>> 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)