(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. We are on day three, I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube. My cohost is John Troyer. We're very excited to be welcoming a Cube alumni, the CEO of Zadara storage Nelson Nahum, welcome back to the Cube, Nelson. >> Hi, thank you Lisa, how are you? >> Good, good to have you here. So Nelson, from your website you say scalable, elastic, cost-effective enterprise storage as a service. What is this, how does this make Zadara unique? >> Yeah, we are unique because of what we provide as a cluster solution that has all the capability of an enterprise storage. The security, performance insulation, fully management by the customer, block, file, object storage, all these as a service at the customer's size. So we are the only one company that can send all the equipment to the customer data center and the customer don't pay for anything, only for what they use. If we ship 200 drives and they start using ten, they pay for ten, and then they start using another ten, they will pay for 20. And if they want at some point to shrink, they shrink so it's totally elastic, in the sense of the agility for the provisioning, but at the same time, it's elastic in the price so the customer pays only for what they use. >> So this your fifth or sixth time at VMworld, with Zadara, you guys have a booth here on your website you're inviting people, hey, come by our booth. Talk to us about the Zadara storage cloud. What is the Zadara storage cloud. How do VMware users benefit from it? >> Yeah so VMware users, as you know, they use a lot of storage and enterprise storage capability, performance is very important, reliability is very important. This show is the most popular storage show, I would say, because of the need of enterprise storage in a VMware environment. But the reason why they are coming to our booth is because they want to move to a OpEx model even if they want to have this in their own data center we provide that. OpEx model is not only the financing of the equipment, it's also the fact that we manage the equipment remotely so customers don't need to use their own ingenious to manage and learn new equipment and so on and if there's a failure we cover with a team that can do everything remotely and immediately act on a issue. As well, one of the important things that happen with this new model is that customer is not locked with the technology. We as a service provider have the incentive to have the best technology the best price performance for the customer at any time. >> Well let me jump in there and let's talk about hardware for a second. The one thing about storage is it keeps advancing, it keeps getting cheaper. A lot of people out there still spinning discs, Flash and now NVMe. The generations are changing, the densities are getting higher, you have to invest now to get the next generation of performance out of it for your workloads. Talk a little bit about how you, as the service provider, who basically takes on the hardware costs, how are you looking at this, where we are on the curve, are there shortages in production, what is that doing to pricing? What is the risk model both for you and for the enterprise then in this equation as we move more to Flash? >> Yeah, really good question. So actually this is basically we take out from the customer not only the risk, the fact that very quickly the system becomes obsolete. So Flash is a good example, right there all the time, new innovations out on Flash, people predicted a few years ago that Flash would be extremely cheap, actually it's going up, the price. So people that buy today, an all-Flash array, and they calculate the loi over five to seven years they are overspending because at some point the Flash will go down and there is a new technology and higher capacity drives, et cetera, et cetera, that they are paying today for what this cost today. So our customers for example rely on us. So they say okay, Zadara is my storage expert and storage outsourcing and what we do is we provide because we are as a service and our incentive is to have the customer forever with us it's not a three years lease or forty year lease, it's a day to day, working together with the customer and being their provider forever so we have the incentive to provide the best technology at the right price to the customer. A good example I can tell you last year at our company summit we used to have Asustek, krpm drive, were the Enterprise drives, and people that have our systems with those drives may started two years ago, maybe started one year ago, maybe six months ago, or even three months ago, at some point we say, you know what, we will provide Flash at lower cost per gigabyte than spinning disc, and not only that, we will do the data migration online, the customer will not feel anything and at the end of the migration, the customer will have higher performance Flash and guess what, the next invoice will go down. And this is the kind of thing that we do that when you buy Capex you can not do. >> Well Nelson talk a little bit about maybe about to the customer is this consumption model, as a service, OpEx, that translates very well to the cloud cloud consumption models. You partner with all the major clouds, you could have data up there as well. You're customer base, do you see people adopting the hybrid model, where are we in that journey, to the public cloud, where are people keeping their eggs in which basket, these days? >> So yeah, as you know our system can be on premise and can be consumed from the major public cloud, Amazon, Azure, Google, we will announce next month another one-- >> There are more than just the three, yeah, yeah. >> There is another one. So they can consume as in both. I will say until two years ago the market was divided between the people that want to be all cloud or private cloud or inside a data center. Today a hundred percent of our customers have both really, except for the very small startup that may start in the cloud. Even after the ones getting bigger they have portable environments so I would say today the landscape is that people have both because they are seeing that it's better to be in the public cloud for bursting and for scalability. But they are seeing that it's better to be on premise or, it's no longer a private versus public, it's hybrid, I guess. >> And speaking of that, and you mentioned that Zadara partners with some big cloud providers, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then there's a to-be-announced-soon, what have the announcements that you've heard at VMworld this year, what have those meant to you with the VCF on AWS that was announced Monday, then we heard yesterday about the pivotal container service, with Google, what does that signify to you, in terms of the market trends, is it in line with what you expected? >> Yeah, so actually we were I guess the first company to partner with Amazon and cross-connect to Amazon, first storage company, okay, not the first company, the first storage company, and people would say, why you will do that it is better to sell the box and thing like that, so our product was built with cross-connectivity and integration with Amazon and Google and the Azure cloud immediately, right, so we are multi-tenant that is necessary for the cloud but the main thing that we do is that we do a really good job of separating the tenants between them that is unique and this is why Enterprisers prefer to use our storage even in the cloud. So customer in fact has, they get the drive, they get the controller, they get the networking even and can attach the cloud storage solution to their own active directory and cover all this capabilities that they would have on-premise. So we started in this way, and I think that now we see more and more even VMware and NetApp and those that they were classical on-premise that they were going in the same direction. It's actually very good for us. >> I'm a little interested in the container story, here, right, lot of talk about containers here at the show. On prem, even the hyper-converge story, talk about containers, you're running workloads and storage, containers super-useful for that, obviously in the cloud. What's the Zadara service with containers and how does that work? >> Yeah, definitely, so we launch it two years ago, a very unique service that allow a customer to run a Linux container inside the storage so inside the cloud storage solution they can run their own core. Why we did that, there were many customers that have millions of files, and they're reading and writing from a VM outside the storage, introduce latency, one of our customer have billion files and billion files if every time you cut one millisecond it translate into long period of time. The other thing that is interesting with our service is that storage, by definition, you can write or read data. You cannot get an occurrence notification hey, a file was changed. But if you run a application a Linux container inside of this storage, then we can provide this type of notification and say each time that a new file jpeg come to the file system, we will notify the Linux container and the customer can trigger many application or many service that will do something with the data. At zero latency, so zero latency, nothing to manage, they don't need external VM's, and also they get the capability of notifications from inside the file system. >> On the container front, I'm glad you brought that up John, are you seeing any industries in particular that are early adopters of this, or are coming to Zadara saying hey, we want to go the container direction, we want some advice here. You talked about a customer with billions of files, are you seeing any sort of industry specificity or is it more size of company where container technology's work would be leading. >> Yeah, most of our customer that use container they use for a specific service, they will not run out full-blown application in a container, they'll still run VM's but there are some services that benefit from zero latency and from having this notification that they can run in our side. So I think that it's not per industry, but more per type of service within the industry. That they need to do. >> Okay. Another thing that I saw on your website is that Zadara was chosen as a 2017 Red Herring top 100 North American winner. You join fellow winners Google, Skype, Twitter, innovation, it's a really not topic, so I'm sure that was pretty cool. Michael Dell talked about innovation yesterday and how important it is to innovate with customers. Tell us a little bit as we close up here about how Zadara is innovating together with your customers. >> Yeah, great question. So we started, I am an engineer from my background, so I like to innovate and have a new product so I'm also a firm believer that specially a company like us that is not the big companies, we need to really differentiate the product. We don't want to compete on the cheapest thing and we found out some for example. We need to provide really high value. So in order to provide high value we need to innovate. I believe that as the time goes on the more important it is for innovation and this is what you keep seeing with new stuff that's coming along because it's a non-stop journey and getting the best value for the customer. Nothing is more rewarding when you have an idea and people start developing that and suddenly customers are using it and they like that. This is the best reward that we can have. >> And it's probably rewarding for them I would imagine that they are able to be influencing to you. >> In our case because we are a smaller company we do summits every year, we invite customers a little bit lower among the VMworld but we invite customers and we have interaction with the customers and they can strongly influence the roadmap. We typically ask about what are the problems? What are the main issues and we try to innovate in this way. It's a good thing to have a really good roster of, we have worldwide customers today and everywhere in the world and when you put everybody together it's a really good experience. >> So as we wrap here, where can folks go I imagine the Zadara website to learn more in about a month of this new announcement that Zadara's going to be making. >> Yeah Zadarastorage.com is the place. >> Zadarastorage.com >> Yes. >> Excellent. >> And you know, we offer free trials and the nice thing about our service is that we're very easy to try you just go register and there's no moving parts it's just, we have a one week free trial and you like, you stay, you don't like you don't stay. >> Fantastic, well Nelson thanks so much for coming back to the Cube and sharing with us some of the great things that are going on. >> Thank you very much, it was a pleasure again. >> And we'll be watching to see what comes out in about a month's time Zadarastorage.com. >> Definitely. It will be very important. >> All right, you heard it here first. (guest laughing) All right from my cohost, John Troyer, for our guest, Nelson Nahum, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube, live continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around we'll be right back. (techno music)

>> And who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> Announcer: Congratulations, Reggie Jackson. You are Cube alumni. (gentle music) Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Google Cloud Next '17. (techno music) >> Hi, and welcome back to theCube's coverage of Google Next 2017. We're at the heart of Silicon Valley in our great studio in Palo Alto. We've got a team of reporters and analysts up in San Francisco with the 10,000 people attending, really, Google's enterprise show. It's got Cloud, it's got G Suite. It's got a little bit of the devices. I'm happy to welcome back to the program, someone we've had on many times, Nelson Nahum, the CEO of Zadara Storage. Really a company that's in there, understanding this cloud transition from, kind of, how the enterprise gets in multicloud and all those pieces. Nelson, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, sir, how are you? >> All right, it's good. So, you know, you and I last time we talked was at another cloud show, a little bigger cloud show, one that's been going on for a number of years, but let's start talking about Google. What's, you know, we think a lot of progress over the last couple of years. I mean, Diane Green definitely has put her stamp on this company. A ton of people that have been brought in, many of them, those of us in the industry, we know these people. We've seen them grow these businesses, understand how to talk to the enterprise, so, what's your take on the show so far and how Google's doing as a company? And we'll get into how they are as a partner soon, too. >> So this is our first Google Cloud show for us, for Zadara. We've been in, I think, since 2011, in Amazon Prime event, and we like it. This is going very well. We have a lot of conversations. We saw that there are many, many customers looking to have multicloud strategy. That actually works very well for us, because we can provide storage that can be accessible at the same time concurrently from Amazon, and from Google and Azure and others. So, yeah, it's a good trend. I think most of the people we found, they're either already on Amazon and looking to expand to Google or some on-premise to Google, and so on. >> Can you help unpack that multicloud a bit for us? So you know, maybe some of our audience might not know, you guys sit in some of those mega-datacenters, like the Equinixes of the world, and direct connect to the public cloud. >> Exactly, exactly. >> So, I've got, kind of, my storage being Zadara, and there actually is, you know, physical storage there, and then that, you know, plugs into the Cloud resources, of course. We know AWS's Direct Connect. Amazon has, you know, their equivalent, and Google has the same, so, can you have, you know, it's a single solution that, does it just get fibers to all three of them? Is there software that takes care of it? >> Yeah, actually- >> How does that work? >> Yeah, great question. So we sit in Equinix data centers with our cloud, and from there, in many cases, we use Equinix Cloud Exchange, that is, basically, like a networking inside Equinix, and can be connected to many different potential targets, so, currently we are cross-connected to Amazon, Google and Azure. So our customer, at first, can create a storage and mount with NFS or ZFS, or Block, and can mount the storage, especially if it is file storage, then you can share data. You can mount the same storage to virtual machines in Google, and to virtual machines in Amazon, and at the same time, they see the same files. >> Yeah, and what's the use case, why are they doing that? Is that for redundancy or certain features? You know, there was a certain cloud outage a week ago, were your customers riding through that, based on what they're doing? >> Yeah, so, the measured cloud outage that Amazon had last week, S3 ... it caused my people to rethink (laughs), I guess. Fortunately, for us, all our customers that sit in our storage, wasn't impacted, because they sit in our storage and they don't use, we don't use Amazon infrastructure, so they could continue- >> Stu: No S3 for your customers, right? >> Right, so we are doing the Block and the file storage for our customers. I think that, what is important here is not the outage, but what is important is people start recognizing that you need to have the data in two locations in order to be safe. >> Yeah, it's ... People that have done architecture and understand infrastructure is, you know, I need to be thoughtful as to how I architect things, so either I need to make sure I have the availability zones and the services and can take care of that, or perhaps even multicloud to be able to take care of that. >> So, multicloud and you're completely independent to each other. So, we have an array of many customers using us and Amazon and, again, because our storage can be cross-connected to multiple clouds, it's very easy to access from virtual machines in any cloud at the same time. So, people that are using that, it's either for a, kind of, these are tolerant solutions or more robust solutions. As well, in some cases for migration. Each cloud provider has the places or the attributes that it has. You can run applications better in that particular cloud, so, for example, in Microsoft Azure, anything that is related to Windows, they are the best, and, Oracle Cloud, if you run Oracle, probably is the best way to start. So, I will say that the multicloud is not only the disaster recovery type, but people want to use the best cloud for the particular application they have, and they have multiple applications, so use multiple clouds. >> I'm curious, do you get visibility, as to, you know, why are customers choosing Google? Are there, do you have customers that are using Google that aren't using the other public clouds, is it primarily your customers are using it as a secondary source, any data you've got or anecdotes would be helpful. >> So, we have two types of customers, the ones that are multicloud and the others that are going from on-premise to the cloud. As you know, we have an on-premise business, and we make it very easy, from on-premise, to move to the cloud. We just launched it, here in Google Cloud, a service called cloud iteratation, that basically, we allow a customer to move their entire infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud with zero, or minimal, downtime. So, we will ship all the storage to the on-premise facilities, the customer will pay per use, we will start doing replication to the cloud, or in some cases, if it is multiple petabytes, we will ship the equipment to the cloud, and, in the meantime, we can do replication and, at the end, we can switch and fail over, and the customer can continue from the cloud. >> Cloud hydration, >> Cloud hydration, yes. >> is that service. Does that support all the services, all the clouds? >> Yeah, so today, we are doing this for many customers, and the good use case is when a customer wants to move a lot of data to the cloud, but they don't want to have downtime. Because, Amazon Snowball and all these boxes, you need to copy the data, and then ship, and then restore. >> Stu: So, it's not a truck that takes three months >> Yeah, exactly. >> sitting on your location. >> This is what we do, we ship double amount of equipment to the customer, they start doing the copy, and then, half of it, we ship to the cloud. We connect to the cloud, and resume the connection, and, all the time, the customer continues to run, okay? And, at the last moment, they do the fail over. So, it's minimum downtime, even if you need to ship one petabyte of storage. >> Yeah. I'm curious, we've been going through such tremendous changes in the storage industry, do you guys sell, you know, is it the storage person, who do you sell to, and where is their mind at when they think about storage today? >> Yeah. Yeah, we sell storage, so the storage person is the one that's buying- >> Yeah, you know, a lot of people, if they're buying Google, or even if they're putting in AWS services, the storage person is, a lot of time, kind of shoved out of the mix, you're a little bit- >> Shoved out of the mix until they have a problem that they need to bring back the storage- >> Wait, are you saying that could be a problem? (laughs) >> So, what happen is that, and this is, I think, how the cloud started, is cloud storage is, "Ah, storage is just storage," until you start running real applications and you need the performance, and you need the reliability, and so on. So, this is why you need the storage guy to architect the solution, and this is where we, we come in and actually act as a really good outsourcing team of storage experts to the customer, and we help them with this transition from on-premise to the cloud and, in many cases, back and forth, if the customer wants to have a leg in the cloud, a leg on-premise, and move data easily back and forth. >> So, Google made a good push at the show, talking about building the ecosystem, how they want to work with partners. They had companies, like you know, PwC's all over the place, SAP, very strong partnership. How have you found it to work with Google? Any things you'd say to them as to how they can accelerate and move things faster to, you know, build up the ecosystem? >> Yeah, so far, our experience with Google was extremely good. The people are very dynamic, they have the Google dynamism that is very good, and, for us, it was really good to have a close relationship with the Google product managers and sales people, and so on, so we enjoy, have a really good relationship with Google Cloud. >> All right, well, Nelson, I want to give you the final word. You know, things you've learned this week, any cool customer conversation you've had, give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so, the ... I guess my summary is that, here in Google Cloud, we have a big advantage because we have ... NAS, NFS, ZFS, we've architected their integration and all the snapshot capabilities that enterprises need. And, you know that Google doesn't have a EFS type of functionality, and our functionality's actually higher than EFS. So, this is what we are talking to customers, here in Google Cloud, anybody that needs NFS and ZFS, and NAS and multicloud, and on-premise to the cloud, they talk to us and we are ready to go. >> All right, Nelson Nahum, really appreciate you coming to the studio here to share what's happening at the Google event. Be sure to check out wikibon.com for our cloud research and, of course, siliconangle.tv to see all the shows we're going to be at, as well as the replays from this and lots of other cloud infrastructure, IoT and big data shows. We'll be back with lots more coverage here, day two of two, covering Google Cloud. From the SiliconANGLE media studio in Palo Alto, you're watching The Cube. (techno music)