>> From the SiliconAngle media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston-area studio. Welcome back to the program, CUBE alum, Ashok Ramu, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud at Actifio, great to see you. >> Happy New Year, Stu, happy to be here. >> 2020, hard to believe it said, it feels like we're in the future here. And talking about future, we've watched Actifio for many years, we remember when copy data management, the category, was created, and really, Actifio, we were talking a lot before Cloud was the topic that we spent so much talking about, but Actifio has been on this journey with its customers in Cloud for many years, and of course, that is your role is working, building the product, the team working all over it, so give us a little bit of a history, if you would, and give us the path that led to 10C announcement. >> Sure thing. We started the Cloud journey early on, in 2014 or 2013-ish, when Amazon was the only Cloud that really worked. We built our architecture, in fact, we took our enterprise architecture and put it on the Cloud and realized, "Oh my god," you know, it's a world of difference. The economics don't work, the security model is different, the scale is different. So, I think with the 8.0 version that came out in 2017, we really kind of figured out the architecture that worked for large enterprises, particularly enterprises that have diverse data sets and have requirements around, you know, marrying different applications to data sets anywhere they want, so we came up with efficient use of object, we came up with the capability of migrating workloads, taking VMware VMs, bringing up on Azure, bringing up on DCP, et cetera. So that was the first foray into Actifio's Cloud, and since then, we've been just building strength after strength, you know. It's been a building block, understanding our customers, and thank you to the customers and the hyperscalers that actually led us to the 10C release. So this, I believe, we've taken it up a notch wherein, we understand the Cloud, we understand the infrastructure, the software auto-tunes itself to know where it's running on, taking the guessing game out of the equation. So 10C really represents what we see as a launchpad for the rest of the Cloud journey that Actifio's going to embark upon. We have enabled a number of new use cases like AI and ML, data transformation is key, we tackled really complicated workloads like HANA and Sybase and MySQL, et cetera, and in addition to that, we also adopt different native Cloud technologies, like Cloud snapshots, like recovery orchestration of the Cloud, et cetera. >> Yeah, I think it's worth reminding our audience there that Actifio's always been software. And when you talk about, you know, I think back to 2013, 2014, it was the public Cloud versus the data center, and we have seen the public Cloud in many ways looks more and more like what the enterprise has been used to. >> Absolutely. >> And the data centers have been trying to Cloud-ify for a number of years, and things like containerization and Kubernetes is blurring the line, and of course, every hyperscaler out there now has something that reaches their public Cloud into the data center and of course, technologies like VMware are also extending into the public Cloud, or, SAP now, of course is all of the Cloud environment. So with hybrid Cloud and multi-Cloud as kind of the waves of driving, help us understand that Actifio lives in all of these environments, and they're all a little bit different, so how does Actifio make sure that it can provide the functionality and experience that users want, regardless of where it is? >> Absolutely, you said it right. Actifio has always been a software company. And it is our customers that showed us, by Cloudifying their data centers, that we had to operate in the Cloud. So we had on premises VMware Clouds, not before we had Amazon and Azure and Google. So that evolution started much early on. And so, from what, you know, Actifio's a very customer-driven company, be it, you know, all segments of the company are driven by the customers, and in 2019, and even before, when you see a strong trend to migrate workloads, to move workloads, we realized, there is a significant opportunity, because the hardest thing to migrate is the volume of data because it's ever-changing, and it is ever-growing. So, the key element of neutrality was the application itself. Microsoft SQL's a SQL no matter how you run it. It could be on a big Windows machine in your data center or a NGCP, it makes no difference. So Actifio's approach to start application down basically gave us the freedom to say, we're going to create SQL to SQL. I don't know if you're running in Azure, Google, DOP data center, or AliCloud, it makes no difference to me. I understand SQL, I understand SQL's availability groups, I understand logs, I can capture it and give it back to you, so when we took that approach, it kind of automatically gave us infrastructure neutrality, really didn't care. So when we have a conversation with a customer, it basically goes around lines of, "Okay, Mr. Customer, how much data do you have? And what are your key applications? Can you categorize them in terms of priority?" It usually comes out to be databases are the crown jewels, so they're the number one priority in terms of data management, migration, test Av, et cetera. And then, we basically drill down into the ecosystem the databases live into. So, because we walk application down, the conversation is the same whether the customer is in the data center, or in the Cloud. So that is how we've evolved, and that's how we're thinking from a product standpoint, from a support standpoint, and then the overall company is built that way. So it makes it easy for us to adapt a new platform that comes in. So, when you talked about, you know, how does, each Cloud is different, you're absolutely right, the security concepts are different, right? Microsoft is built on active directory, Google is built on something very different. So how do you utilize and how do you make this work? We do have an infrastructure layer that basically provides Cloud-specific capabilities for various Cloud platforms. And that has gotten to a point where it understands and tunes itself from a security standpoint and a performance standpoint. Once that's taken care of, the rest of the application stack, which is over 90% of our software, stays the same, there's no change. And so that is how we kind of tackle this. Because the ecosystem we live in, we have to keep up with two people. We have to keep up with the infrastructure people who are making it bigger, faster, and we also have to keep up with the application people who are making it fancier and more complicated. So that's unfortunately the ecosystem we live in, and taking this approach has given us a mechanism to insulate us from a lot of the complexities of these two environments. >> Yeah, that's great, 'cause when you talk to customers and you say, "What's going on in your environment," change is difficult. So, how many different pieces of what I'm doing do I need to move to be able to take advantage of the modern economics. On the one hand, you know, if I have an application and I like it, well, maybe I could just lift and shift it, but if I'm just lifting, shifting, I'm not necessarily taking advantage of the full Cloud native environments, but I need to make sure that my data is protected, backup, you mentioned security, are of course the top concerns, so. It sounds like, in many ways, you're talking, helping customers work through some of those initiatives, being able to take advantage of new environments, but not need to completely change everything. Maybe, I'd love to hear a little bit, when you talk about the developers and DevOps initiatives that are happening inside customers, where does that impact, where does that connect with what Actifio's doing? >> Well, that's a great question. So, let me start with a real customer example. We have this customer, SEI Investments, who basically, their business model is to grow by acquisition, so they're adding on tens, hundreds of developers every quarter. So it's impossible to keep up with infrastructure needs when you grow at that pace. They decided to adopt a Cloud platform. And with each Cloud platform comes some platform-specific piece that all these developers now have to re-tool themselves. So, I'm a developer, I used to come in the morning, open up my machine and start working away on the application, now I have to do something different, and if there is 300 of me, and the cost of moving to the Cloud was a lot less than training the developers. It was much harder to train the developers because it has been ongoing process. So we were presented the challenge of how do you avoid it? So, when we are able to separate the application layer from the data layer, because of the way we operate, what we present as a solution was to say, just move your, what is the heaviest layer you have? That's the database, okay. And what are the copies you're creating? I'm creating hundreds of copies of my Oracle database, okay. Let's just move that to the Cloud. All of the front-end application doesn't see a change, thanks to the great infrastructure work the Cloud providers do, you add 10 Gigabyte to everywhere. So network is not a problem, computer's not a problem, it's just available on an API call, so you provision that. All they did was a data movement, moved it from Point A to Point B, gives you the flexibility to spend up any number of copies you want in the Cloud, now, your developer tool sets haven't changed, so there's no training required for developers, but from an operations standpoint, you've completely eased the burden of creating a hundred more copies every month, because Cloud is built for that. So you take the elasticity of the Cloud, advantage of that, and provide the data in the last mile to the Cloud, thereby, developers, they will access the application with the same level of ease. So, that is the paradigm we're seeing, we're seeing, you know, in some of our customers, there is faster and better storage provision for Actifio because there are 190 developers working off Actifio, where there's only about a handful of people running production. So, it's a paradigm shift is where we see it. And the pace at which we bring up the application wherein we're able to bring up 150 terabyte article database in three hours. Before Actifio, it used to be, maybe, 30 days, if you were lucky. So it's not just an order of magnitude, it's what you can do with that data, is where we're seeing the shift going to. >> Yeah, it's interesting, when you go back and look at some of the changes that have happened in the Cloud, Cloud storage was one of the earliest discussed use cases there, and backup to the Cloud was one of the earlier pieces of the Cloud storage discussion. Yet, we've seen changes and maturation into what can actually be done, explain a little bit how Actifio enables even greater functionality when you're talking about backup to the Cloud. >> Absolutely. You know, the object storage technology, it's probably the most scalable and stable piece of storage known to mankind, because nobody can build that level of scale that Amazon, Azure, and Google have put into it. From a security standpoint, performance standpoint, and scale standpoint. So I'm able to drop my data in Boston and pick it up in Tokyo seamlessly, right? That's unheard of before. And the biggest impediment to that, was a lot of legacy application data didn't know how to consume this object storage. So what Actifio came up with on onboard technology was to light up the object storage for everybody, and basically make it a performance neutral platform, wherein you take the guessing game out of the customer. The customer doesn't need to go research S3 or Google Nearline or Google Persistent Disk and say I want ten copies there versus five copies there, Actifio figures it out for you. You give us your SLA, you give us your RTOs and RPOs, and we tell you, okay, this is the most cost effective way to store your data. You get the multi-year retention for free, you get the GDPR, appchafe and protection for free, you get the geo-redundancy for free. All this is built into the platform. In addition, you also can run DevOps off the object store. You can run DR off the object store. So we enabled a lot of the legacy use cases using this new technology, so that is kind of where we see the cusp, wherein, in the Cloud, there's always a question and a debate, does D-doop make sense? D-doop consumes a lot of compute, takes a lot of memory, you need to have that memory and compute whether you want it or not. We're seeing a lot more adoption of encryption, where the data is encrypted at source. When you encrypt data, D-doop is just a big compute-churning platform, it doesn't do much for you. So we went through this debate actively, I think four or five years ago, and we figured out, object store's the way to go. You cannot get storage, I mean, it's a buck a terabyte in Google, and dropping. How can you get storage that's reliable, scalable, at a lower cost? All we had to do was actuate the use of that storage, which is what we did. >> Yeah. I'm just laughing a little bit because, you know, gosh, I think back a dozen years ago, the industry knew that the future of storage would be object, yet it's taken a long time to really be able to leverage it and use it, and the Cloud, the hyperscalers of course, have been a huge enabler on that, but we don't want customers to have to think about that it's object underneath, and that's the bridging the gap that I think we've been looking for. There, what else. We talk about really being able to extract the value out of Cloud, you know, data protection, disaster recovery, migrations are all things that are top of mind. >> Yeah, absolutely. All those use cases, and we're seeing some of the top rating CIOs talk about AI and ML. We've had a couple of customers who want to basically take their manufacturing data from remote sites and pump it into Google bit query. Now we all know manufacturing happens in Taiwan and Singapore and all those locations, now how do you take data from all those applications, normalize it, and pump it into Google bit query and get your predictable results on a quarterly basis, it's a challenge. Because the data volumes are large. So with our Cloud technology and our onboard capability, we're able to funnel data directly into Google Nearline, and on a quarterly basis, on a scheduled basis, transform it, push it into bit query, and bring out the results for the end user. So that journey is pretty transformated, from a customer standpoint. What they used to have five people do maybe once a year, now with a push of a button happens every quarter. So it's a change in how the AI and ML analytics evolve. The other element is also you know, our partnership with IBM, we're working very closely with their Cloud bag for data. Cloud bag for data is an awesome platform built to analyze any kind of data that you might have. With Actifio's normalization platform, you basically can feed any data into Actifio and it presents a unified interface into the slow pack, so you can build your analytics workloads very quickly and easily. >> So we've talked a lot about Cloud, one of the other C's of course in 10C is containers, if we look at containerization, when it first started, it was stateless applications, most applications that are running in containers are running for very short period of time, so help us understand where Actifio fits there, what's the problem statement that you are solving? >> Oh, absolutely. So containers are coming up, up and coming and out of reality, and as we see more applications flow into containers, you see the data lives outside the container. Because containers are short-lived, they're microservices, they come up and they go down, and the state is maintained in a storage platform outside the container, so Actifio tackles containers by taking the data protection strategy we have for the storage platform already, Bell defined, but enhancing the data presentation into the container as it comes up. So a container can be brought up in seconds, maybe less. But the container is only brought to life when it can lead to data and start working again, so that's the bridge Actifio actuates. So we understand, you know, the architecture of how a container is put together, how the container system is put together, and basically, we marry the storage and the application consistent in the storage into the container so that the container's databases, or applications, come to life. >> And that could be in a customer's data center, in a public Cloud, Kubernetes enabled, all of that? >> Absolutely, it can be anywhere, and with 10C, what we have done is we've also integrated with Cloud Native Snapshot, so if you talk about net neutrality for the container platform, if it's on premises, we have all kinds of access to the storage, the infrastructure, and the platforms so our processing is very different. If you take it to the Cloud, let's say Google, Google Kubernetes platform is fairly, it's a black box. You get some storage, and you get containers. And you have an API access to the storage. So in Google, we automatically autotune and start taking the Google snapshots to take the storage perfection, so that's the other way we've kind of neutralized the platform. >> Yeah, you've got a, thinking about it just from a customer's standpoint, one of the big challenges there is they've got everything from their big monoliths, they're big databases, through these microservice Cloud native architectures there, and it sounds like you know, is that just one of the fundamental architectural designs to make sure that you can span across those environments and give customers a common look and feel between those environments? >> Absolutely. The single pane of glass is a big askt and a big focus for us, not just across infrastructure, it's across geos and across all platforms. So you could have workloads running AIX6, VMware, in the Cloud, all the way through containers, and manage it all to a single console, to know when was the last good backup, how many copies of the database am I running, and each of these databases could have their own security constructs. So we normalize all of those elements and put them in a single console. >> Okay, 10C, shipping today? >> 10C shipping today, we have early access to a few customers, the general availability releases possibly in the February timeframe. >> Okay, and if I'm an existing Actifio customer, what's the path for me to get to 10C? >> Our support will reach out and do a simple software upgrade, it's available on all Cloud platforms, it's available everywhere, so you will see that on all the marketplaces and the regular upgrade process will get you that. >> Okay, and if I'm not an Actifio customer today, how easy is it for me to try this out? >> Oh, it is very easy, with our Actifio go SAS platform, it's a one-click download, you can download and try it out, try all the capabilities of the platform, it's also available on all the Cloud marketplaces for you to go and access that. >> All right, well, Ashok, a whole lot of pieces inside of 10C, congratulations to you and the team for building that, and definitely look forward to hearing more about the customer deployments. >> Thank you, we have exciting times ahead. >> All right. Lots more coverage from theCUBE throughout 2020, be sure to check out theCUBE.net, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Moscone Center in San Francisco everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our coverage of Google Cloud Next #GoogleNext19. I'm here with my co-host Stuart Miniman and I'm Dave Vellante, John Furrier is also here. Dominic Preuss is here, he's the Director of Product Management, Storage and Databases at Google. Dominic, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great, thanks to be here. >> Gosh, 15, 20 years ago there were like three databases and now there's like, I feel like there's 300. It's exploding, all this innovation. You guys made some announcements yesterday, we're gonna get into, but let's start with, I mean, data, we were just talking at the open, is the critical part of any IT transformation, business value, it's at the heart of it. Your job is at the heart of it and it's important to Google. >> Yes. Yeah, you know, Google has a long history of building businesses based on data. We understand the importance of it, we understand how critical it is. And so, really, that ethos is carried over into Google Cloud platform. We think about it very much as a data platform and we have a very strong responsibility to our customers to make sure that we provide the most secure, the most reliable, the most available data platform for their data. And it's a key part of any decision when a customer chooses a hyper cloud vendor. >> So summarize your strategy. You guys had some announcements yesterday really embracing open source. There's certainly been a lot of discussion in the software industry about other cloud service providers who were sort of bogarting open source and not giving back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How would you characterize Google's strategy with regard to open source, data storage, data management and how do you differentiate from other cloud service providers? >> Yeah, Google has always been the open cloud. We have a long history in our commitment to open source. Whether be Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Angular, Golang. Pick any one of these that we've been contributing heavily back to open source. Google's entire history is built on the success of open source. So we believe very strongly that it's an important part of the success. We also believe that we can take a different approach to open source. We're in a very pivotal point in the open source industry, as these companies are understanding and deciding how to monetize in a hyper cloud world. So we think we can take a fundamentally different approach and be very collaborative and support the open source community without taking advantage or not giving back. >> So, somebody might say, okay, but Google's got its own operational databases, you got analytic databases, relational, non-relational. I guess Google Spanner kind of fits in between those. It was an amazing product. I remember that that first came out, it was making my eyes bleed reading the white paper on it but awesome tech. You certainly own a lot of your own database technology and do a lot of innovation there. So, square that circle with regard to partnerships with open source vendors. >> Yeah, I think you alluded to a little bit earlier there are hundreds of database technologies out there today. And there's really been a proliferation of new technology, specifically databases, for very specific use cases. Whether it be graph or time series, all these other things. As a hyper cloud vendor, we're gonna try to do the most common things that people need. We're gonna do manage MySQL, and PostgreS and SQL Server. But for other databases that people wanna run we want to make sure that those solutions are first class opportunities on the platform. So we've engaged with seven of the top and leading open source companies to make sure that they can provide a managed service on Google Cloud Platform that is first class. What that means is that as a GCP customer I can choose a Google offered service or a third-party offered service and I'm gonna have the same, seamless, frictionless, integrated experience. So I'm gonna get unified billing, I'm gonna get one bill at the end of the day. I'm gonna have unified support, I'm gonna reach out to Google support and they're going to figure out what the problem is, without blaming the third-party or saying that isn't our problem. We take ownership of the issue and we'll go and figure out what's happening to make sure you get an answer. Then thirdly, a unified experience so that the GCP customer can manage that experience, inside a cloud console, just like they would their Google offered serves. >> A fully-managed database as a service essentially. >> Yes, so of the seven vendors, a number of them are databases. But also for Kafka, to manage Kafka or any other solutions that are out there as well. >> All right, so we could spend the whole time talking about databases. I wanna spend a couple minutes talking about the other piece of your business, which is storage. >> Dominic: Absolutely. >> Dave and I have a long history in what we'd call traditional storage. And the dialog over the last few years has been we're actually talking about data more than the storing of information. A few years back, I called cloud the silent killer of the old storage market. Because, you know, I'm not looking at buying a storage array or building something in the cloud. I use storage is one of the many services that I leverage. Can you just give us some of the latest updates as to what's new and interesting in your world. As well as when customers come to Google where does storage fit in that overall discussion? >> I think that the amazing opportunity that we see for for large enterprises right now is today, a lot of that data that they have in their company are in silos. It's not properly documented, they don't necessarily know where it is or who owns it or the data lineage. When we pick all that date up across the enterprise and bring it in to Google Cloud Platform, what's so great about is regardless of what storage solution you choose to put your data in it's in a centralized place. It's all integrated, then you can really start to understand what data you have, how do I do connections across it? How do I try to drive value by correlating it? For us, we're trying to make sure that whatever data comes across, customers can choose whatever storage solution they want. Whichever is most appropriate for their workload. Then once the data's in the platform we help them take advantage of it. We are very proud of the fact that when you bring data into object storage, we have a single unified API. There's only one product to use. If you would have really cold data, or really fast data, you don't have to wait hours to get the data, it's all available within milliseconds. Now we're really excited that we announced today is a new storage class. So, in Google Cloud Storage, which is our object storage product, we're now gonna have a very cold, archival storage option, that's going to start at $0.12 per gigabyte, per month. We think that that's really going to change the game in terms of customers that are trying to retire their old tape backup systems or are really looking for the most cost efficient, long term storage option for their data. >> The other thing that we've heard a lot about this week is that hybrid and multi-cloud environment. Google laid out a lot of the partnerships. I think you had VMware up on stage. You had Cisco up on stage, I see Nutanix is here. How does that storage, the hybrid multi-cloud, fit together for your world. >> I think the way that we view hybrid is that every customer, at some point, is hybrid. Like, no one ever picks up all their data on day one and on day two, it's on the cloud. It's gonna be a journey of bringing that data across. So, it's always going to be hybrid for that period of time. So for us, it's making sure that all of our storage solutions, we support open standards. So if you're using an an S3 compliant storage solution on-premise, you can use Google Cloud Storage with our S3 compatible API. If you are doing block, we work with all the large vendors, whether be NetApp or EMC or any of the other vendors you're used to having on-premise, making sure we can support those. I'm personally very excited about the work that we've done with NetApp around NetApp cloud buying for Google Cloud Platform. If you're a NetApp shop and you've been leveraging that technology and you're really comfortable and really like it on-premise, we make it really easy to bring that data to the cloud and have the same exact experience. You get all the the wonderful features that NetApp offers you on-premise in a cloud native service where you're paying on a consumption based service. So, it really takes, kind of, the decision away for the customers. You like NetApp on-premise but you want cloud native features and pricing? Great, we'll give you NetApp in the cloud. It really makes it to be an easy transition. So, for us it's making sure that we're engaged and that we have a story with all the storage vendors that you used to using on-premise today. >> Let me ask you a question, about go back, to the very cold, ice cold storage. You said $0.12 per gigabyte per month, which is kinda in between your other two major competitors. What was your thinking on the pricing strategy there? >> Yeah, basically everything we do is based on customer demand. So after talking to a bunch of customers, understanding the workloads, understanding the cost structure that they need, we think that that's the right price to meet all of those needs and allow us to basically compete for all the deals. We think that that's a really great price-point for our customers. And it really unlocks all those workloads for the cloud. >> It's dirt cheap, it's easy to store and then it takes a while to get it back, right, that's the concept? >> No, it is not at all. We are very different than other storage vendors or other public cloud offerings. When you drop your data into our system, basically, the trade up that you're making is saying, I will give you a cheaper price in exchange for agreeing to leave the data in the platform, for a longer time. So, basically you're making a time-based commitment to us, at which point we're giving you a cheaper price. But, what's fundamentally different about Google Cloud Storage, is that regardless of which storage class you use, everything is available within milliseconds. You don't have to wait hours or any amount of time to be able to get that data. It's all available to you. So, this is really important, if you have long-term archival data and then, let's say, that you got a compliance request or regulatory requests and you need to analyze all the data and get to all your data, you're not waiting hours to get access to that data. We're actually giving you, within milliseconds, giving you access to that data, so that you can get the answers you need. >> And the quid pro quo is I commit to storing it there for some period of time, is that you said? >> Correct. So, we have four storage classes. We have our Standard, our Nearline, our Coldline and this new Archival. Each of them has a lower price point, in exchange for a longer, committed time the you'll leave the product. >> That's cool. I think that adds real business value there. So, obviously, it's not sitting on tape somewhere. >> We have a number of solutions for how we store the data. For us, it's indifferent, how we store the data. It's all about how long you're willing to tell us it'll be there and that allows us to plan for those resources long term. >> That's a great story. Now, you also have this pay-as-you-go pricing tiers, can you talk about that a little bit? >> For which, for Google Cloud Storage? >> Dave: Yes. >> Yeah, everything is pay-as-you-go and so basically you write data to us and there's a charge for the operations you do and then you charge for however long you leave the data in the system. So, if you're using our Standard class, you're just paying our standard price. You can either use Regional or Multi-Regional, depending on the disaster recovery and the durability and availability requirements that you have. Then you're just paying us for that for however long you leave the data in the system. Once you delete it, you stop paying. >> So it must be, I'm not sure what kind of customer discussions are going on in terms of storage optionality. It used to be just, okay, I got block and I got file, but now you've got all different kind of. You just mentioned several different tiers of performance. What's the customer conversation like, specifically in terms of optionality and what are they asking you to deliver? >> I think within the storage space, there's really three things, there's object, block and file. So, on the object side, or on the block side we have our persistence product. Customers are asking for better price performance, more performance, more IOPS, more throughput. We're continuing to deliver a higher-performance, block device for them and that's going very, very well. For those that need file, we have our first-party service, which is Cloud Filestore, which is our manage NFS. So if you need managed NFS, we can provide that for you at a really low price point. We also partner with, you mentioned Elastifile earlier. We partner with NetApp, we're partnering with EMC. So all those options are also available for file. Then on the object side, if you can accept the object API, it's not POSIX-compliant it's a very different model. If your workloads can support that model then we give you a bunch of options with the Object Model API. >> So, data management is another hot topic and it means a lot of things to a lot of people. You hear the backup guys talking about data management. The database guys talk about data management. What is data management to Google and what your philosophy and strategy there? >> I think for us, again, I spend a lot of time making sure that the solutions are unified and consistent across. So, for us, the idea is that if you bring data into the platform, you're gonna get a consistent experience. So you're gonna have consistent backup options you're gonna have consistent pricing models. Everything should be very similar across the various products So, number one, we're just making sure that it's not confusing by making everything very simple and very consistent. Then over time, we're providing additional features that help you manage that. I'm really excited about all the work we're doing on the security side. So, you heard Orr's talk about access transparency and access approvals right. So basically, we can have a unified way to know whether or not anyone, either Google or if a third-party offer, a third-party request has come in about if we're having to access the data for any reason. So we're giving you full transparency as to what's going on with your data. And that's across the data platform. That's not on a per-product basis. We can basically layer in all these amazing security features on top of your data. The way that we view our business is that we are stewards of your data. You've given us your data and asked us to take care of it, right, don't lose it. Give it back to me when I want it and let me know when anything's happening to it. We take that very seriously and we see all the things we're able to bring to bear on the security side, to really help us be good stewards of that data. >> The other thing you said is I get those access logs in near real time, which is, again, nuanced but it's very important. Dominic, great story, really. I think clear thinking and you, obviously, delivered some value for the customers there. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing that with us. >> Absolutely, happy to be here. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this. You're watching theCUBE live from Google Cloud Next from Moscone. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, John Furrier. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching theCUBE, on the ground, extremely excited for our segment here. Wasabi just launched last week on Wednesday. We have their co-founder and CEO with us here today on theCUBE. David, thank you for coming on today. >> Hey, nice to be here Sam. Thank you. >> So, unbelievably exciting. Can you tell the world about Wasabi? >> So if you know what Amazon S3 cloud storage is, you pretty much know what Wasabi is, except we're one-fifth the price and six-times as fast. (laughing) >> Incredible. So, you know, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite decided to start Wasabi. Tell us, why Wasabi? >> Why the name Wasabi? >> Well, the name as well. >> Cause it's hot. (laughing) My co-founder Jeff Flowers, who's one of the great technical geniuses I've ever met in my life, came to me about three years ago, with this paper design for a new storage architecture, and said, "I think we could do something that's going to be far faster and far more efficient in storage than what the cloud providers Google, Amazon and Microsoft are doing," and I said okay, "Well you should go check it out." So he left Carbonite, and we spent about a year doing design work, and eventually we ended up with this design that was so compelling to me that I decided it was time to jump on board, and join Jeff again, and this is this is the sixth company that we founded together since 1980. So we kind of know how to complete each other's sentences. It's been a winning combination, there's been quite a lot of successes there. >> So, I'd love to hear about the vision of Wasabi. >> My vision of Wasabi and cloud storage in general is that cloud storage ought to be like electricity or bandwidth, it should just be a commodity. Right now you have all these silly tiers, you have Coldline and Nearline and Standard and Glacier, and these artificial tiers that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have made to try to protect their high price spread. Wasabi is faster than the fastest of them and it's cheaper than the cheapest of them, so why do you need all these silly things in the middle? It's just like electricity, you go to plug your computer or your blender into the wall, you don't have three different plugs, one for great electricity, one for so-so electricity and one for crumby but cheap electricity, you know, you just have one. So one size fits almost all needs, and I think that's the way cloud storage is going to be as well. When we get to that, it'll be best man wins, right? The guy with the best performance and the lowest cost is going to win, and we feel we can compete in that environment. >> So a buzzword I've been hearing is 'immutable buckets', can you tell me about that? >> Yeah, so that's the one functional difference between Amazon S3 and Wasabi, otherwise Wasabi is completely 100% plug compatible with Amazon. You can unplug Amazon, plug in Wasabi and all your applications should work, and the other way around too. That's part of being a commodity, right? Your suppliers should be interchangeable. But, immutable buckets is something which really came from our Carbonite heritage. We know from Carbonite that most data loss is not due to failing disk drives and things like that today, it's stupid mistakes, you know people accidentally overwrite or delete a file? It's bugs in application software cause data to get overwritten or deleted. Then you get things like Wannacry, which come in, grabs all the data on your computer and encrypts it. So immutability means if you store data in an immutable bucket, it cannot be altered, and it cannot be deleted. It can't be deleted by you, it can't be deleted by us, and it certainly can't be deleted by a hacker or somebody breaking in from the outside. So, about 10 or 20 years ago, people invented something called the WORM tape, write-once-read-many, that was really one of the first forms of immutable digital storage. Once you put your data on there, that was it, when the tape is full, you take it off, put it in the drawer, and it's safe. That's not a very good system by today's standards, but we've built immutability into Wasabi, so that when you create a bucket in Wasabi, and for those people who don't know about object storage technology, a bucket is like a folder, and an object is like a file, when you create a bucket in Wasabi, you can flip a switch and you can say, "I want to make this bucket immutable for 10 years," let's say, and any time you go in and try to erase or alter any of the data that's been written, you just get an error message, which is what the wannabe virus would have gotten had it tried to encrypt that data. So the only downside of immutability is once you put something in there, you can't go in and clean it up. You're going to be stuck paying to store that data for a long time, but at our price of 0.39 cents per gigabyte per month, I don't think anybody would bother ever trying to clean it up anyway. You know, it's like when's a good time to go empty that U-Haul storage locker? Eh, I'll write another cheque for $40 and think about it next time. (laughing) >> So your tag-on is a hot storage? >> Hot storage, yeah. >> So you launched one week ago, on Wednesday. Tell us about that first week, how crazy was it? >> Well the only thing we did was some PR, so there were a number of articles that appeared about us, and we were expecting maybe 15, 20 companies would come sign up in the first week, do a free trial. But by 48 hours in, we were over 150, and by one more day we were at over 200. And we kind of had to shut down new sign-ups because it was just more than we could handle. We were just worried that we would get overwhelmed. Now we're trying to catch up, we just put more storage online in the last 24 hours, and now we're working through the stack of people. I don't know how many more have come in since then, but it's been a lot, so we're working through that now to give people their passcodes so that they can get on the system, hopefully by this time next week we'll be caught up. >> Well congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks! >> Any last words that you want to leave the people with about Wasabi? >> Well anytime you drop the price of anything by 80%, unexpected things are going to happen. When bandwidth suddenly got cheap, you got Netflix and movies over the internet and that kind of stuff, which people hadn't even dreamed about. I'll be really interested to see what people do with really cheap, fast storage. When you think about all these storage intensive apps like Pinterest, Instagram and things that involve videos and so forth, storage has got to be your biggest cost. And most of these apps are free, so the only revenue you're going to get is going to be advertising. I'll bet there are a lot of business models that just won't work at Amazon's prices, but drop those prices by 80%, and now suddenly you say, "Wow, this could be profitable." I'm not going to invent those apps, but I'm sure that some of the people who are signing up for Wasabi today are thinking about things that didn't work in the old regime, but with commodity cloud storage at these low prices, it starts to make sense. So we'll see, I think it's going to change the world. >> I hope so, and it's going to be exciting to watch. >> Yeah, it'll be fun. >> We'll need to catch up again soon and check back in on the growth. But David, thank you for coming on theCUBE tonight! >> You're welcome Sam, thank you. >> And CUBENation, thank you for watching. (Outro music)