>> Woman: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this cube conversation. Going to be digging in talking about how storage, in the software world, moving forward to cloud native containerized environment. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guests, Paul Sustman. He is the product manager for info scale storage and availability products with Veritas. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. >> Hey, thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to talk about what we're doing for support for containers and Kubernetes. >> All right, so, Veritas I think, most people should be familiar with Veritas when it comes to the storage world of course, strong and long history. Why don't you level set us first on infoscale, I've got way too much history going back to, things like Veritas volume manager, and the like, but infoscale today in 2020, how should we be thinking of it, and kind of the region has out in the marketplace? >> Yeah. First off our infoscale, infoscale is a product that's used by very critical infrastructure, the top enterprises, the top 11 out of 12 airline reservation systems, the top 19 out of 20 investment banks, right? These are companies that use infoscale to drive their business, not just an application, but actually keep their business available and operational. So, we've had a long legacy. You talked about some of the history. We are formerly known as storage foundation, going back 25 years Veritas storage foundation, as it was known at that time was one of the first virtualization technologies, where we virtualized storage for hard drives, right? That's where the volume management came in. We really support for many different file systems, both clustered or shared storage, as well as non shared storage, came out with support for Unix to Linux migrations, added support for virtualization technologies, and came out with a lot of optimizations for storage efficiency and performance optimizations. And we've been building upon that legacy ever since. We've recently come out with a lot of support for AWS cloud as well as Azure cloud, and support for SAP HANA as well as SAP netWeaver for Azure. And, we have customers who are now migrating to their SAP environments up into the cloud. So, long history of this, we came out with Docker support back in 2016 for Docker containers. We made a bet that Docker was going to win. We actually built our net backup flex appliances around the Docker platform. It turns out that wasn't quite accurate. It turns out Kubernetes won, there's some standards now that have come out around storage and networking interfaces, and the world has shifted and it's picking up that standardized platform. So we're doing the same. So, what we're doing is a couple of different things. First off, we are, coming out with a persistent storage solution, for leveraging the CSI storage interface. And, we're coming out with a high availability solution, which is leveraging some of our legacy code around VCs and around the service group technology we have an intelligent monitoring framework, to monitor what's going on inside the container. And we're going to be adding that technology in the infoscale and releasing it later this year. So that's what we're actively working on. I'm really excited about the fact that we're able to bring forward this legacy that we have, where we've done it incredibly well on physical environments and virtual environments. And as customers move to the cloud, to also support containers. We're seeing that mission critical applications are starting to move to containers. We're having a large number of our customers come to us and saying, "what's your roadmap? Where are you going on containers? We've been talking about the flex appliance, on the net backup appliance where we've done really support for that years ago." And they're looking to actively start moving some of those mission critical apps. But what they're seeing is, is that in the container environment, it's missing a lot of the enterprise capabilities that exists on physical platforms. >> Paul. >> Yeah. >> Paul, if I could, so yeah, I'm glad we got the news in here. (mumbles) if we can level set our customers a little bit. >> Sure. >> The marketplace here. So, I think back to server virtualization and VMware. We spent about a decade as an industry going from, yeah it's supported and it works with it too. How do we really optimize it, and make sure it is really supported? When you talk about cloud environment, talk about containerization, we've gone through a maturation journey there also, and in some ways it's got a little bit faster, and we've learned from the past, but it has been a journey we've been on. So, you talk about Docker helped really, bring containers to the masses and the enterprise especially. But maybe give us a little bit as to, you throw it a couple of things like interfaces that are supported to enable a storage more how Kubernetes fits into things. Help us understand, how it's not just supporting the environment, but making sure that they're optimized and take advantage of the feature functionality that people are looking for. And why they go to these containerized Kubernetes environments. >> Yeah. That's a great thing. So, first off IDC called out that containerization is actually it has a potential of replacing what VMware has done around VMs and virtual machines, and that's, I think there's several driving factors for container adoption, right. It comes down to that term cattle not pets, which is often used around containers where you're able to manage things at larger scale or a larger number of items. And it comes down to the fact that the container itself is a much smaller image size than a VM. It's a fraction of the size of a VM, and that makes it possible to be more agile. It makes it possible to have a higher density of containers versus VMs. It makes it easier to manage as well. And because of that, there's faster adoption, with developers and speed and efficiency coming about where developers are making changes quicker in a container environment. And that's very appealing to customers. So, we're seeing a lot of interest in containers. The applications that went there first were applications that were not the typical mission critical application, but we're more of a web type application that didn't have a dependency on persistent data. The data was temporal. But what we're seeing now is, as adoption happens more and more in the container environment. And as people realize that there's a lot of advantages to this container versus a VM, there looking to take those applications and lift and shift them to a container environment, to take advantage of those benefits. So, that's what we're seeing it right now. >> Yeah. It's really interesting, right. You know, Paul, when you looked at that virtualization adoption, it was what a VM really did, is it brought the whole operating system along with me. So, inside that we have, not only the operating system, but typically one application but there'll be more, as opposed to a container gets closer to that atomic unit of the application, or even if it's microservices architecture, it might just be a service inside there. So, I guess that that brings us to the point when you talk about storage, what I really care about. I care about my data, I care about my applications. As you mentioned, often there are different type of applications. Developers are building new applications, using containers as an example. Help us understand where Veritas and infoscale fits in, what applications you're supporting today from a containerized environment. And are there any things you're saying is that, "hey, this is what you should do containers, and at least for certain enterprise environments, maybe we're not quite ready for certain things here yet." >> Yeah. So let, let me take a step back. If you look at the maturity in that technology shift, in my opinion, we're at today with containers where we were early on with VMs. So, early on with the VMs, a lot of people were saying that those virtual machines, they're not really suitable for production code, they're not suitable for mission critical applications. You really should run those on dedicated hardware. In what we've seen is actually a shift in VMs, when people run pretty much everything on VMs now. It's your first platform by default, instead of a physical server. And now the same thing is kind of happening with cloud as well. In containers, what we're seeing is that the early adopters, they weren't looking for those critical or enterprise data requirements, things like security and scale and performance. They were okay with the status quo. But as people are starting to move things that drive their business, or they're going to run their business on, they really need those requirements. They need the same level set of enterprise capabilities that exists today in VMs, on VMs and exists today on physical environments or even in the cloud, a lot of capabilities in the cloud, that's very secure. It's very resilient. The data is very durable. Those capabilities exist there, but on containers, they've been lacking until recently. And so, what we're doing, is we're trying to bring those same capabilities that our customers are used to, for those customers as they're moving those mission-critical applications to containers. >> Excellent, so, let's talk about the services that that infoscale offers. When we first moved to cloud, there were some that thought, "Oh, hey, wait, maybe I don't need to think about things like high availability and data protection, I'll just architect the cloud that way." I think we know from like a security standpoint, it's a shared responsibility model that everybody understands. When it comes to containerization also, I'm often architecting things differently. So, I have to think about things a little bit different, but I don't think it removes the need, for some of the services that we typically see, from solutions like you offer from Veritas. Maybe, give us a little bit of understanding as to, is it the same, Is it a little bit different, and what is needed in today's new architecture? >> Yeah. That's a great question. So, if you look at containers, and start reading a lot of their documentation around Kubernetes, what they claim and what they point out, is that the underlying storage is responsible for the high availability of the storage. It's not the requirement of the application. It's not the requirement of the IT administrator. (mumbles) push it back on the storage. And if you look at the way storage is used or consumed with containers, it's really, there's two types of storage. There is block-level storage, which is presented from the disk array. The challenge with block-level storage by itself is that there's no data management right there. What ends up happening is that, the database does the data management and the database in order to take advantage or compensate for that lack of data management. Often what happens is the database is oversubscribed. So, you present too much data, or the database in the end up wasting space. The other side of things, the common use cases around files, and the most common use case, or the most way that most people use with containers, is actually leveraging NFS. NFS was never designed for mission critical applications. It's really designed for very small IO, and it will guarantee or maintain right consistency. But if you have multiple applications accessing the same share, who knows who's going to actually win. Somebody will win, and it might not be who you want to win. So, you have data corruption or data integrity issues with them NFS, not to mention that you have huge performance challenges with NFS. Again, it was never designed for mission critical application. And so those are areas that our customers have looked to us in the past, and look to us right now, to present storage which is very high performance and very highly available, and is often replicated across the Metro or across geo locations, across availability zones, to other data centers. So that you have multiple redundant copies. And so that you just don't lose data, right. That's something that we've done really well with infoscale and we've done that for applications that require share resources. And we've done that for applications that require their own repository, their own data store. So, it's an opportunity for customers, to use or have other storage, which is persistent, highly available, higher performance, for use with their containers, other than NFS or block storage. >> Excellent. Well, we know that the storage, we always use to joke all, is that the only constant is change, in the cloud native world, we know that it accelerating change, is the norm. Give us the final takeaway, when they think of infoscale for Kubernetes in containers, how should we think about Veritas, and what differentiates you from really the rest of the marketplace? >> Yeah. If you look at it, it's really simple. I mean we have a solution which works very well for storage, very high performance, very highly available, scales really well. We are going to be releasing a plugin for Kubernetes that will install on storage nodes and make that storage persistent and available to the application running up as a container. We're also taking the technology that we've done around, our availability suite and we are taking some of the technology forward into containers. Now, understanding that Kubernetes does the orchestration, our key differentiation is that we're going to be, monitoring the dependencies of what's critical for that application, right? All the mount points, the network interfaces, all the different processes make up that critical application. We'll be monitoring those applications, actually inside the container and then working with Kubernetes to in collaborating as far as orchestration goes, so we'll tell Kubernetes when it needs to restart the container or restart a pod. Lots of it advantages come a solution. And the way we're building it, again it integrates with Kubernetes. We monitor the what's going on inside the container, and we'll notify Kubernetes of an event change and we'll do that instantaneously. Kubernetes looks at the pod, they don't look at inside the container, right. They don't look at the processes, they don't look at the mount points. So, the pod might be available, but the container itself, you might've lost a process, you might have lost one of the containers. One of your dependencies might have gone away, and we're taking that same availability offering that we've done very well with and the physical environment, and cloud in virtual environments, and bringing that forward to containers. >> Excellent. Paul, any minimum requirements, Kubernetes of course, being open source, there are dozens of distributions out there. So, if I choose >> Paul: Yeah. >> Any of the native services from the public cloud providers or from my vendor of choice, I don't have to be like on 1.16 or 1.17 to get this, what are any considerations there? >> Well the latest version I think is 1.18, they're coming out with 1.19 soon. (murmurs) Kubernetes in my view, they came out with the standards. They came out with a standard network interface and a standard storage interface. We're leveraging those standards, and we're building a plugin towards that standard. That same plugin will be used in Kubernetes and OpenShift and VMware, as well as all the different cloud container offerings. So, our intention is to support all those. We'll be supporting Kubernetes on day one. Out of the box for Linux platforms, with all the same storage capabilities that we have with impulse scale, and with the same agent framework and monitoring framework that we have with infoscale for our availability as well. >> Excellent. Well, Paul Sustman, thank you so much. It's been great to watch the maturation of the storage environments in the container and Kubernetes world. Thanks so much joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm here with Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to have on the program first-time guest Joe Zarb, who's with SAP Labs. He's the Vice President of Global Technology Partners. And welcome back to the Cube, long-time guest, Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Customer Success with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here, Stu, great to be here, Keith. >> All right, so Venugopal, our audience has seen him a few times. Joe, let's start, your role and inside SAP Labs what your organization does. >> Sure, happy to do that. So Joe Zarb, I head up our global technology partners within our global business development and ecosystems team. Basically helping our customers to respond to their needs and their wants for solutions that span not only SAP, but their whole digital transformation agenda. So we do that with the partners, and we do it with global service providers, we do it with software technology partners, and hardware technology partners. >> And Pai, we talked to Inder earlier today about customer success, but from an application standpoint, tell us why you're here. >> Of course, no thank you, Stu, thank you, Keith. Very good to be here again. So the reason that I'm here with Joe from SAP is we've had a long-standing relationship with SAP. Spanning almost four years. And the reason it's important is as Nutanix becomes the platform that customers start to depend on for the infrastructure, the key elements of what value we provide the customer is to mitigate a lot of the complexity that comes from infrastructure and allow them to focus on the business value of the application. And the predominant application as you start to global enterprises, large customers, SAP tends to be the lifeblood of that company. And the business value of how they drive value. So our partnership with SAP is to really make sure that as we start looking at transforming the data center and moving them to a digital platform that makes it very easy to consume, the ability for transcending the value to an SAP application, making sure that customers have that trust of, if I run SAP on Nutanix, the trust of availability, performance, capability, all the things that they need enterprise vendors to stand up to, we wanted to make sure that our journey with SAP started up early. Our journey with SAP in making sure they understand the concept of hyper-convergence and the impact of what it does for them has been a very fulfilling one and has been a journey that will continue on for a long ways to come. So that's why we're here. >> So, Joe, let's talk about digital transformation and the drivers. You know SAP, rich set of data is, I've heard it called a cash register of the world. So many transactions go through that. With that said, it's also one of those areas that we say, oh thoust dare not touch SAP. It is the system of record. However, it's a rich, rich area for digital transformation. The go fast, break things, part of the IT team, wants access to SAP, they want to get the data from there, they want to update transactions. Talk about that conflicting role that SAP has of, we're steady, rock solid versus go fast and break stuff. >> Right, so that's a great question. And what we're facing at SAP are demands that are coming from our customers around what people term as bimodal IT. They got to run their business, but they also have to innovate. So a big part of our strategy going forward is centered around HANA as you know, which is our real-time database, and it's a translytics database, right? So you could do transactions in it, you could also do analytics with the database within the same data set. So it provides a very powerful platform so that you could do your transactional operations and the analytics in a way where you could innovate. So that bimodal IT, and the relationship with Nutanix and the other hyper-convergent infrastructure players that we work with is really to focus on driving down the total cost of ownership in those operational areas, get to market quicker with those, and free up a technical center of excellence and functional center of excellence resources so that they can help the enterprise innovate. We have an entire platform that's dedicated just to innovation. It's our SAP Leonardo platform with our SAP Cloud platform, with Nutanix, and other hyper-converged players, and our transactional system. So that whole digital transformation really needs to take into account, hey, you got to protect the base, you got to run those core applications, but you can't take your eye off of innovation 'cause digital transformation's all about innovations. Business model reinvention as well as business process reinvention. So I think that's a big part of what we're focused on. >> So talk about Nutanix's role. How do you help customers with that goal of saying, the things that we do before are critically important, you need to keep doin' 'em, we need to do it cheaper, we need to do it faster, and we need to do it more reliably while we look to innovation. >> Absolutely. And I think that's a great story in terms of what Joe talked about in terms of SAP's lead into making sure that the ship is steady as it goes while making sure that the innovation engine is not forgotten, right? Where we start seeing is that the amalgamation between the two saying, I've got the traditional applications running as is, but I got to embrace innovation. And if we look at what Nutanix has done, and continues to do as you saw in some of the announcements at this event, is bringing the innovation in, but making sure that that innovation is brought with the respect of applications running in the data center, and still giving the customer the flexibility of hey, I want to embrace Cloud. I want to embrace the concept of what Cloud means to me, not just taking my data and moving it into the public Cloud, but giving me the way to get the Cloud-like heuristics, the Cloud-like management, Cloud-like flexibility, Cloud-like agility, the consumption of Cloud DevOps capabilities, so the combination of what we delivered in infrastructure layer, become where hardware to software, and tie it to what SAP is doing to drive that innovation from an application level is a very good partnership conversation to have, is hey, how do we now blend this software base in terms of what we're doing in the data center, and tie that to the innovation that SAP's driving at the application level, and together that's when true innovation for customers starts bringing to light. Because they focus the applications, we got the infrastructure, but this partnership then brings the two together. >> So, Pai, let's put some meat on the bone. It takes nine months, 12 months, to deploy SAP infrastructure period. Nutanix rack and stack, I can get a whole cluster up in less than an hour. However, there's still that SAP layer that basis layer that has to be laid out. How are you helping customers get more agile in that so that they wow the business? >> Absolutely. And just to put things in context, our SAP partner who has been around for four years, right? We've been SAP certified for 2 1/2 years, right? Both for SAP NetWeaver running on VMware hypervisors, and then as of a year and a half ago, running on our AHV hypervisor. So we're bringing that hypervisor innovation into the SAP world. Right, so that's one side. When you start looking at our software stack that start disseminating the focus on why things take so long for deploying an application is because the application layer is complex and the infrastructure layer is complex. So what we're doing is with the 40 to 50 customers you already have running on SAP is what we bring is if we can reduce the complexity of the infrastructure layer, the speed to value of deploying an application becomes much, much faster. So that's why customers are gravitating to Nutanix is because the infrastructure complexity has been eliminated as hey, it takes me six months to spin up a infrastructure that's meet variety of where they apply the amount of VM, which server, which storage, and you figure we're networking, and then I spin up the application. When we bring in Nutanix, the ability for us to disaggregate all that layered complexity that comes into play, speeds up the deployment of the application, therefore better time to value for customers saying, hey, I got to spin up the application a few months. I can't wait for nine months because the infrastructure's slowing me down. We start eliminating that complexity. >> Joe, one of the more interesting things to watch in the industry is the change in how customers are purchasing. Especially from software. The days of everything fully shrink-wrapped are long behind us. It's the subscription economy now. Nutanix is going along that journey from buying to software to fully subscription model. Can you touch on what you're seeing in maybe either you or Pai'll connect how that comes together with Nutanix. >> Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So what we are seeing, and this is implemented in our strategy and our go-to market approach, is really that we live in a hybrid world. And I thought that that was a wonderful quote that I heard here at the conference or driven home in the keynote. So we do. We live in a hybrid world. SAP's strategy recognizes that. That's what our customers want. So we work very closely with Cloud partners like Microsoft Azure and Google, and of course Amazon and others. And of course we have an on-premise suite of solutions. So when we start to look at these business models, it's oftentimes about right-sizing the business model for the workload and the need of that particular customer sometimes for a particular industry. Now where Nutanix comes into play in this hyper-converged infrastructure is, there's some really difficult things that need to get done to make this world a reality. Right if you're going to move workloads and have them run in the Cloud, you might have them run at the edge if it's an IoT solution leveraging our Leonardo platform you might have them running in the core or you might have it running in a branch office. Every time you start adding those layers, you're adding complexity, you're adding cost, and you're adding a requirement for skills. So when we can work with close partners to downgrade the skills, downgrade some of the number of people you might need, create simplicity and create an environment where really it's a Nutanix statement but where our customers have that freedom to move their workload to the right environment to take advantage of it. Those are the partners who we want to work with. >> So SAP Labs, you can't get out of a Labs conversation without talking, well no we can't get out of a SAP Labs conversation without talking mobile and Fiori and all of the great stuff that's happening on just taking advantage of the deep data. Data's the biggest accessor, and mobile and giving that data to mobile, let's talk a little bit about the itch. What's the story between Nutanix, SAP, when it comes to stuff that CIOs care about today and that's Fiori. >> Yeah, so a great question. So if we look at Satyam presented yesterday in terms of our direction around IoT and looking at the edge as a very critical component of the entire operating system, enterprise called operating system model. One of the key things that we are spending a lot of time on is understanding the use cases for verticals and understanding okay when you look at a specific vertical, let's say it's oil and gas, or energy, or manufacturing, right? All of those verticals have a unique perspective on what IoT means to them. So IoT is a good buzzword and a good catchword, but when it comes to use cases and verticals, there's a very specific nomenclature on what they mean by IoT for them, right? So spending a lot of steam and Nutanix making a lot of time in deciphering what IoT means for customers, defining what use cases mean for that vertical and then working with SAP in determining okay, what does Leonardo mean for them because Leonardo is again, is a platform. Within the verticals, we're working with SAP and okay within the Leonardo platform, within the vertical, how do we define what our value prop within the IoT landscape is when it comes to the edge? And so you can see more coming from us, but we truly understand the importance of data like you said, and the creation of data at the edge, and the importance of analyzing the data, maybe in the Cloud. And that transformation of where the edge of data's created and where it needs to be analyzed, that journey is very complex. And if we can make that journey simple, then SAP customers win, SAP application, deployment wins, and we're able to therefore mitigate some of the complexity that comes with making that journey simple. >> You know I might add to that is again, what Pai said is spot on, but if you look at it from a manufacturing point of view, moving to the edge, customers are confronted with the reality of the networking complexity and they're either going to take the processing and move it to the problem or bring the problem to the processing. And so to do that takes hard work. And servers, and so there's a whole new genre of high-performance gateways and hardware that's emerging on the market from players like Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dell, what have you. And you end up having a plethora of these devices at every well head, on every AMI, AMR meter-reading infrastructure in the utility system or in every single plant floor. So how do you take that level of innovation that's happening now at the plant floor and make it part, not only of your operational system, but of your IT and your data center so you could manage it with all the ilities that IT people do. And I think Nutanix and SAP are working to solve that problem. And our Leonardo platform is what we have to drive that edge and with Nutanix it's a very manageable environment. >> Great well, Joe and Pai, really appreciate the update on where you are today, where some of the direction are, we're going to the future. Getting towards the end of two days of live coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)