(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mario Angers is here. He's the senior manager of systems at the University of British Columbia. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So how's VeeamON going? >> So far, so good. It's fabulous, actually. I love the event, cause it's not so big that you can't talk to a lot of people, and it's small enough that you get to know a lot of different folks. >> Yeah, it feels bigger, they're saying the number's 3,000. It feels bigger than that to me, but at the same time it is kind of intimate. >> Yeah no, I went to their first event, so certainly this is very different than what it was like. I think their first event was 2014? So, yeah, that's very good. >> So, tell us what's going on up at British Columbia. What's hot these days? >> Well, I spoke to this a little bit yesterday during the partner session, right? So, British Columbia's in a bit of unique position, because we have laws that prevent us from storing data outside Canada, right? So up until recently, we didn't have any of the large service providers, so we had to basically, to some degree, reinvent the wheel. So if wanted to provide or consume cloud, we had to basically build it, which is what the University of British Columbia did a few years ago. And, because we're the largest in BC, we were doing it at scale already, so we were approached by an organization inside British Columbia called BCNET, which basically services all the other higher ed, and they asked us if we wanted to provide cloud services to the community, and we've been doing this for almost three years now. >> Dave: As a partner to BCED? >> Yeah, to BCNET, yeah. >> Dave: BCNET, yeah. >> So we're basically the service operator, they're the service provider, right, but we do everything, we take care of the marketing, the communication. >> And Mark, could you walk us through, what's that stack look like? I did an interview with the OpenStack Summit with a Massachusetts higher ed cloud that they built that used OpenStack as the underlying piece. What's yours built on? >> So we went with, we're a VMware shop. So we went with the cloud directory as the front end basically, but the back end is a combination of Cisco servers, HP servers, net op storage, HP storage, data domain for our backup. Of course we use Veeam for our backup software, and then it's VMware stack end-to-end. >> Okay, it was funny, the gentlemen that I interviewed, actually, was the one who created VCD, when he was at VMware, so I'm just curious to see your viewpoint. One of the things we use to say is, cloud is not virtualization plus, but if you build a stack, if you can have kind of the orchestration and management pieces... So you feel you have a cloud, what differentiates what you have today, versus what you could have built five years ago? >> Well, I think five years ago, it would have been really challenging to provide the services in a self service capability to our end users. So today we can do that. The only involvement we have is we provision a virtual data center for our end user, and then it's self service from there, for them. We also use NSX, which is also a VMware product, so it's self service end-to-end. >> And how has your availability become better with what you have today versus what you had before? >> Veeam is a significant partner of ours, so we've been a Veeam customer for probably five or six years now, on the backup and restore side, probably about four years, and I would say it's made our jobs a lot easier. So historically our legacy backup system was just a bear and a monster to manage. So it required a huge amount of time to not just manage, but understand how it was done. With Veeam, they've really simplified that process, and we have a very large environment, and we basically have one guy managing backup. >> So it used to be, well that's pretty good productivity. So it used to be the conversation around, "Well, we're meeting our backup within the window." That was sort of the challenge. >> Mario: Yep. >> And now increasingly, it's, we want to get as close as RPO zero as possible for certain apps, not everything, as it's too expensive, and we want a much faster recovery time objective. So can you talk to us, first of all, do you converse in those terms with your line of business, and have you been able to affect those metrics? >> So, we're not quite there yet, from a sophistication, or a maturity perspective, We still have a bit of a ways to go to get there. However, can we now guarantee to our folks that we'll be able to bring workloads back within the service level that we have with our customers? Absolutely. So we can provide peace of mind now, knowing that if we lose something we can bring it back very quickly, as it's actually being restored to the production environment. >> So where do you want to go from here? It sounds like you've got the productivity thing nailed. You got one person managing all this, and you're able to meet those SLAs. What's next? >> I would say next for us is, so today we provide what I'll call a managed service around backup. So basically, the team that I manage is looking after backup for all the clients within the service, so our next step is really to provide them the ability to manage that themselves. So we're looking to do that over the summer. Once we do that, then we want to start partnering with Veeam as well and start looking at their Cloud Connect product. We've been in discussions for some time now about how we're going to do that, and that's the evolution of that. And then building on that, we're being also asked to add to the portfolio of services that we provide, and one of those services is disaster recovery as a service. So that's becoming very, very critical to the province. Vancouver is basically like San Francisco or Los Angeles. We live in one of the biggest fault zones in the world, so at one point it will happen. So now we've basically provisioned a data center in the middle of the province where it's outside your quake zone, so now we can start providing those services to our community. >> Could you speak to the relationship with Veeam with the storage arrays that you have? What's the interaction there? >> So when we went to Veeam it was really important that the full integration is there with the storage vendors that we have. So originally we were primarily in that app shop. So in that, integration was in place. So when we started looking at moving off of tape and moving onto disk for backup, we basically narrowed the list down to vendors that also fully integrated with Veeam. So we chose Data Domain, an EMC product. We've been very happy. And just recently we went to RFPing, we basically selected a new vendor for virtualization storage. And the same rules apply. Full integration needs to be in place. We need to be able to know that we're going to be able to read the data off of the storage arrays, and then move it to the backup. Without that integration, there's no guarantees that we can do that successfully. >> So a data demand customer, happy with that as the backup appliance, fast, great data reduction... Didn't EMC get you in a headlock and say, "You got to buy Networker and Avamar," and really push hard? >> Mario: Oh they tried. >> Of course, they did try. >> Okay, so what led to your decision to go with Veeam? >> The complexity of those solutions. So we're not going to reinvent how we're structured or how we're architected just to put a backup solution in place. And if you look at a lot of the other really big vendors in the marketplace today, that's basically the expectation, is okay well, you're built out like this, now you're going to have to do this in order to consume our solution. That just wasn't an option for us. >> And some people would say, "Well I get one thrown to choke and that simplifies things," but you don't buy that. >> Mario: No, not at all. I think it keeps vendors honest if you have more than one. It gives you some leverage to be able to negotiate. And to be quite honest with you, I've yet to find another vendor that provides the level of quality and support that Veeam does. And they're growing as a company, and I expect that things will change to some degree, because that's part of growing. However, so far, the experience that we've had is the same we had four years ago when they were a relatively small company. >> Can you give an example of what resonates with you as customer in terms of that service experience? >> I think as a bunch of IT guys, we think we know everything, right? So when we originally acquired Veeam, we thought, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get what you're telling us, but we know better than you do." So we went ahead and implemented based on what we felt was right. It wasn't right. So they didn't come over and say, "Told you so," or "We're not going to help you now, cause you decided to go this way." No, they provided us with all the support we needed in order to actually change what we had done, and there was never any finger pointing or any... It was basically, "You're a partner, we're going to help you be successful." And that's very rare, I think, in the industry today. >> Yeah, really, respecting sort of that you wanted to do it a certain way, and now I learned. >> Yeah, they did try to talk us out of it, but we decided to move in that direction anyway. To me it's like, yeah, it's a fantastic relationship. >> Anything that you've seen here today, or this week, the announcements, that was really interesting and exciting to you? >> Yeah, I think a lot of the things that are coming in Version 10 are going to allow us to expand on the things that we provide to our customers. For example, all the stuff they talk about around availability, primarily disaster recovery stuff, which is such a big thing for us. So I think this is going to add significant value. >> Mario, anything either Veeam or your vendor ecosystem that you're looking for that would make your life easier? You seem to have a pretty opinionated view of what you need. >> So to me is, we're it the business of solving problems. So as a vendor, you're not going to help me solve my problem unless you understand what my problem is. In my experience, I'm not going to say with all vendors, but with a lot of vendors in the past couple of years, is basically the caliber of the sales people I feel have changed. So it used to be that the sales folks used to be pretty knowledgeable about what they sold. Now it feels like all they're trying to do is make their quarter. And as a customer it's becoming frustrating, because I don't want to be sold to. I want someone that's going to help me solve problems, and deliver solutions to my customers. >> You must get a lot of different storage infrastructures, but NetApp is a primary supplier, of course. >> Mario: Yep, it's still very big in our environment. >> We just had NetApp on with Veeam, and they were talking about their relationship. As a customer, how do you find the relationship between Veeam and NetApp? Is there tangible value that you see in that working relationship? How do you interact with those two different companies? >> Oh of course there's tangible value. So we're an enterprise customer, right? And as we scaled within our environment, we came into a bottleneck between Veeam and NetApp. And all we had to do was expose it to both companies, and they worked together to resolve the issue. And I believe it was Version Nine that they released a fix for it. But that's been the experience, is the work that happens behind the scenes, we're not exposed to that, it always creates a positive experience for us in the end. >> We had Dave Russell on earlier from Gartner, and he was talking about pricing, and licensing, and specifically socket-based pricing, and said that that had a big impact on the marketplace. From a customer standpoint, what can you share with us about licensing, pricing, strategies that you employ, and maybe advice for other customers? >> So I think a lot of vendors are starting to try to simplify their licensing. Because if you look, I'm not going to pick on anyone specific, but they had, "Okay well we're going to sell you a number of VMs and then the storage on top of that." And it's like, okay that doesn't make sense. I don't want a PhD in math to be able to calculate how much I'm going to spend for licensing. So give me a model that is easy to manage, and I'm going to know exactly what my cost is, and have a very predictable cost going forward. And I understand Veeam has a couple different model, but they're still very simple. So you're either subscription or you're socket. So to me, just keep it simple. >> Dave: What's your preference? >> Right now it's socket. However, I'm not opposed to looking at something different. If it makes sense for my clients, I'm perfect fine with it. >> When you go subscription, does that have an effect? Does your CFO like that? Switching to a radical model? >> Well, we're just basically turning our capital into operational. And as long as my base cost doesn't change, I think it's perfectly fine. >> Dave: So from a capital budget standpoint, it's got to be neutral and go from there. >> Excellent, alright Mario, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great insights. >> Thank you for having me. >> Dave: You're very welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)