>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, the home of hot chicken and Commvault GO this week. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Keith wasn't expecting that one. >> I'm looking forward to the hot chicken. >> Absolutely. And happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Rahul Pawar, who is the head of R&D, research and development, at Commvault. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me on this one. >> Alright, we said, like the hot chicken, I said we need to roll up our sleeves and really get into the sauce-- >> Rahul: Yes, yes. of what we're talking. Alright, enough of the puns on my standpoint. But tell us a little bit about R&D inside, what's your role, what's your team, what's your charter? >> So, we have a team of about 650 very dynamic, young engineers. And what my role, and I'm very excited about that role, is I get to talk with a lot of our customers and partners and understand their pain points. And the majority of my research comes from what the customer is really looking to do and what is hurting them, and trying to solve that and describe. And once I have a problem defined, the team is very, very intelligent at solving them and they come up with various ways to solve it. And then getting that customer satisfaction high is what gives me the high and that's really what's kept me at Commvault for over 17 years now. >> Yeah, 17 years, Rahul. I think back so, 17 years ago, I was working for a storage company. And we talked about data, but it was usually about storing data or protecting data. Now we're talking about how we can get more value out of data. One of the things I was looking at coming into this show is like, okay, you talk about the AI and the ML. Well, how does that fit into this environment? Maybe you can explain why is it different now in 2018? What can you do now that you wouldn't have been able to do 10 years or even five years ago? >> So Stu, you made a good point. Back up, especially, was make a copy, put it on tape, send it to somewhere. Iron mountain, typically. And that has changed now. Everything is available online all the time. And even our thermostat is much smarter than what it was five years back, so we really are expecting, everybody's expecting, a lot more from the retail that is available from all the information that is there and they want to make use of that. So backup can no longer be, hey, I'm backing up these five servers and go figure it out. Backup is now getting tons of VM's, tons of new application swapping in various cloud applications that are coming in. So the IT team is really, really in the middle of this data revolution and getting so much information thrown their way. So that data, and that data is the liquid gold, like Bob and I like to call it, and that has a lot of valuable information. It has information about your patterns, it has information about who is accessing what files, and should they really be accessing it, what data is really, really not needed, and what is the sensitive data that is lurking behind and it could become a problem for you? So that data is a goldmine and the systems and the hard disks are becoming so much cheaper. Storage has become so much cheaper, so having that data accessible all the time, we take it for granted. >> So Rahul, I'd like to say scale breaks things. When I was a young administrator, I literally had a spreadsheet to keep track of my tapes, of where my tapes were, what systems were backed up. So even if I lost my index and my software backup product, I could know where my tapes were at. Now, with organizations with petabytes and petabytes of data, how important is ML, AI to knowing where your data is at and how important is the index to that relationship? >> I really want to say that ML and AI has become what deduplication was five years back, and pretty much everybody is expecting you to have it. Like I said, if my car knows it, if my home knows it, my thermostat knows it, even my phone knows it, like where I'm going, like every week if I travel to a certain place and it knows it, it is something that is expected to be known. And our backup environment has become so dynamic. There's network failures and there's tons of things beyond the control of the backup admin, even the storage admin or the DB-ers or the app developers who are putting in there, that just come in place. And with all of that happening, you need a system that is learning from what is happening and being very smart about doing stuff. So, we learned from yesterday's failures or the failures that were on the backups, we look at the network load that is on right now, the disk load that is on right now, and adapt our backup schedules accordingly. So we know your SLAs. You're trying to get an SLA of a certain number of hours versus minutes, and based on that, we prioritize certain servers over others, or certain VM's that we see brand new over other VM's, and then VM's around certain data stores over others because we want to keep the load on the data storage server or even your network and the proxies minimum, but at the same time we know we are racing against the clock because we want everything to be backed up and even have a secondary copy and all of that. So there we are prioritizing and re-prioritizing our backups and schedules and everything. >> One of the challenges when you talk about automation is there's the technology and then there's the people and in the open to the keynote this morning, the poet was using the GPS analogy >> Yes. and talked about, okay, you have arrived. Well, the admins today, they kind of have their turf that they control versus do I trust that it's doing the job and can automate some of those things and I shouldn't have to worry about it. Does your team get involved in that dynamic? Because I know you listen to the customers how do you help bridge that gap and help? I think of autonomous cars, we said we will soon get to the point, sometime hopefully in the not-too-distant future, where it's not that I don't trust the computers, it's really that I trust them more than I do the people. >> Okay so I'll tell you, trust develops as you use it more. There's a reason why autonomous driving cars still have a steering wheel and a break because, I'm not sure whether I can trust it. But on the other hand, as time passes by, you really see the software in action and you want to see that its really doing the smart thing, and you yield control to it more and more. Like today, I'm like old era, so when I have something important I make an extra copy. Versus my kids, they are on Google files system or cloud files systems. They never even think about making an extra copy. The same thing is going to happen. We do have people who can take control and they can put on their priorities and all of that but we are saying, hey guys, you shouldn't be doing it we are here to help you and we are going to show you and in case you don't like it you can always put your brake on that self driving car or the self driving backup. >> So Rahul would we be remised if we had a researcher on theCUBE and we didn't talk about the art of the possible looking a few years ahead, or even a couple of years ahead. If you've ever been a backup administrator, nothing beats bandwidth. The bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. However in this modern digital transformative environment, we have to get data to the cloud as soon as possible. What are some of the unique ways Commvault is tackling getting Big Data from where it's ingested and to the cloud provider so that we can take advantage of stuff like AI, ML, base workloads, and Amazon or Google? >> One thing we have done with the cloud or anything is we have always kept data independent of where it is going. So even if I am taking data from on-print to a cloud provider we will play to their full strength, but we will still keep the data independent where, in case you want to move from one cloud window to another you have that flexibility with Commvault. As for us taking the cloud and its efficiency and using its efficiency what we have done is we always only send re-duplicated encrypted data to the cloud and we have various ways of consuming the cloud. So the cloud is where your storage has become so cheap that you don't have to think about it. In fact, I had a customer who got rid of their whole secondary DR data center, and now they are using the cloud as their DR location and every three months they do the DR test with Commvault, wherein they bring the infrastructure machines up, and its all scripted and orchestrated, they bring the infrastructure machines up, followed by all the VM's and the applications in a certain order. Like database has to come up before AD has to come before exchange anytime it has to come before web server. So all of that happens after their testing is done they have SLA's of four hours and 24 hours on certain servers. After all of that is done they power it off, they get rid of the infrastructure, and then they are back to paying only the storage bill on the cloud. That's just one usage but the cloud has made life so flexible that I don't have to think about my rack space and where does the server go and when do I order it and when does it ship, If I need something I experiment with it, I give it more memory and size and do stuff. Protecting that data and the cloud, and protecting it well, is what we do. We have taken use of all the technologies, like replicating across regions, taking it and replicating it across clouds we have done all of that. >> Keith: Well let's talk about the importance of metadata in all of that. So if I have bits and pieces of data distributed across cloud providers on-prem, how do I keep track of that data? >> That's where our furi index comes in play key because all that is happening is the data is spreading faster than some of the cloud growth because you have data with so many copies and people have made extra copies just to be safe that keeping track of everything, and knowing what is where, and who has access to what, and people change roles, some people leave, who has access after all of that is done? It's very vital and critical for an organization to function So our furi index is keeping track of not just the bare minimum of who has the files and what the files are what we have done is we have worked with several customers where we have allowed them to insert their own custom tags and custom information along with the data. So it's not just the file and file information or the file content awareness. They are able to keep third party extra data along with every piece that is automatically queried from their other databases and inserted in that file. So those are the custom properties that are tagged a lot. >> Stu: Yeah its interesting, you think about metadata I remember five or 10 years ago we were talking about the importance of metadata, but it seems like it's the convergence of the intelligence and the AI paired with that, because it used to be, oh, make sure you tag your files or set up your ontologies or things like that, and now, on our phones, it does a lot of that for us and therefore the enterprise is following a similar methodology. Did we hit a certain kind of tipping-point recently, or is it just some of these technologies coming together? >> I think a lot of that was in the making. We used to have this technology called index cards, where we were keeping track of things, who ever thinks of that, right? Now everything is by search, and that's the new normal. Searching for your thing, thinking that somebody will know what I'm trying to do and telling me ahead of time is where the future is. That's what we are trying to keep up with. >> You're saying my kids don't know the Dewey decimal system because they have Amazon and you know, and now we have a similar thing in business. >> It really to strikes you, for a calculator on a Windows desktop when the kids go and search on the web for a calculator instead of using the calculator app on the desktop, you really know that things have changed and shifted a lot. >> Keith: So thinking about that change and shift before I'm able to add these custom tags to net new data, I'm going to throw you a softball from a use case perspective, but it's a hard technical challenge is, I have 20 years of Commvault data that are data I've backed up with Commvault. Wouldn't it be great if I could teach an ML or AI algorithm to go back and tag that data based on how I tag new data, any requests for that or roadmaps to add that type of capability? >> Alright so if you are a 20 year old Commvault veteran customer, first of all, thank you. (laughing) >> Secondly, the fact that you're index is there and we have built on our existing index and added a lot more attributes to it, we already know a lot about you. If you are starting to beam to our cloud, we know a lot more about how your backups are, and how much you are backing up, and how your licensing is, and what are the typical workloads, and the top error rates, and how the health conditions are, and a lot of that. That is even on your own server dashboard. You don't have to beam it to any public cloud. You could see it on your own dashboard, all those statistics. So we already know all of that information. What we have come and started doing is we are inserting even more and more pieces of intelligence that we are finding because things have changed over the last 20 years. So what used to be just file metadata, user and all of that, now we have a lot more attributes that the file has. >> One of the biggest challenges we see is, I'm a networking person, and when I go to like the Cisco show this year, the network administrator, most of the network that they are responsible for isn't under their purview, and I think we have the same thing in data, a lot of the data that I'm concerned about in my business it's no longer in my four walls and it's spread out in so many different environments. Opportunity? Challenge? Both? >> For us it's very exciting and opportunistic. For our customers and a lot of IT admins if you are dealing with multiple tools to handle that kind of thing its a big challenge. I have met several customers and they wouldn't admit it, but they know that even though their company policy is not to use certain clouds, the people are using it. If their company policy is not to use some doc sharing, people are using it. So, there are two ways you can look at it. You could forget it and then risk. Or you could accept it and analyze everything with Commvault and go ahead. >> So let's talk about Commvault and this ability to know where your data is at with adjacent technology you know data protection is about protecting the data not just from 'oops I lost my data' or even ran somewhere specifically, but security. What is the role of the index or metadata In protecting your data from intruders? >> So as far as 'ran somewhere' is concerned, we have taken a few things. One is, and we are not a 'ran somewhere' production per se, but what we have done is because we are in there and we look at your backup, how often they happen, how much data is changing, adjusted that to seasonality we know per quarter if you have a lot of files changing versus weekends and how things change, adjusted to seasonality if we something that is out of the norm, we are going to alert you. At that point that alert is an actionable alert where you could say, hey, I want to disable data edging on this particular client, or I want to take away access of someone on that. So even data risks like a rogue admin or an accidental admin what we did is we have added almost a two-signature kind of stuff. So if somebody accidentally deletes a client or a storage policy, one admin won't be able to do that. The business workflow says: 'do you also have authentication from Stu?' That 'hey, Keith is trying to delete this'. That's to approve of this and it's and email to which you reply 'yes' or 'no'. The moment it is done, it goes ahead and it deletes it versus it may stop and 'oops' that was an accident Keith didn't really want to do that. So there's that aspect, the second thing is our own media, what we have done is it is completely protected with our drivers, wherein you can't get to it. Only Commvault authenticated processes are able to write to write to our media. When the customer came in this morning and was talking about it, all their infrastructure was affected, but Commvault really hasn't because we had it secured and the ransomer couldn't attack that because they simply were unable to write to it. >> Stu: Alright well Rahul Pawar we really appreciate you giving us an update. Look forward to catching up in the future where we'll see exactly where the research is going. Alright, for Keith Townsend I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Commvault GO, in Nashville, Tenessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Rahul: Thank you Keith, thank you Stu. >> Keith: Thank you.