market that we're replacing. We've also grown from a company that initially focused on midsized enterprise to now an enterprise class built product and company. So if you look at our average sale, our average customer size, it has grown exponentially over the past several years. And our sales force has grown over 500% just in the last two to three years itself, so we're in a high growth mode, we're experiencing a lot of success and much of our business is, a significant portion of our business is working with either existing or new Veeam customers. >> And a lot of the growth is coming from replacing existing, what's generally referred to as purpose built backup appliances, is that correct? >> That is correct, and the reason that we're seeing that phenomenon is when we sat down and created our architecture, we looked at the legacy of tape and what was wrong with tape. Well tape wasn't very mechanical, it was unreliable, but it also suffered from a vicious cycle of grow, break, replace. So, all our customer data is growing 20, 30% a year, which means your data's doubling every 2.5 to three years. And whatever you're backing up to, you're going to outgrow it. And you're going to ultimately have to replace it in its entirety. And you've got those precious IT budget dollars that you'd like to spend on other initiatives, and you're rebuying your backup storage just to tread water before you even get around to spending on the expansion. So we said that problem needs to be eliminated entirely, and the only way you can eliminate that problem, is by having a highly scalable architecture that never requires forklift upgrade. So if you look at our technology and why we're able to replace incumbent vendors, we're typically finding a frustrated customer who's been through two or three forced refreshes, either 'cause they outgrew technology or the vendor forced them to to outgrow technology by end of lifing et cetera, which we don't do, we don't end of life any of our products, and therefore they lift their head to say, well before I just spend all these dollars again, plus expansion, why don't I go back into the market and see if anyones figured out a better way to do this, and that's where we come in. We come in and show them that you can start with the footprint you need and then you can expand infinitely and we're never going to force you to buy what you already own, so, it marries up much more closely with the lifespan customer customers want for backup storage than the lifespan vendors want for back up storage. >> Marc, can you unpack that a little bit for us, I think about VM where it was an example of how we avoided having to do certain upgrades. I think of operating systems, or servers that were end of life, stick it into VM, I could grow and expand, but when I think about Gear, there's all sorts of reasons why just the exponential growth of, you know, different media types, different sizes that we need to take, that how come you can do this, while others, you know, force those upgrades. >> That's a great question, so I'd compare and contrast a little bit with virtualization, what virtualization brought to the table was, it allowed you to take a set of computing resources and make sure it was fully utilized, right, so if you had a server, you were running one application on it, maybe it was only 30% utilized, you had spare storage, you had spare compute, so what virtualization allowed you to do was add applications that were segmented, and therefore they could run without conflict and you could get that hardware fully utilized. This is a little bit different in that, if you think about what backup really is, on a nightly or weekly basis, even with some of the modern backup techniques that have come out, customers are moving large amounts of data, and it has to be within a certain window of time, because they don't want backups running during productions hours, because that can impact network performance, server performance, et cetera. The other side of the equation is when they want something back they want it back fast. So in order to achieve that, we made two architectural differences, on a scalability side, we said that the legacy storage architectures that typically, utilize a fixed amount of compute, and then expand by simply adding storage, missed the point that when you add workload to a system, but you don't add power to that system, performance at the same time, everything that system does is going to take longer. So, if I have a certain amount of data, and I have a certain amount of compute, and then I double my data, but I don't double my compute, my memory and my networking, naturally everything that system's doing going to take twice as long. So we recognized that you needed a grid based architecture, or a cluster based architecture, that said, when my data doubles, I'll double the storage, but I'm also going to double the compute, the network, the memory, et cetera, at the same time. So if I have a very short backup window day one, with an Exagrid implementation, and my data doubles, I have that very same backup window, I have the very same recovery time. I have the very same replication time, all the things that a disk based backup appliance do, grow linearly with Exagrid. >> And you're saying other architectures had to wait for intel? >> That's a great point, yes, they rely very much on the compute. Now there's implementations where Flash is being added to try and speed up processes, et cetera, which sounds like a great idea, 'cause Flash is obviously a very useful technology in the storage industry, but when you look at the pricing of backup infrastructure, Flash breaks the model for that, for backup infrastructure. It makes the products more expensive and its unnecessary if you implement things correctly. >> Because FAT Disk is still cheaper than cheap Flash, is that right? >> Spinning disk is still about a sixth to an eighth the cost of Flash. >> Now, I wonder if can go back, I want to pick your technical brain for a minute. So you mentioned tape replacement, and then, as I recall the ascendancy of we can call them purpose built backup appliances, I think it's an IDC term or whatever, but we'll use that. A big part of the value proposition was plugging directly, looking like tape, so you didn't have to rip and replace your processes, and I remember Avomar was trying to convince the market that no, you have to change your processes, and people were like, conceptually that sounds good, but its too disruptive for me, so where were you guys on that curve? Do you look like tape, are you easy to pop in or? >> Proud to say we look nothing like tape. >> Okay, so that was a head wind for you early on, right? But it's really benefited you down the road, is that fair to say? >> If it was a head wind, it was a breeze, okay, and what I mean by that is, the technology we're referring to is VTL, Virtual Type Library, and in the very early days of the market, there were some legacy environments typically Fibersand type environments, where you had to make your disk look like tape so that the customer could transition, especially larger customers where, you know, change is harder, radical change is harder to make quickly. So VTL provided a sort of bridge, or transition technology over a period of time. We're through that phase of the market. >> Dave: But it was a band aide? >> It was very much a band aide. >> But you say it was a breeze, but Data Domaine got two thirds of the market, so, I mean... >> Yeah, but it wasn't because of their VTL. >> Dave: It wasn't. >> No, that was a result of there were still some Fiber environments out there, and they decided to cover that part of the market. We looked at the percentage of the market that we thought would need that, both in the early days but more, even more forward looking, you know, everything about our architecture is quite a bit more forward looking than the people we're competing against. And we realized that the investment it would take to do that, would eventually be wasted because it would go away, and heres why, if you look at what Veeam's software does with instant VM recovery and synthetic fulls and, sureback, and virtual lab, et cetera, when you make a disk look like tape, you lock yourself into the Fred Flinstone era of backup. In other words, you can't take advantage of any of the advanced features in that software, because tape couldn't support those features. And as far as the software knows, it thinks it's talking to a tape library, so it's doing silly things like saying fast forward, rewind, eject with disk. If you think about it, you can almost do a stand up set. >> Dave: Hey, your sequential... >> You know, picking on this, right. So what we said is, that's going to go away, it's very clear with what the software folks are doing, especially Veeam, that that's going to go away. Now, I realize Veeam recently added tape capability, but the reason for that is, not because its a primary backup media, it's because for customers that have, you know, infinite retention, or seven, eight, 10 year retention... >> Dave: They need an offsite tape option. >> They need an economic option. It's not that they like it, because we actually have a lot of conversations with customers, even with that longer term retention where they at least want to explore the economics of disk, but in some instances, even though they hate it, and they grin and bare it, they go with tape just purely economically. >> Right, so early days was, hey don't change anything about your software, keep the Fred Flinstone software and all your processes associated with that, and then, of course VM Ware changed everything. >> Marc: Right, and then graduate to the modern... >> Okay, and then the other big, sort of intern scenario, they used to argue about Dedupe rates, and I presume it's the work load and the nature of the data that determines that, not necessarily the technology, but maybe not, maybe there's some nuance on. >> It's a little bit of both. So a responsible deduplication vendor's going to ask the customer a number of questions about the make up and the nature of their data, okay, however, there's also a lot of aspects to which algorithm you use that are going to drive that. So, if you don't implement a very strong aggressive deduplication algorithm, your result is going to be lower, and we find in many of the software based implementations, and some of the appliance vendors, that they took shortcuts on the algorithms itself. Either because they were compute bound or you might be running it on a standard Windows server which is not optimized to run a really strong algorithm, and therefore where, we may say at 12 weeks of retention, you can get about 20 to one, they're getting six or seven to one, and in some cases they're recommending just put straight disk behind the software, well you end up with disk sprawl, because you're keeping all of this retention but you're not reducing the data enough, so you've got disk everywhere. >> Okay, so the quality of the data reduction algorithms matter, okay, and then the other arguments used to be inline or post process, Frank Luptin used "Oh that crappy post process..." >> Marc: I don't remember when he said that. >> Yeah, and weigh in on that. >> So, we kind of agree. Not that inline is better but that parallelization is better so we actually invented a third way called Adaptive Deduplication. Which basically, what that does is, it allows the chunks of data to land into our box first, and then we begin deduplicating, and replicating and parallel, right. So, we're doing it at the same time, but we're not doing it inline. And we monitor utilization of the system and we favor the backup window, so if think our deduplication is going to slow the back window down, we throttle back a bit. If we have plenty of resources, we crank away at the deduplication and replication. So we eliminated the potential drawbacks of post process, we eliminated the potential drawbacks of inline, and the biggest drawback of inline is that, when you go to recover a system and you think about Veeam's instant VM recovery, if you boot a virtual machine, we have that virtual machine in its entirety in a high speed cache, so it's up in seconds. So I was talking to a customer of ours at our booth who recovered an exchange server recently by booting it off of a Exagrid in about five minutes, right. If you tried to do that out of a dedupe, a device that only has inline deduplicative data, you're looking at hours to maybe even a day. Now you're CEO's not going to be too happy when they can't do email for a day, so I would recommend a high speed cache. >> Marc, Exagrid's been a partner with Veeam for a lot of this journey that Veeam's been on for the last 10 years. Here at the show, they've been talking about where the next 10 years are going, everything cloud, and expanding what they're doing, as you look forward, any announcements this week or as you look forward as a partnership, where do you see things growing? >> We don't have any specific announcements this week, I would refer folks to our website, we just recently announced our 5.0 release, it includes some pretty important things. One of the things it includes is, integration with Veeam's scale out backup repository, which dramatically simplifies the use of multiple Veeam repository's with Veeam's software. We also announced an offering for AWS we think that's appropriate for some customers, not all necessarily, where we can put a virtual appliance on Amazon, and in the cloud realm, there's no question that customers are going to continue to explore the cloud model for both efficiency, operational, expense versus capital, but there's going to be multiple cloud models, for example we partnered with a company, who's here, who you may have spoken to Offsite Data Sync. So if the customer doesn't want to do Amazon for some reason, then Offsite Data Sync will offer them the very same service with Exagrid technology and an operational expense model. And they've been a very good partner of ours as well. >> And the virtual appliance in AWS how does that work? You pop it in a COLO facility or? >> No, you literally, you load it into Amazon like you would any other Amazon machine instance, and it behaves just like a second data center. So you replicate to it, and it can store all of your offsite data, and then when you need it back, you can recover it provided bandwidth is adequate. >> So, I access the instance from the AWS marketplace, or? >> No, we actually provide it directly. >> Oh, okay. >> Through reseller network. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I appreciate you by the way taking me down memory lane and sort of educating us on... >> Marc: Love talking about this stuff. >> Now, so, a lot of things we talked about are old news, to sort of set the context. Where are we today, what is the state of the market and the competitive differentiators that customers really care about? >> I think that we're at the state of the market where people are frustrated with a lot of legacy approaches, whether it's on the backup software side or the backup storage side. The licensing models are expensive, the vendors are gouging them, because they're trying to keep revenue, and they're worried about, you know, the players that are becoming the replacement players like Veeam, like Exagrid. So we're at point now where I see more activity of customers looking for alternatives to what they're running today than maybe in history of backup. You know, people always used to say, backup apps are very sticky, they're very hard to replace, well, look at what Veeam's been able to accomplish. Backup storage is very hard to replace, once it's installed. Well if you force a customer every three years to respend the money they already spent, plus more, you're creating a vent where that customers going to get frustrated and they're going to go out and look at alternatives. So I think we're at a point now where more so than ever, customers are looking for alternatives that stop the madness of backup spending, and stop the madness of backup performance degradation. >> Yeah, we had Dave Russel on yesterday and in his last magic quadrant, you probably read it, I think one of his strategic planning assumptions was 50% of the customers out there are going to replace or sunset their existing backup architecture in the next two years. I mean, that's a massive number, so, and obviously a huge opportunity for you and for Veeam. >> Yeah, I'm honored to be talking to Dave later today. >> Well Marc, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCube, it was really a pleasure. >> Thank you guys, it's been fun. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest after this short break. (techno music)