(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS storage day. My name is Dave Vellante and we're here from Seattle. And we're going to look at the really hard workloads, those business and mission critical workloads, the most sensitive data. They're harder to move to the cloud. They're hardened. They have a lot of technical debt. And the blocker in some cases has been storage. Ashish Palekar is here. He's the general manager of EBS snapshots, and he's joined by Cami Tavares who's a senior manager of product management for Amazon EBS. Folks, good to see you. >> Ashish: Good to see you again Dave. >> Dave: Okay, nice to see you again Ashish So first of all, let's start with EBS. People might not be familiar. Everybody knows about S3 is famous, but how are customers using EBS? What do we need to know? >> Yeah, it's super important to get the basics, right? Right, yeah. We have a pretty broad storage portfolio. You talked about S3 and S3 glacier, which are an object and object and archival storage. We have EFS and FSX that cover the file site, and then you have a whole host of data transfer services. Now, when we think about block, we think of a really four things. We think about EBS, which is the system storage for EC2 volumes. When we think about snapshots, which is backups for EBS volumes. Then we think about instant storage, which is really a storage that's directly attached to an instance and manages and then its life cycle is similar to that of an instance. Last but not the least, data services. So things like our elastic volumes capability of fast snapshot restore. So the answer to your question really is EBS is persistent storage for EC2 volumes. So if you've used EC2 instances, you'll likely use EBS volumes. They service boot volumes and they service data volumes, and really cover a wide gamut of workloads from relational databases, no SQL databases, file streaming, media and coding. It really covers the gamut of workloads. >> Dave: So when I heard SAN in the cloud, I laughed out loud. I said, oh, because I could think about a box, a bunch of switches and this complicated network, and then you're turning it into an API. I was like, okay. So you've made some announcements that support SAN in the cloud. What, what can you tell us about? >> Ashish: Yeah, So SANs and for customers and storage, those are storage area networks, really our external arrays that customers buy and connect their performance critical and mission critical workloads. With block storage and with EBS, we got a bunch of customers that came to us and said, I'm thinking about moving those kinds of workloads to the cloud. What do you have? And really what they're looking for and what they were looking for is performance availability and durability characteristics that they would get from their traditional SANs on premises. And so that's what the team embarked on and what we launched at reinvent and then at GEd in July is IO2 block express. And what IO2 block express does is it's a complete ground app, really the invention of our storage product offering and gives customers the same availability, durability, and performance characteristics that can, we'll go into little later about that they're used to in their on premises. The other thing that we realized is that it's not just enough to have a volume. You need an instance that can drive that kind of throughput and IOPS. And so coupled with our trends in EC2 we launched our R5b that now triples the amount of IOPS and throughput that you can get from a single instance to EBS storage. So when you couple the sub millisecond latency, the capacity and the performance that you get from IO2 block express with R5b, what we hear from customers is that gives them enough of the performance availability characteristics and durability characteristics to move their workloads from on premises, into the cloud, for the mission critical and business critical apps. >> Dave: Thank you for that. So Cami when I, if I think about how the prevailing way in which storage works, I drop off a box at the loading dock and then I really don't know what happens. There may be a service organization that's maybe more intimate with the customer, but I don't really see the innovations and the use cases that are applied clouds, different. You know, you live it every day. So you guys always talk about customer inspired innovation. So what are you seeing in terms of how people are using this capability and what innovations they're driving? >> Cami: Yeah, so I think when we look at the EBS portfolio and this, the evolution over the years, you can really see that it was driven by customer need and we have different volume types and they have very specific performance characteristics, and they're built to meet these unique needs of customer workloads. So I'll tell you a little bit about some of our specific volume types to kind of illustrate this evolution over the years. So starting with our general purpose volumes, we have many customers that are using these volumes today. They really are looking for high performance at a low cost, and you have all kinds of transactional workloads and low-latency interactive applications and boot volumes, as Ashish mentioned. And they tell us, the customer is using these general purpose volumes, they tell us that they really like this balanced cost and performance. And customers also told us, listen, I have these more demanding applications that need higher performance. I need more IOPS, more throughput. And so looking at that customer need, we were really talking about these IO intensive applications like SAP HANA and Oracle and databases that require just higher durability. And so we looked at that customer feedback and we launched our provisioned IOPS IO2 volume. And with that volume, you get five nines of durability and four times the IOPS that you would get with general purpose volumes. So it's a really compelling offering. Again, customers came to us and said, this is great. I need more performance, I need more IOPS, more throughput, more storage than I can get with a single IO2 volume. And so these were talking about, you mentioned mission critical applications, SAP HANA, Oracle, and what we saw customers doing often is they were striping together multiple IO2 volumes to get the maximum performance, but very quickly with the most demanding applications, it got to a point where we have more IO2 volumes that you want to manage. And so we took that feedback to heart and we completely reinvented the underlying EBS hardware and the software and networking stacks. And we'll launched block express. With block express, you can get four times the IOPS throughput and storage that you would get with a single io2 volume. So it's a really compelling offering for customers. >> Dave: If I had to go back and ask you, what was the catalyst, what was the sort of business climate that really drove the decision here. Was that people were just sort of fed up with you know, I'll use the phrase, the undifferentiated, heavy lifting around SAN, what was it, was it COVID driven? What was the climate? >> You know, it's important to recognize when we are talking about business climate today, every business is a data business and block storage is really a foundational part of that. And so with SAN in the cloud specifically, we have seen enterprises for several years, buying these traditional hardware arrays for on premises SANs. And it's a very expensive investment. Just this year alone, they're spending over $22 billion on SANs. And with this old model on premises SANs, you would probably spend a lot of time doing this upfront capacity planning, trying to figure out how much storage you might need. And in the end, you'd probably end up overbuying for peak demand because you really don't want to get stuck, not having what you need to scale your business. And so now with block express, you don't have to do that anymore. You pay for what you need today, and then you can increase your storage as your business needs change. So that's cost and cost is a very important factor. But really when we're talking to customers and enterprises that are looking for SAN in the cloud, the number one reason that they want to move to the cloud with their SANs and these mission, critical workloads is agility and speed. And it's really transformational for businesses to be able to change the customer experience for their customers and innovate at a much faster pace. And so with the block express product, you get to do that much faster. You can go from an idea to an implementation orders of magnitude faster. Whereas before if you had these workloads on premises, it would take you several weeks just to get the hardware. And then you have to build all this surrounding infrastructure to get it up and running. Now, you don't have to do that anymore. You get your storage in minutes, and if you change your mind, if your business needs change, if your workloads change, you can modify your EBS volume types without interrupting your workload. >> Dave: Thank you for that. So Cami kind of addressed some of this, but I know store admins say, don't touch my SAN, I'm not moving it. This is a big decision for a lot of people. So kind of a two-part question, you know, why now, what do people need to know? And give us the north star close it out with, with where you see the future. >> Ashish: Yeah, so let's, I'll kick things off and then Cami, do jump in. So first of the volume is one part of the story, right? And with IO2 block express, I think we've given customers an extremely compelling offering to go build their mission critical and business critical applications on. We talked about the instance type R5b in terms of giving that instance level performance, but all this is on the foundation of AWS in terms of availability zones and regions. So you think about the constructs and we talk them in terms of building blocks, but our building blocks are really availability zones and regions. And that gives you that core availability infrastructure that you need to build your mission critical and business critical applications. You then take layer on top of that our regional footprint, right. And now you can spin up those workloads globally, if you need to. And then last but not the least, once you're in AWS, you have access to other services. Be it AI, be it ML, be it our relational database services that you can start to think about undifferentiated, heavy lifting. So really you get the smorgasbord really from the availability footprint to global footprint and all the way up to sort of our service stack that you get access to. >> Dave: So that's really thinking out of the box. We're out of time. Cami we'll give you the last word. >> Cami: I just want to say, if you want to learn more about EBS, there's a deep dive session with our principal engineer, Marc Olson later today. So definitely join that. >> Dave: Folks, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. (in chorus )Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from AWS storage day from Seattle.