(futuristic techno music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and it's eco-system partners. >> Good morning, welcome to day three of our coverage here on theCUBE of VMworld 2019. We're at Moscone Center North, here in San Francisco. Kind of a, well not kind of, it's a really cloudy day but I kind of expect that. We've been talking about clouds all week, right? Multi, hybrid, public, private, you name it, we've been talking about it. John Walls and Dave Vellante, good to see you this morning. >> Good to see you John. >> Yep. We're joined now by a couple of executives from Kaminario. Josh Epstein, who's a CMO and Eyal David who's the CTO of Kaminario. Good morning gentlemen, >> Good morning, >> Morning. >> Great to be here, great to be here. First of, let's just talk about the show. I know you've got a presence down on the floor, just your feeling about the traffic, the kind of traffic you're seeing at your booth, what the questions are, coming from customers, maybe what those answers are. Eyal, why don't you jump on that? >> Yeah, so first of all, it's great to be back in San Francisco for this conference! >> John: Here, here! >> Dave: Agreed! >> Definitely. (laughter) And I think it's very clear that, yes definitely, cloud is the name of the game, and especially how do you implement a hybrid cloud, customers are all on their cloud journey, and the big question is, "How do I do that?" "How do I take these new technologies, the cloud, "containers, and how do I take my applications "and my data services to the next step?" And it's kind of all over the place, all decisions, all the customers are asking about, this is where the focus is, where the interest is, and it's a great to be in the center of all of that. >> Yeah, you made a big decision, or a big announcement about a month ago. You said, "Okay, public cloud; that's where we're going." Josh, the driver behind that and kind of, what the early fall outs were? >> Sure, sure. I mean, we started our journey, really from the beginning of Kaminario, Kaminario's about ten years old, and you know, the data storage market, as a traditional all-flash storage array. The past 24 months, we've really pivoted the business model towards first, 100% software, we got out of the appliance business, started really focusing our business on doing these large software based implementations, moving into more subscription based revenue, kind of delivering that cloud based economics experience. And then, over the last several months, we've been focusing on taking our core architecture, which fundamentally decouples the data services from annoying infrastructure, and thinking about how that might actually look on public clouds. So doing the same thing, kind of creating this sort of shared storage experience, delivering all the traditional enterprise class data services, but sitting on public cloud infrastructure. It's been a really interesting journey. >> So let's double click on that, because it's clear that this space is not about the media, it's about the business model, it's about the additional value you can add for customers, so maybe you could add a little bit of color, as to sort of, how's that going, where you guys are differentiating in the marketplace, where you're winning. >> Sure, I mean I think- >> Yeah. >> Jump in, Eyal. >> Yeah, so I think it's, as you said, it's not about the media, it's all about how do you help customers have a uniform experience around any deployment model. So they want to deploy on-prem, they want to deploy in the cloud, they are actively seeking for a uniform way to do that without too much heavy lift. There's some challenges in going to the cloud. If you are not born in the cloud, you need to re-architect your applications, you need to kind of, learn some new skills. There's a big challenge, especially if you have big data intensive applications. That's where we focus, delivering that uniform experience around orchestration of resources and data services across your on-prem, off-prem and public cloud implementations. >> So you guys decided not to ship a box anymore, you know the Silicon Valley show, "Where's the box?" so I'm interested in the technical challenges of doing that, but also the customer feedback, because sometimes people want an appliance, so how were you able to transition through that and what's the feedback been? >> Yeah, I think for us, I mean, our core business, our core customer, has really been cloud scale applications, for the last five years. So this is large SAAS providers, e-commerce platforms, fintech, healthtech, any of these large, mature software companies, right, their core business is delivering a cloud scale application. And for them, you know, many of them were born before the age of the public clouds, they've actually heavily invested in application architectures that rely on enterprise class and shared storage. That said, they see the draw towards the cloud, they see the benefit of the cloud like economics, subscription based, consumption based economics, and then the overall capability to scale up and scale down like the cloud does, but that said, they need that bridge, from where they are today, with traditional data centric architectures to this cloud world. >> You mentioned fintech, and there's an interesting case, because when the cloud really started to gain momentum, a lot of financial services companies, the big guys especially, said "You know, we can build our own clouds." And then they realized, "Well we can't build them as fast as Amazon can build them", and so they sort of pulled back on that. But they, and they sort of put their foot in the cloud, and then went all, and then they said, "Wait a minute." So what are you seeing, in terms of, call it the private cloud, you know, we've kind of swung back to that, is that gap closing, are they able to get close enough? The key part of that is obviously the pricing models, and the pay by the drink. I wonder if you could add some color to the on-prem cloud business- >> Josh: Sure. >> If we can call it that. Some people might object, but that's- >> Yeah, definitely. So the way we approach it is that we want to bring the simplicity, the agility and the flexibility of the cloud model to this on-prem data center, to deliver the same performance, control of a dedicated resource, which is exactly what these type of fintech customers are looking for. So, in our basic architecture, which was already, we decoupled from hardware, already decoupled performance from capacity, we're able to do that extremely flexibly. You can get the same flexibility of the cloud in an on-prem solution with all the benefits, and you can also decide, on your own pace, in your own terms, what you actually need and makes sense to run on a public cloud infrastructure. >> So scale is obviously a big deal for your customers, that's kind of been your focus since day one, what's the bell curve look like? Are we talking about scale in just the ability to scale quickly, or is it also the sheer size, and what does it look like? >> Yeah, I think it's about performance at scale, it's about control over performance at scale, it's about control over availability at scale, and it's obviously about cost at scale, right? I mean, it's too, there's so many different ways to look at the economics of public cloud versus on-prem. If you're looking at the pure dollar, it's clearly building on your own dedicated on-prem infrastructure, it's clearly cheaper than paying Amazon or Google or whoever to do it. But there's clear benefits to kind of going in that direction, in terms of agility, in terms of hands off management, in terms of really just, you know, staffing expertise. But I think it does come down to control, right? And when you talk about scale, when you talk about petabyte scale, it's easy to lose control, and this is the benefit of shared storage models, and this is where we think there's a real opportunity. >> Can I follow up on that, because you said there's a clear benefit of, if I understood it correctly, of building out your own prem infrastructure at some critical mass. There's obviously people, like Andy Jassy, who would disagree with that. So what's your data showing? I presume it's weighted towards large customers. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> But maybe you can add some color to that? >> We've certainly got good research, good analysis on this. And I think if you're talking about, we're talking about certainly over 500 terabytes to a petabyte, it's a multi petabyte scale, data driven applications, we're talking about business critical applications, big block storage, heavy analytics. If you compare just raw economics, the thing is, there's a lot more than just the raw economics, but the raw economics of an infrastructure built on Kaminario versus the equivalent infrastructure, built on one of the block storage resources from one of the public clouds, it's literally about 1/3 the cost, to build out your own dedicated infrastructure, leveraging a good, high quality colo, a good, high quality hardware underneath it. So raw economics, it's clear where that sits. >> Okay, so that's if we're comparing the cost of the, the acquisition costs versus some end number of years, right? >> That's correct, yeah exactly. >> And not really going into the labor costs at that- >> Not going into the direct labor costs of managing the storage, yes, there's clearly interesting benefits to going to a 100% cloud model. What that does to an organization, when you kind of, hands off, you know, you don't have the same kind of in house IT resources, you're out sourcing a lot of that- >> Well except what Eyal was saying before, is that you're trying to bring that cloud model to the data. So to the extent that you can close that gap, then you can- >> Eyal: Differently. >> Substantially mimic, exactly. >> We saw the opportunity to extend those capabilities into the public cloud, delivering a high performance storage solution in the cloud today is as expensive. Our focus over the years, of taking these commodity components and comprising them into a high performance shared storage solution. We can do the same in the cloud. >> But I think the key is multi-cloud. >> Yeah, let's talk about that. >> The key is that there's not one size fits all, and it really is about creating this mobility between your on-prem data and public cloud number one, and then public cloud number two. One of the key concerns about moving a business critical application to a public cloud is lock in, right? And if you can create this infrastructure where you're decoupling that data services stack that the application relies on, from the underlying infrastructure, you get this mobility between clouds that becomes really attractive. >> So you're kind of answering the next question that was on my mind, of how are you selling that to customers. The fact that we're having this very robust discussion about this fundamental shift and you get it, because you're providing this service to your whole client base, but if I'm a client, my head's starting to spin a little bit, right? And I've got big decisions to make, so how do you sell that, that this is not a little shift, this is a fundamental way, the way you're going to do your business? >> So, in the simplest form, we tell the customers that we significantly lower the barrier of entry into the cloud. You don't need to re-architect everything, you don't need to be worried about performance management, or, control, or orchestrating resources; we do all that for you, and we do it in the same way that we did it for you in your own on-prem data center, and we can do it on any of the public clouds. So the barrier of entry, the risk of actually doing that transition- >> John: Is lowered. >> Is lowered significantly, and you can that on your own pace, in your own terms, and make some smart decisions later on about what needs to reside where over time. >> So, when we think about multi-cloud, we think about, "Okay, I'm going to have data on-prem, I might choose "Azure for my collaborative workloads, "I might put my dev stuff in AWS, "I might put some analytics in Google..." You know, whatever, my business is going to decide what to do, I'm not going to have this grand, multi-cloud strategy, it's just kind of going to happen. And then IT's going to be called in to clean up the crime scene! But we're envisioning this architecture that's shipping metadata, and maybe compute to the data, versus moving data. Do you agree with that, or do you see it differently? >> We see, I think, two types of customers. Some behave just as you describe, but some have a very specific decision not to be locked into single vendors. So they'll say, "I'll put one business unit on Google Cloud, "and put the other business unit on Azure. "I'll put this certain type of application on one cloud, "and the other type on the other cloud, "because I want to make sure that I am cloud agnostic. "I'm actually mandating with an organization that "I can run anywhere." >> As a hedge. >> As a hedge, as a definite hedge, because they are concerned about locking to either of the vendors, and in that sense, they later on make the decision, "Okay, where is the "core of the data? "Where is my mission critical data which always "has some gravity, and how do I make sure that it's in "the right place at the right time." >> Doesn't that add complexity for the client? I mean, if they've got a workload here, and here, and here, it'll be a lot easier if it was all here, or most of it were here. But that adds, I'm wondering if- >> You're absolutely right, but what we see is this rapid shift towards embracing the multi-cloud model. So let's take an example. You have a classic cloud scale application, and might have an active/active data centers in two parts of the United States, sort of serving up the production application. You have dev test requirements, so they want the ability to rapidly spin up an environment to mimic a problem or do some development. Public cloud's a great example for that. You have DR requirements, your back up requirements, they want to be backing up, they want the ability to rapidly spin up in instance, in a public cloud instance, and no matter what, within every organization somewhere, even in the most sophisticated IT organizations where they have tremendous control over the data centers, some C-level exec somewhere that says, "In five years, I'm 100% on public cloud. I want nothing." So you have to sort of service that element as well, and what we're doing is saying, "Listen, you can continue to focus on building out "a world class, next generation data center, "based on the NVMe, all NVMe fabric, "and still have the mobility to do certain things "in the cloud, and still have this path, "if it makes for your organization, "to migrate the entire thing to public cloud, "and not get locked in." They'd be able to sort of, surf the clouds as actually- >> So technically, that means you have to speak as your API, S3, whatever language of the cloud, and so I'm trying to understand, sort of, technically, what you have to do, and then where you add value, where you pick up from whatever, VMware or whomever else is trying to be the control plane. >> So then, that is exactly the point, and to address the question about what the complexity of this multi-cloud world, this is exactly where we see the rise of this next generation orchestration framework, either from VMware or from others, that strive to give you this uniform experience. So we deliver that at the data services layer, we connect that to the orchestration layer, that allows you do seamless workload abilities, seamless data mobility to wherever it makes sense for those applications or business workloads to run. And basically, the customers expect, to date, that we encapsulate all that complexity for them. They want to be able to put their Google, Amazon or Azure credentials , and then forget exactly where it went. And this is a lot of what's going on in the floor this week, and that's exactly where we connect to the rest of that orchestration scene within the data center or the public cloud. >> So, in that context, are you primarily, I know you sell to a lot of different people, but is it the cloud architect, or the architect that's actually determining that throughout the organization, or is it again, cleaning up the crime scene type of a thing? >> It's usually a conversation with that CIO, who's kind of, on that cloud journey, building his cloud strategy, and even if he made the decision to in five years be in the cloud, now the question is, "Okay, what's happening in the meantime? "How do I actually do that?" >> One of the cool things that's happening in the meantime is most of our customers are in just this perpetual state of data center consolidation, right? Most of these large SAAS companies, they're growing through acquisition, they've got nine data to data centers, they all have a plan within two or three years to be consolidated on three next generation data centers and then have cloud mobility. So what we're able to do, this is leveraging our software model as well, is say, "Listen, let's do an enterprise wide, "unified licensing scheme, "where you're paying on consumption, "based on actual data stored, "and then you can build the underlying infrastructure "wherever you want. "You can base it on your traditional infrastructure "you might already own, it might be on next generation "NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics connected data centers, "and then a piece of it now might be in the public cloud." >> So, you're talking CIO, Dave, you're talking CSI, I'm just little confused! (laughter) Gentlemen, thanks for the time, we appreciate it. Great discussion, and continued success downstairs and on down the road. >> Great to be here guys, thank you. >> All right, back with more VMWorld 2019, here on theCUBE. (futuristic techno music)

(Techno music) >> Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high tech coverage, it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well we are in Moscone Center North here in San Francisco, the city by the bay. Gorgeous day outside. Day two of our coverage here on the Cube. Vmworld 2019. I'm John Walls with John Troyer. John good to see you today. >> Great to be here with you. >> Good for day two. We have a couple of authors with us today, both from VMware. Rosa Lear who is the Director of Marketing at VeloCloud, in the business unit there. Rosa thank you for being with us. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate that. And Dave Twinam, who is the Director of Systems Engineering in that business unit at VMware. And this is the book that they have collaborate on I think with 12 others, there were 14 who came together on this project. It's called SD-WAN one on one, the what, the why, and the how. This is going to answer all those riddles, all those puzzles that you have about how to software define wide area network work, where are the pitfalls, where are the challenges, what are we going to do to solve our problems. So folks what was the genesis of this? It's a hefty thing for sure, >> (Rosa) It is, yes. And really well illustrated, we'll get into that in a little bit, but what was the genesis of this? Rosa if you would first, what drove you to put this together? >> Sure, there are a lot of books out there on the market that are focused on the SD-WAN because it's such a hot topic, but what we saw was a big deficit on how does it actually work. Getting down into that second, third layer of what people are looking for. So it's not so superficial. They really want to know how does it work, how do I integrate it into my network, what are the steps that I go through. So it's not a user manual, but it definitely gives you that deep perspective of what SD-WAN can provide and how to implement it into your network. >> So the target audience would be who? >> Network engineers, we also got stuff in here for the business owners, so CTO's. We actually have two characters that help outline a lot of the comments, or a lot of the meat of the book. One is Elvina. She's the CTO, so she really describes what her business needs are. And then there's Rodney who is her network engineer who actually implements this, the architect, so it's told from their perspective and really introducing each of the chapters, the concepts, and the takeaways. >> So Dave as you've been doing this, you're talking to customers out there, what's the state of the art here, where are we with the evolution of SD-WAN? It's kind of a noisy space from my perspective. Also from a VMware perspective, this brings VMware out of the data center into the network, and network edge, and wide area network. So can you just talk a little bit about what are the problems people are seeing, and that they're solving with SD-WAN, and why are network engineers interested in taking this as their bedtime reading. >> Absolutely, clearly what we're seeing in the marketplace is that there is a lot of noise out there, there are a lot of vendors that are in the SD-WAN space. I think it's important to note though that we are number one. It's always a good place to be. So while VMware is a newer kind of entrant into the wide area market in particular we already have a leadership position via the VeloCloud acquisition, and obviously the continued enhancements to the portfolio from there. So the reality is that SD-WAN, it's kind of funny we have the why at the beginning of the book, more and more customers aren't asking the why. They know why they need it, which is it's the natural evolution of their wide area infrastructure. They know that software is the future, that's why we are here at Vmworld cause we're all about software, and understanding how they can evolve to meet those business challenges in a software framework versus the traditional rip and replace hardware based model over the past. >> And you're on one side of the equation obviously, you're supplying this information, supplying the services, developing the solutions whatever. How much listening do you do to the other side to put together something like this? Cause I would assume you had to have a real sense of what the problems are and what the questions are. What is the what, what is the why, what is the how that's going on on the customer side of this. Tell me about that process if you will. >> Sure, so one of the unique parts of this book is that with these other authors that we brought in to put this book together, and we did this within five days which is a great project, but we really took the people out of the field. So these are the engineers that helped create this book are the ones who are shoulder to shoulder with the customer. Helping them that implementation, talking to them about how they actually implement this. So they talk to the customers, this is brought out from the field. It's not some guy sitting in an ivory tower talking about what you should do. This is actually what you should do because this is the best practice, this is what we hear from customers, this is what works best for all of the people we've implemented SD-WAN with. >> You did this in five days? >> Five days, so we hired a company. >> (John) How many of you 14? >> There was 15 of us. >> 15 in five days, we're you locked up for >> Yes. 24 hours around the clock. I read you went to Miami, I remember that, but I didn't realize it was in that compressed of a time frame. >> Oh yeah, it was great. I mean we all learned, I think, a lot because we come from different geography's. We came from different deployment models and so forth. And yeah we just all got together. >> I love the idea of the book spread. So you've captured a moment in time, of the technology, of the marketplace, but you said this isn't a dummies book, isn't an intro, nor is it a how to manual right. It's not a product manual. So I'm thinking it should be somewhat conceptual and have a life span of more then just the latest release of anything right. Is that part of the goal here? Is this going to have a lifespan? >> Absolutely. >> I mean what do you envision? Again it's interesting you're both engineering and you said the CTO, the CXO level can get some understanding of why some things are going on. >> Sure, you think about it from a CXO perspective right. What are the business challenges that that individual sees. They don't necessarily care about the bits and bites of networking underneath. They know that they need a network, but they also know that it's a really expensive part of their budget. So they need to understand how does it actually support the business and ultimately how can they do more with it, and ideally what we always hear is do more with less. So how do we get to that point and understanding then that's one need that comes from the business side. Well how do we complement that from the technical side of things. How do we solve those problems. But the reality is we're not solving technical problems just to solve technical problems. We're solving them to actually meet the needs of the business. So kind of seeing both side and how they come together is critical to it and I think that's something we tried hard to put into the book. >> When you have a collaboration like this, and you said you brought 15 people together, I'm sure there has to be some disagreement at some point or some discussion. So what were some of those points that came up where somebody thought that perhaps maybe a little more attention here, maybe a little less attention there. Maybe this is something we should bring, no that's not touch that base. How about those discussions, that back and forth, and how did you settle that with so many people in the room? >> So one of the things that we first outlined when we started this process was that this is a safe space. That nobody is really wrong, cause we're also bringing in different perspectives here. So we definitely all decided that we're going to treat each other respectfully. There was a lot of arguments here and there about certain things but we all are professional so we all figured out what the right thing was to do. >> So let's talk about the order, let's talk about how you dealt with it, the what's and the whys. You said why almost didn't make the cut but did make the dress rehearsal and the publishing. How do you put together something like this, that is not a user manual, cause that's the first thing I thought of. I thought okay, you're going to show me what SD-WANS all about and how I'm going to deploy it. VMwares services or solutions rather on my network. But that's not what this is all about. How did you parts that? How did you decide this is the direction we're going to go, and not just make it a how to for people or a dummies. >> So we already have a dummies book, so you should check that out. There's also a PDF on our website, velocloud.com, so we needed another layer, another book that would go deeper on that. We needed something that, I mean you can always write a user manual. Anybody can sit in a room and put that together, but we wanted something that was different. That was actually going to, I guess, comfort customers who were looking at the solution. Give them the right idea that this is what they need, and also what they were going to get into. That's a big question, you don't understand what the implementations going to be like until you're in it. So this gives you that view. So you can use it as a pre-customer read, or you can use it post-sales and really help define what you need to do when you're implementing. >> Nice, nice. We're here at VMworld 2019, this is my you know millionth VMworld. Very interesting, a lot of talk at the top level. Apps and kubernetes and that sort of stuff. At the bottom level, networking and a lot of other things, that maybe the traditional admin, Vsphere admin, already kind of a silo busters from old rolls is already here but sometimes when the networking folks talk with the server folks the words mean different things. They're slightly different tribes lets say. App performance is an SD-WAN context may mean something completely different then app performance in a data center, server context. So you're here at the show. You've got the network edge zone down in the show floor. You've got a booth there, you've got activities, obviously a lot of break out sessions. How have the networker's mixed with the admins? How has it been? And you all are from VeloCloud which has been with VMware for? >> (Rosa) Almost two years in December. >> Talk about both that integration, both corporately and you know here at the show. >> You want to go first? >> Sure, the event has been fantastic for us. We are getting a lot of traction. We actually did a book signing for this book yesterday with six of the authors. 96 books are gone, and I feel like the conversations are really migrating to the networking space. The wide area networking space rather then just data center. You're right there is a lot of overlap in the technology and the lingo and jargon, but I think if we know what were talking about in terms of wide area networking I think those conversations can easily be fudged or gaped. >> Just I would add, I've been at VMware about five years now so I was on the NSX team prior to moving over to the Velo team. So five years ago there was virtually no presence of networking. We were the only networking people here for the most part, And that's really changed substantially. And this year in particular is the first year where there are a lot of networking folks that are roaming the halls here. Whether its understanding the NSX side of the house or whether its SD-WAN there is a significantly greater presence then there's ever been previously. So the other piece is realizing we're a networking company now and a security company right. Those components are integral as a part of the solution and so the makeup has actually begun to change a little bit and there's more co-mingling then there's ever been before in this space. >> You touch on security in the book? >> Absolutely there's an entire chapter on it. >> So C-Cell might be interested as well? >> Absolutely. >> All right so the book I've seen is for purchase here on site. >> (Rosa) Yes. >> In case somebody's watching and they're here tell them where they can get it. >> Go the the VMware book store, it's in Moscone West, and then we also will be making it available on Amazon starting next week. >> All right so here's again a look at the book. SD-WAN one on one, the what, the why and the how. Rosa, Dave thanks for being with us. Congratulations on, I assume first book? >> For me yes. >> Third for me. >> Oh okay, a practiced hand. (laughing) >> First print though. >> Not fair. Thank you both, appreciate the time. >> (in unison) Thank you. >> Back with more continued coverage here on the cube of Vmworld 2019. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to bright and sunny San Francisco. Gorgeous day here in the City on the Bay. Dave Vellante, John Walls. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE VMworld 2019 with Doc D'Errico from Infodant, CMO. Doc, good to see you again, sir! >> Infinidat. >> Oh Infinidat! Sorry, sorry, sorry. (Doc laughs) But, good to see you! >> I missed my opportunity but thanks, Dave, yeah, it's good to be back. >> John: You bet. Marc Creviere, who is principle systems engineer at US Signal. Good to see you again, Marc here. You were here just last year, right? >> Yeah, I'm an alumni now. >> We'll touch base on that in just a little bit. Doc, first off, let's just talk about the show from your perspective. What you're doing here, explain to our viewers at home what it's all about and what you find the vibe that's going on this year. What kind of sense do you get? >> The vibe is fantastic The sense is great. Coming back to San Francisco, I'm not sure what we were really expecting but it's a really good tempo, a lot of great people, lot of great feedback on our recent launch. A lot of people looking at what're we doing, especially with VMware and availability. Lots of new use cases for snapshot technologies which is fantastic. The 100% availability, it's great getting people come up to you who say "Hey, this is incredible. "You guys actually put some teeth behind your guarantees," "you know, you're not just promising "some future discounts or something. "In the VMworld environment where I've got my VMs, "I need that kind of guarantee, I need that support. "I need to know that my systems "are going to be there when I need them, "because that's my business," right? It's just an incredible vibe. >> And had your party last night? >> We had our party last night. And guess who was there? (laughs) >> I did stop by, it was a very cool venue. The San Francisco Mint, which is, it was kind of awesome. >> Yeah, it was a great, great environment. It was great having people like Dave there, and some of the other industry luminaries talk to our customers. >> I didn't get the tour of the Vault. >> Doc: I'll get you a picture. (laughing) >> So, Marc, I mentioned in the intro, we had you on last year. So, let's look back at the last 12 months for you. US Signal, and what's been going on with you, and what are you seeing here and kind of feeling here in terms of business? >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been another great year at US Signal. We are planning on opening a new data center in the Detroit Metro area, coming up online Q1 of 2020, so that's exciting for us. Purpose built, wholly owned and operated by us, so that's great. It's going to add to our capabilities in that region. We've had a heavy focus on DR technologies, DR as a Service technologies in the past year. Seeing a lot of success, a lot of really good conversations with customers and developing their plans, and bringing our new capabilities to be able to service those needs. >> So, tell us more about the DR as a Service. I mean, that's obviously one of the early sort of cloud-use cases? >> Marc: Yeah. >> Add some color, what is it all about, how does it relate to some of the other DR solutions that are out there and what role do these guys play? >> Yeah, well we conducted a survey of a little over 100 of companies in our region, a little over 100 respondents, and three out of four respondents told us that their biggest concerns were either distributed denial of service or ransomware. Obviously, we've got these bad actors out there. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad actor, it could be something force of nature making data unavailable, right? It doesn't matter how great the equipment is if either a bad actor or nature takes it out for you. So, having that protection, we're able to have replication technology. We actually have three separate technologies that we use now. We enhanced our Zerto-based offering to include multi-cloud so we can now have customers replicate to either multiple cloud destinations, us being one of them, or they can replicate to one of their sites and us as a tertiary site, so that's new. They're able to bring their existing licensing. One thing that's exciting to me, near and dear to my heart, is drafts for VMware based on the vCloud availability platform. So, we're a big VM, vCloud shop, big consumer of VMware technologies, that's why we're out here, and that's really exciting to me because it uses built in VMware replication technologies. There's not a lot of learning curve, there's not a lot of extra components. Super simple to get up and running and get RPOs as low as 5 minutes, and it's easy, and it's relatively cheap on an OPX-type platform, where you're paying for storage and per VM and that's it. And then we've also spun up a replication for Veeam, Cloud replication for Veeam based on that ecosystem. So, we've got a lot of entry points, a lot of different ways that we can protect that data and bring it in and get a copy in our data center, so in the event that it becomes unavailable at the source, it's either managed or customer managed. We can get it up and running in a short time frame on our infrastructure. >> And Infinidat is the primary storage underneath all this? >> Marc: Yeah. >> So, explain more about... So, Doc, you and I have had these conversations. The state of the art, whatever, 15 years ago, was three-site data centers, very complex, extremely expensive. I'm interested in how we're attacking that problem today. You obviously, with multi cloud, it's multi-site, but how are we attacking the cost problem, the complexity problem, the "I can't test because I can fail over "but I'm afraid to fail back" problem? >> Well, you know, there's so many different ways to cover all of these. We're talking just about ransomware, you know, ransomware are immutable snaps, become an important play and we have Snap Rotator which will allow you to build a certain number of snaps and have them just rotate through so you're not just creating an infinite number, you're not wasting time and space. And, by the way, time and space, our snapshots are zero-overhead. There's zero performance penalty, unless you want to crash consistent copy, and there's really zero data overhead because it's only the incremental data that you write. So, by creating this, you can do it every couple seconds, and then create some immutable copies of that. You know, make them time out, so they can't be modified, 30 days, 60 days, whatever you decide administratively. So that's great. If you're looking for the DRaaS, the DR as a Service-type capabilities, whether it's single site or multi site, going to cloud service providers makes a lot of sense. 'Cause now, even if it's on premises to a cloud service provider, now you're not having to worry about that second set of infrastructure, you're not having to worry about the management of it, you're not having to worry about the systems integration of it, or even go CSP to CSP, right? Go from one data center within your favorite cloud service provider, hopefully US Signal, to another or any one of our great partners would be super, too. And then, of course, InfiniSync, where if you really want that longer distance capability, why bother with a bunker site? Why bother with all that complexity and that cost and overhead? Put in an InfiniSync appliance in with a VM, and you've got the recoverability. You can go asynchronous distances, and have a zero RPO. >> For way, way less. >> Oh, a fraction of the cost. It'll cost you less for the InfiniSync appliance than it'll cost you for the telecoms equipment that you need for a bunker site. >> If I don't want to build another data center... Go ahead. >> What I'm curious about; I heard a number yesterday in one of the interviews we had, about ransomware. The number kind of blew me away, and I thought about one out of every three companies will be a victim of, or at least a ransomware attack within the next two years, which means everyone, over the next six, if you extrapolate that out. Does that sound about right from what you're seeing? That the intrusions are reaching that kind of frequency? >> I'm surprised it's that low, but I'll let Marc try and answer that. >> We've done some events where we actually demo how easy it is, like, through a phishing attack, to get that in there. So, it's not just about having those protections in place, it's your user training; that's a huge area, training those users what to look for in those emails to avoid that sort of thing, but it's not perfect. People are imperfect. >> Dave: And yeah, you got to have both the protection on the front end, the training for the people, and those recovery options in the event it does get in. In our survey, the average monetary damage was over $150,000 per incident. And that means that some people got off a little lighter and some people paid a lot more, if that was the average. >> Should you pay the ransom? >> Uh, not if you've got a good plan in place that can test it. (laughs) >> But it is, it's a reasonable question. >> Huge quandary. Some are, some aren't, right? Atlanta says "no, we're going to pay a boatload "to protect against it, but we're not going to pay that," what was it, 55,000 or whatever it was? >> Let's negotiate. >> Yeah, I think I said last time I was here that until you've tested your plan, you don't really have one. You know, it rings just as true today. >> What's your business worth? I mean, it's a great question, really. What is your business worth to you? Your business is probably worth a lot more, and they probably throw these numbers out there, thinking "Well...", then becomes a no-brainer for you to pay, and that's the whole point. Because what is ransomware? It's malware that's recoverable, maybe. You're not even sure of that. >> Is it usually, is it operator error? Is it human error that allows that to work more often than not? Or, is it a mixture of technical chops, or just...? >> It's a mixture; you've got to know what vulnerabilities are out there on your infrastructure, you got to make sure you're staying up to date on patching those vulnerabilities, paying attention to any compliance practices, if you're a compliant organization. You know, HIPAA, PCI, our entire infrastructure footprint is actually HIPAA and PCI compliant at the levels that we control. So, it's a heavy lift. You got to stick with it. >> But just to kind of bring it full circle to the comment about the ransom and paying it, you know Marc said something really important, "Have a good plan." I would argue, have a good partner. If you don't have a CISO who's got the chops to be dealing with these types of problems, that's when you need a partner like US Signal to really step in and take you through what's involved in a realistic plan, something that's not going to break the bank, something that's really going to protect your business going forward, because these things are very real. >> One of the concerns I have in this topic is that things happen really fast these days. So, if there are problems, they replicate very, very quickly. How do you address that problem? Is it architecture, analytics, I'm sure process, maybe you could add some color to that. >> All of the above. Having those controls in place, those segregations, we've got, obviously, clear segregation between our management and customer data plans. And each of our customer data plans are separate from each other. It's secure multi-tenancy, not just multi-tenancy. So yeah, it's important to keep those delineations, user access, making sure that people only have access to what they need, and a lot of that, again, is covered by those compliance practices and paying close attention to what they have. There are reasons they have these guidelines and these rules and these audits. It's to help, in large part to protect against that. >> You mentioned before, Marc, you're a heavy VMware user, Infinidat, it's kind of the new kid on the block. People said "Oh, they'll never be--" >> Marc: Not for us. >> What's that? >> Not for us. >> Not for you, right, but for the storage industry. Doc and I have been in the storage industry a while. But, I'm curious as to what you want from a supplier like Infinidat, why you chose Infinidat? How're they doing with regard to VMware affinity, all those things people tend to talk about as important. >> Marc: All right, well-- >> What do you think is important? >> Well, in the Infinidat experience, the company experience, the support experience, it is the benchmark by which we judge all other vendors now. It's that good. The working with us whenever we need equipment, obviously they've got, the price per terabyte is hard to beat with the way they're able to leverage that technology. The responsiveness, if we've needed something in a hurry they've been able to get it to us in a hurry, It ties in extremely well with our infrastructure because we scale so quickly, right? Trends are very hard with us, because there's all these hockey sticks. It's going, going, going, we get a big order and it goes up really fast. I think the theme right now is scale to win? >> Yep. >> So that resonates with us because by having that in place and having that scale ready to go, we don't even need to anticipate those hockey sticks because it's already there. >> Great. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Doc, Infinidat. (laughs) >> Thank you very much it's great to see you both again. >> John: Look forward to see you in 2020, right? >> I'll be back. >> Yeah, it's become an annual thing. >> Michael said we'll be celebrating our 20th year, so I'm looking forward to seeing-- >> And this is our 10th year here, so anniversaries all across the board. >> Congratulations. >> Congratulations. >> Have a good rest of the show, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Back with more VMworld 2019, we continue our coverage live here on theCUBE. We're at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. (upbeat electronic music)