(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE Studios for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Any business that aspires to be a digital business has to invest in multiple new classes of capabilities required to ensure that their business operates as they're promising to their customers. Now, we've identified a number of these, but one of the things we think is especially important here in theCUBE is data protection, data assurance. If your data is going to be a differentiating asset within your business, you have to take steps to protect it and make sure that it's where it needs to be, when it needs to be there and in the form it's required. Now, a lot of companies talk about data protection, but they kind of diminish it down to just backup. Let's just back up the data, back up the volume. But increasingly, enterprises are recognizing that there's a continuum of services that are required to do a good job of taking care of your data, including disaster recovery. So, what we're going to talk about today is one of the differences between backup and restore, and disaster recovery and why disaster recovery is becoming such an important element of any meaningful and rational digital business strategy. Now, to have that conversation, today we're here with Sazzala Reddy who's the CTO at Datrium. Sazzala, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Happy to be here, Peter. >> So, before we go on this question of disaster recovery and why it's so important, let's start with a quick update on Datrium. Where's Datrium today? You've been through a lot of changes this year. >> Yes, right. We kind of have built a bunch of services as a platform. It will include primary storage, back-up, disaster orchestration and encryption mobility. So that last piece of that puzzle was a DR orchestration, we kind of finished that a few months ago, and that's the update, and also now what we're offering concretely is DR services to the Cloud with the VMware Cloud on Amazon. It is transformational, and people really are adopting it quite heavily with us, because it simplifies, that what you just said about the business continuity, and it gives them a chance to shut down the second data center and leverage the Cloud in a very cost-effective way, to have that option for them. >> So, let's talk about that, because when you think about the Cloud, typically you think about, especially as you start to bring together the Cyber Cloud notion of an on-premise versus a Cloud orientation, you think in terms of an on-premise set of resources and you think in terms of effectively mirroring those resources in the Cloud, and a lot of people have pointed out that that can be an extremely expensive way of doing things. So, historically we had a site, we had a disaster recovery site, maybe we even had a third site, and we had to replicate hardware, we had to replicate networking, we had to replicate software and often a sizeable percentage of staff across all those services, so we've been able to do it more effectively by having the Cloud be the target, but still, having to reserve all that CPU, all that network, seemed like an extremely expensive way of doing things if you only need it, when you need it, and ideally, it's not often. >> That's correct, so, Cloud offers us a new way of doing elastic, on-demand pricing, especially for disaster recovery, it is really useful to think about it that way. In a data center to data center DR like you mentioned, you have to buy all the different products for managing your data, you'll buy primary storage, back-up and de-orchestration, all these different pieces. Then you replicate the same thing somewhere else, all these pieces are kind of just complicated. It's called Murphy's Law, you know, imagine that when there's a disaster, everybody's watching you and you're trying to figure out how this is going to work for you, that's when the challenges are, and there's the danger is that until now, disaster recovery has mostly been a disaster. It's never really worked for anybody. So, what Cloud offers you is an opportunity to simplify that and basically get your disaster recovery to be fail proof. >> Well, so, we have the ongoing expense that we're now ameliorating, we're getting rid of, because we are not forcing anyone to reserve all those resources. >> Yeah. >> But one of the biggest problems in disaster recovery has always been, as you said, it's been a disaster. The actual people processes associated with doing or recovering from a disaster in business continuity sense often fails. So, how does doing it in the Cloud, does it mean we can now do more automation in the Cloud from a disaster recovery stand-point? Tell us a little bit about that. >> There are multiple things, not just that the Cloud offers simplicity in that way, you do have to imagine how are you going to build software to help the customer on their journey. The things, like you mentioned, three things people do in a disaster planning kind of thing, one is that they have to do planning, make all these notes, keep it down somewhere and things change. The moment you make these plans, they're broken because somebody did something else. And second thing is they have to do testing, which is time consuming and they're not sure it's going to work for them, and finally when there's a disaster there's panic, everybody's afraid of it. So, to solve that problem, you need to imagine a new software stack, running in the Cloud, in the most cost-efficient way so you can store your data, you can have all these back-ups there in a steady state and not paying very much. And its three costs are pretty low, if you do dedupe on that it's even lower, so that really brings down the cost of steady-state behavior, but then, when you push the button, you, we can bring up VMware servers on the Amazon Cloud on-demand. So you only pay for the VMware server's computer services when you really need them. And when you don't need them anywhere, you fix your data center, you push a button, you bring all the data back and shut down the VMware servers. So, it's like paying for insurance, after you have an accident. That changes the game. The cost efficiencies of doing DR, it suddenly becomes affordable for everybody, and you can shut down a second data center, cut down the amount of work you have to do, and it gives you an opportunity to actually now have a chance to get that fail proof-ness and actually know it's going to work for you or not going to work for you. >> But you're shutting down the other data center, but you're also not recreating in the Cloud, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you've got the data stored there, but you're not paying for all the resources that are associated with that, you're only spinning them up-- >> That's correct. >> in VM form, when there's actually a problem. But I also want to push this a little bit, it suggests also that if you practice, you said test, I'll use the word practice-- >> I did say that. >> As one of the things you need to do. You need to practice your DR. Presumably if you have more of that automated as part of this cloud experience, then pushing that button, certainly there's going to be some human tasks to be performed, but it increases the likelihood that the recovery process in the business continuity sense is more successfully accomplished, is that right? >> Yeah, correct, there are two things in this DR, one is that, do you know it's going to work for you when you actually have a disaster. That's why you think of doing testing, or the, what did you call it, planning-- >> Practice. >> Practice once in a while. The challenge with that is that why even to practice? Like, it takes time and energy for you to do that. You can do it, no problem, but how can we, with software, transform that in such a way that you get notified when actually something is going to go wrong for you. Because we own primary, back-up and DR, all the three legs of the stool in terms of how the DR should be working, we check continuous compliance checks every half an hour so that we can detect if something is going wrong, you have changed some plans, or you have added some new things, or networking is bad, whatever, we will tell you right away, pro-actively, in half an hour, that hey, there's a problem, should go fix it now. So you don't have to like do that much plan, that much of testing continuously anymore, because we are telling you right now there's a problem. That itself is such a game changer, in the sense that it's pro-active, versus being reactive when you're doing something. >> Yeah, it dramatically increases the likelihood that the actual recovery process itself is successful. >> Sazzala: Yes, right. >> Where if you have a bunch of humans doing it, could be more challenging -- >> Sazzala: More fragile. >> And so, as you said, a lot of the scripts, a lot of that automation is now in the solution and also pro-actively, so if something is no longer in compliance, it does not fit the scheme and the model that you've established within the overall DR framework, then you can alert the business that something is no longer compliance or is out of bounds, fix it so that it stays within the overall DR framework, have I got that right? >> Yes, correct, and you can only do this if you own all the pieces, otherwise, again, it's back to the Murphy's Law, you're testing. So every customer is testing DR in different event typologies, everybody's different, right? So then a customer is not the tester of all these pieces fitting together, and different combinations and permutations. Because we have all the three pieces, we are the ones testing it all the time and everybody testing the same thing, so it's the same software running everywhere that makes the probability of success much higher. >> So it's a great story, Sazzala, but where are you? Where is Datrium today in terms of having these conversations with customers, enacting this, turning this into solutions, changing the way that your customers are doing business? >> Right, we have simplified by converging a lot of services into one platform. That itself is a big deal for a lot of customers, nobody wants to manage stuff anymore, they don't have time and patience. So, we give this platform called DVX on-prem, it runs VMware RCLI, it's super efficient. But the next thing, what we're offering today, which is actually very attractive to our customers is that we give them a path to use the Cloud as a DR site without having to pay the cost of it and also without having to worry about it working for them or not working for them. The demos are super simple to operate because once it all works together, there's no complexity anymore, it's all kind of gone away. >> And, there are a lot of companies, as they mention upfront, that are talking about back-up and restore-- >> Yeah. >> As an approximate to this, but it seems like you've taken it a step further. >> Yeah, so, having been in the business for a while, back-up, yes, back-up can live in the Cloud, you can have long-term back-ups, whatever, but remember that back-up is not DR. If you wanted to have a DR, what DR means is that you're recovering from it, if you have back-up only-- >> Back up's a tier. >> Back-up is a tier. Back-up is that, you have to do rehydration. There's two problems with that. Firstly, rehydration will take you two days, everybody's watching you while the data center is down and businesses wants to be up and running, two days to recover, maybe 22 days. I recently was with a customer, they have a petabyte of data, takes 22 days to do recovery of the data. That's like, okay I don't know what business -- >> 22 days? >> 22 days. And then another 100 days to bring the data back. So that's the problem with back-up as a topic itself. And secondly, they're converting, a lot of those back-up vendors are converting VMs into Amazon VMs, nothing wrong with Amazon, it's just that, suddenly in a disaster, you're used to all your VCenter, you're used to your VMware environment, and now you're learning some new platform? It's going to re-factor your VMs into something else. That is a different disaster waiting to happen for you. >> Well, to the point, you don't want disaster recovery in three years when you figure it all out, you want disaster recovery now-- >> Now. >> With what you have now. >> That's correct, that's exactly right. So those conversions of VMs leads to a path of, it's a one-way migration, there's no path out of that, it's like Hotel California, you're getting in, not coming out. It may be good for Amazon, but the customers want to solve a problem, which is a DR problem. So by working with VM via Cloud, they have been very friendly with us, we're super good partners with them and they've enabled us access to some of the things there to enable us to be able to work with them, use their APIs and launch VMware servers on-demand. That to me, is a game changer, and that's why it's such a highly interesting topic for a lot of customers. We see a lot of success with it, we're leading with it now, a lot of people just dying to get away from this DR problem, and have business continuity for their business, and what we're giving them is the simplicity of one product, one bill, and one support call. You can call us for anything, including Amazon, VMware and Datrium, all the pieces and we'll answer all the questions. >> Now I really like the idea, and you pay for it only as, or after the disaster has been recovered from. >> It's like paying for insurance after the-- >> I like that a lot. All right, Sazzala Reddy, CTO of Datrium, once again thanks for being on theCUBE. >> Oh, thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (lively brass band music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back. Everyone's the cubes. Live coverage here in San Francisco v. Emerald 2019. We're in the hall of Must Going north. Lot of stuff going on here. I'm John for David. Want a day for 10 years covering the emeralds? Been quite a ride, Seeing from 2010 to 20 A lot has changed, but still de our backup and recovery still is always a big thing. Our next two guests is already CTO co founder of a tree, Um, and Igor Zika, director of I t Sensible. Thanks for coming on your early customer since one Dato. You're on the journey with day tree. Um, congratulations. Been a wild ride. Good ride. Tell us. Thank >> you. It's been a journey. It's It's been a good relationship. We've been using day trim for three years. Started with 10 we're now in 5.3. I believe it's >> been really >> good. It's been, um, innovative. It's been challenging from us working in the space where we have to think about what next step is and working towards the data transformation internally in order to get to a cloud. But we're almost there. So we're pretty excited about the >> opportunities when they build a great product. They got some new news is all about the new news you got going on here. You get your core product now you got some new stuff. Share the news, >> we're gonna finish the journey, and we started off. The idea was to make a recovery be better for everybody else. As you know, we are is really mostly about disaster for everybody. So what we have done is that we are able to offer cloud disaster. Recovery of the service idea is that you can have backups in the club on Amazon, and then you push a button you can fail over and bring up your remember servers on demand so you can run your workloads right away, and when you push a button will bring it down and bring it. Bring data back to you on from we call it a cloud. Br the service to a movie. Every cloud on Amazon >> specific to Amazon, >> physically via MacLeod and Amazon, >> right Okay, um, one of the one of the early instance see ations of leveraging that platform. I think people they misunderstand atrium. I mean, you guys have been around now for a while, but in the early days, it wasn't clear that you guys were really kind of changing the way in which people approach storage. Maybe that's what interested you in the beginning, but But both primary and secondary storage, high performance yet gloss, That's right. All right. So it's kind of like magic sauce that you >> ultimately d r finishes the story because really look at any data center. The reason white B R doesn't work is because you end up with five different products, won his primary on his back up. One is the orchestration and some other things, like encryption by an optimization. You buy all these products for you, manage your data in one day to center, and then you replicate the same fight things on your second data center. No, that's not movies law. I don't know what it is. You push the button one day when there's a disaster. Every is watching the ideal person to actually do this. It's very fragile. It's very scary for a lot of people, which is why it doesn't really work. No customer as ever met. I've said it's amazing that the D R works for them. They're nobody's ever, >> well, most customers, almost all customers say they can't test D R because it's too dangerous. That contest test portions of it. They could test, fail over but not fail back. Can you explain sort of your approach in D. R. And how this potentially could change it? >> Yeah, and are, in my experience, the or is challenging for a variety of reasons. Major reasons. Yes, you can't actually fully test the d. R. You have to put a lot of efforts, a lot of thoughts and develop a really strong game plan in order to execute D. R. Flawlessly and a lot of times you have a chance of very short windows to perform these tests, and in order to deliver, you have to do a lot of homework, and you have to do a really good design of your infrastructure and extensive design in order to have a successful outcome. So in my experience, I mean, what are we hoping again? I mean, we are joining towards the day trim the Our solution is to actually have a solution that's going to be baked in that we can press a button on DDE, have our vision off d r and meet our objectives. Meet Rto is executed, >> So let's hit the escape key element So sensible San Fillipo What? >> What about? We are one of the largest California North based accounting firm. We deal with accounting and finance and compliance and assuring service is so. Our focus is to provide clients with no peace of mind knowing that their financial data is you know, that is correct. >> So paint a picture of your technology infrastructure. So you're obviously presuming inferring VM where customers that >> we are the M or customer. You are also a customer gets >> an idea of what what she looks like and >> we are basically operating out of a single location. We are multi multi office, you know, company, but we operate our single location. We are the m were based. We also VD I based so everybody works from a digital workspace are strong. Focus been to provide a robust and high performance digital workspace for employees so they can have a peace of mind and work anytime they want. >> I was at the first use case for atrium was video air >> atrium Woz our foundation to build that robust beady eye platform. >> Okay, so give us a before and after what prompted you to goto? Damn. What was it like before? What was the problem? You were trying to solve >> the challenge of the VD. I is. We have to provide a very robust platform. So people feel they work on their local machines. So highly responsive systems like highly responsive story systems of foundations red. Besides having a very, you know, high optimized bandwidth, we need to make sure that our bottlenecks are not focused on the storage. So our challenge is warped provisioning VD I machines within the within the time frame that we actually would really kp eyes that we designed. So our challenge was deploying all the master images, deploying provisional service's. And it's taking a very long period of time, which basically was putting us towards on ability for I t guys to do the job. So we were deploying virtual machine master images that too now and have to deploy every time we have a change every time we make a change in our environment, it to interment a smarter time in order to apply those changes. So day tree, um changed that. >> That was an infrastructure issue. I mean, the storage >> of that was a storage infrastructure. How? How >> did atrium change that? And maybe says all you could follow with the tech behind it >> The good >> Well, if you look at most people, end user scare about late and see my office is one thing but didn't see is what matters and deserves indeed. So having our architecture, having the local flash and the software running of the local host for you, that's what really provides the end user experience. Which is kind of what we here for a lot of a customer. The end users tell the A d folks that, hey, something has changed for me. That was our fundamental design architecture we chose from So those primary storage. And how do you make that high performance low latency? We're closed for everybody, and that's what we have done so that technology is basically local flash suffering host. That's what gives you the >> best of your experiences. You went from what you say an hour and 1/2 to >> 15 minutes. So that was pretty dramatic moment of truth when we deployed atrium and we started the imaging process and it was finished. And to be honest, I thought, that is broken, but it actually was that fast. So gave us a tremendous amount of ability to deploy and manage and do the war during the War day instead of working after hours >> and what we do for data protection before day tree, >> we use variety of different solutions. Backups, just a tape and variety of service. Is that actually backed up? They still do our know. We've given that a lot. The floor >> of all the legacy stuff you got rid of that. Did you have to change your processes or what was that like? Was painful. >> We have to We have to get rid of a lot of process that we're focused on backup focus on the time that it took to manage back up with a tree. Um, Day Trio didn't have the backup from the day one. This is something that they've designed, I think a second year, and that was very different to see the company that deals with storage. Creating such innovative vision for developing old I'm developing a road map that was actually coming true with every generation off the software deployment s o. The second tier that we provisioned was the snapshots on the snapshots that were incredibly fast. That didn't take a lot of space. That was give us ability to restore almost instantly gave us a huge amount of, you know, focus on not focusing on the storage anymore. >> But when you and Brian and you go got together and said, Okay, we're gonna do this you must have been thinking about backup, obviously, right? >> It's mostly not so much backup, but about data of the Mikado recovery faster for people That's not back up. I've been in business for a long time, backup, but you go back. I was very taxing. It's about recovery, and we made recovery fast. Freddy are finishes the story of recovery to be in the club >> and essentially eliminate the need for a separate sort of backup. My set, right? That's that was the vision >> you can recover from a backup device. Size it >> right. All right. So where do you go from here? >> That's a good question. Way hoping to go into fully orchestrated the our solution so we don't have to think about it. Don't mean my thing is like, I don't I don't want to worry about D. R. I want to make sure it's there. I want to be able to prove to business owners and our clients that we have a viable, orchestrated automated the our solution. >> So you you gave us some metrics in terms of hour and 1/2 to 15 minutes for deployment. But what about like, this is the staff, um, you know, not talking about getting rid of staff redeploying staff. Or maybe you got rid of staff, I don't know. But what are the people that were spending all that time? You know, the hour and 1/2 before, What are they doing now? Have you sort of re allocated them to some you know, other higher value initiatives, and you could add some color they're >> using the M or and integrated solutions allows us to have a pretty small profile on my T group. We actually operating with three people, believe it or not supporting over 250 users and systems so we can focus. I mean our main focus. Instead of troubleshooting technology systems and problems with the storage and problems with networking, we are focused on looking for the next best thing, providing high level of customer support, focusing on performance, looking for innovations and, you know, So it's definitely better use than troubleshooting, for sure. And >> innovative solution. What's it like working with the entrepreneurial? Not start up Very >> cool. Very fresh. Very good feeling off knowing that you can call in and you have a you have almost in house. I t relationship a defender is extremely valuable to us >> and bring it to innovate approach. It makes it go fast. I mean and making it easier. They talk about the industry and you go back. I mean, the interest has changed so much. We've been the cube for 10 years. I mean, so much has changed in I t. But in product sides, that's where the sprawl happens. I think >> the iPhone changed everything. Right, So, you know, iPhone, Icloud. That's what we wanted with our d R service as well. I think the world has changed. You expect those same experiences in your in your off duty and on I t. The people have wanted a similar experiences. This kind of what you want to do. >> This is cloud to point out. This is Enterprise Cloud the innovations, that clean sheet of paper you built from the ground up solves a lot of problems. I'm sweep the floor with the other guys >> as an observer of the of the storage business, right? Kind of Look at it. There's two companies now that there are over a billion dollars in revenue that are independent storage companies. And I was always surprised the year I met Brian. We had him on the Cube several years ago, and, you know, he was kind of, you know, coy about what? Actually, guys are doing a secret. And so and at the time we were thinking, Wow, it's stores. Amazing is the industry's consolidating, but money keeps flowing into storage because it's still hard Problem the salt. So what do you thoughts about that about the industry, its structure as a independent, you know, pure play storage company. What you want to do with this? This company want to grow it so >> we don't up your praise storage company in the sense that be focused on data management as well. So it's not just a pure prey storage only. So that's just a dumb stories. You're not gonna go anywhere. What you need to do is move a level up and provide customer level, higher level functionality so that they can make their lives easier. Dumb story doesn't sell anymore, just Lund's son anymore. >> So that says, essentially that. And I would agree with you. By the way. That's essentially. That old thinking about the storage model is dead. That's why the industry is consolidating data. You mentioned data management. Certainly. You're seeing a lot of the the the next generation Data protection companies use that term because that term means a lot of things to a lot of different people. What does it mean to you? >> Okay, I'll tell you what it means to us if I made any CEO their sake Lord for started. What they mean is that they want to be able to run their workloads anywhere they want to push a button, move, move from place to place. That's all they care about. So what are you doing? What you're building is a platform a multiple of data plane where we can run in any clothes you want to get. The same survey data service is you push a button will take you anyplace you want. That's what really aiming for. And it's just we believe the number is there everywhere, and Kubernetes is the other one. So if you put the America Bernadis on top and a trim on the bottom, you can move to any cloudy. Wantto, you cannot tell the difference, >> and you guys are software. It's a subscription model >> SAS model in the club. No, no deployment of software. It's all like new mortal of doing sass right, >> which is the new architecture cloud to point my point to point. Our >> people want that kind of stuff. People don't want to be installed if you're gonna go to the club and doing the same things you were doing before. That's not how people who want to operate anymore. We don't have time and patience. >> A lot of people are handcuffed to their old stuff they wanted Just get the shackles free beer, liberating people. You're a living. Yeah, he's their case Study. Well, you were nimble enough. You had a good team. You could do it harder >> for the bigger guys. It was It was hard doing it without them. You know, this is all I am. The team presented division. >> All right, The product. This is exactly the kind of stories we love to talk about. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the inside a cloud to point. No, this isn't a great example of innovation. Bm where? Kubernetes statement of the covers. All good. It's a cube. We're right back after this short break. Thank >> you.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at AWS re:Invent 2018 at the Sands Convention Center and all over Vegas. I don't know how many people are here. We haven't gotten the official word. 60,000, 70,000, I don't know. There's a lot of people. We're excited to have our next guest, but before we get in, happy to be joined by Lauren Cooney. Lauren, great to see you, as always. >> Great to see you, as well. >> You know, one of my favorite things about doing Cube interviews is we learn about new industries that we didn't even know about. So, while we're here talking about IT, it's really about the application of IT that I think is really more interesting, more fun, and a great learning experience. So, we're really excited to have our next guest on. He is Kevin Smith, the director of MIS for Transcore. Kevin, great to see you. >> Hello. >> And many time Cube alumni, Sazzala Reddy. He is the CTO and co founder of Datrium. Sazzala, great to see you. >> Happy to be here. >> So, Kevin before we get into it, tells us a little about Transcore. What are you guys all about? >> Basically, we are the leading toll authority for kind of of Continental United States and we are trying to expand that throughout the world. We do the whole engineer all the way through manufacturing of toll systems for vehicles and cars throughout the U.S. So, the little stickers in you car all the way up to the readers that read them. They're coming through my place some how or some other. >> So, everything from the reader in the car-- >> Yup, the little sticker tag that sticks in your window or suction cups in. Wherever you are, yes you may hate us, but I'm not the one collecting the tolls. (laughs) >> I don't like it when you miss the picture. >> Well, let's input some design here. (laughs) >> Trust me, I've tried. (laughs) >> But then the huge back in process to pull that up, get it into the system, billing systems. >> Yeah, all integrated. Yep. >> And how big is the company? How long has it been around? >> We were acquired by Roper. We've been many divisions, but Los Alamos was technically, founding fathers 1954. >> 1954, so you've been around a long time >> Oh yeah, yes. They started with cows. >> RFID's on cows? >> Yes, tracking cows in the pastures of New Mexico. (laughs) >> With the little tags in their ears I imagine. Alright, great. We can talk about traffic probably all day long, but that's not why were here. That's not your day job you're not out there with the little RFID scanner. >> Not anymore, thank God. >> Let's talk about some of the challenges 'cause you know, obviously, the toll business has been around for a long time. But the automation of tolls has really changed a lot over the last five years. You probably know better than me from somebody in the booth taking my money and giving me a receipt to some places it's almost exclusively electronic. So, how's that business grown, and what have been some of the accompanying challenges have you seen that been grown? >> Part of the performance issues we were running into was the quantity. Because the man is gone from the booth, we have to produce more tags that become more readable. So, that creates more back in work, more transactions. And, in the long run, producing more tags. You know, we've gone to millions and millions of tags being produced, in a quarter, to where it was just hundreds of thousands. So, with that requires scalability that we can grow with our systems and our systems we had just wasn't doing it. >> So, you got the manufacturing of the tags as well, I didn't even think of the manufac- you got to make them in the first place, too. >> That is our bread and butter. Manufacturing those tags and the millions of millions of transactions that we test, because we have to test every tag that goes out the door. Every tag gets tested. >> How far away do they work, on those readers? I'm just curious. >> It depends on your speed. We've tested up to 200 miles an hour. And I think it's, like, 40-50 feet? So, as long as you're going under 200 miles an hour, we can get ya. >> Okay, so, how did you meet Sazzala in Datrium? How did that come about? >> We went looking for a product that could give us a one stop solution. We wanted something that was basically, I wanted to get out of the storage business, I wanted to get out of the management business. I didn't want to be having to worry about all these different vendors, all these different solutions. And Datrium was able to provide that. Compared to some of the other products that we were looking at, we did test with other products, and Datrium came out on top. They gave us the total package. >> Sazzala, when you looked at this oppurtunity, what did you see? Anything unique and different? What were some of the challenges that you tried to figure out how to help Kevin? >> So, what we are finding is that more and more companies, every company is a software company, every company is a data company, right? Every body wants to move faster. Everybody wants to things faster. I can't wait for my movie to start in two seconds. I'm like, Why is it taking two seconds? So, everybody wants things faster. We live in this instant economy where everything needs to be either you transform or you die. So, how do we make that transition into the speed? How do you build your data center, whatever your doing, to match that speed of innovation? Any system you're going to deploy in a data center, has to be not in the way. It has to be less management, less overhead. Look at Amazon, very successful because there is less to manage. And, you mostly manage your applications. That's what the business moral is going to be going forward. That's why people like the Cloud. Why does CIO like the Cloud? Not because it's cooler, or whatever, but because it makes things faster. It's expensive, yeah, but it makes things faster in some ways. >> Go ahead. >> I was going to say, on issue we ran into and we came to him with was our CAD designers. 'Cause we designed the product. And, the rendering was just dragging on our old systems. And, we went from two to three minutes rendering to seconds rendering new graphics. And, so, before they were like I'm not going to save it yet, I'm not going to re-render it. Now, they're re-rendering every time they're making a change. It helps in performance, it helps the application, and it helps increase the productivity of my CAD designers. >> Right. I was going to say, it was probably the customer service pretty significant, as well, so they can get the version that they want. >> Definitely, definitely. And, you know, the nice thing is is Datrium allowed us to scale. We couldn't go out and just Okay, revamp everything. You got to do baby steps. And Datrium gave us that scaleabilty, to where I could add anything from 1 to 128 nodes. You know, I was able to increase performance by just adding a server node, or increase the rights by adding a data node. That's the flexibilty that I needed from a vendor. >> So, when you said that Datrium had the whole package, you looked at some other solutions out there. When you were trying to find the whole package at the beginning of the process, what were the key attributes that you said I would love to get all these from one place? >> I was looking for performance and scale. Which I got. I was looking for back-up. God, I wanted to get out of the back-up business. I was tired of tapes, I was tired of third-party solutions. >> Tire of tapes? (laughs) >> Trust me. Shh, don't tell the tape vendors here. >> Tape is good, if you have the right application. >> Security, I stay awake at night. I lead our security teams. I stay awake worrying about Is my data protected? You know, with their encryption, that gave me that whole protection. And the last thing was DR. DR is adorned in every IT manager, every IT director, every, you know, CTO. And, with their whole Cloud shift, that DR? What DR, it's done. It just happens. And those four things is kind of what led us to finding Datrium. 'Cause some of them gave us one or two, but not everyone could give us all four of the options that we were looking for. >> What I love about the story is those are kind of concrete savings and doing your job easier. What your excited about is enabling your CAD designer, your kind of proactive sales process, your proactive design, your proactive innovation to actually move faster. That's not a cost saving mechanism. That's really a transformational, kind of positive revenue, side of the tale that I don't think is told enough. People focus on the cost savings and execution. That's not what it's about. It's really about innovating and growing your business faster. Do you think? >> Oh no, our ROI, that we calculated in, was just on hardware. Just on my cost savings that I could put a penny to. The time, it's so great. I mean, my CAD designers producing product faster, my developers are asking for more VMs. For me to spin up because the speed is so much faster. We're used to being Oh, don't touch it. I got this guy tuned exactly where I want it. We got the memory. But now, they're asking for more and more, and it's my in users, who are really the engineers, my manufacturing people, they're wanting more and more out of the product and Datirum is delivering. I don't go to dashboard and look to try and figure out how to tweak it anymore. I don't have any complaints. And, if I don't have any complaints, were doing something right. >> That's a good thing. >> So, it just works? >> Oh, it was beyond just works. >> Literally. >> Trust me, I was ready when we bought product to bring in a whole team and I was like, Oh, I'm going to have to hire all these people. And the guy came in and he goes, Okay, turn it on. Okay we're done. I was like, Nu-uh. He goes, Oh yeah, you have to plug that cord in back there. I was like, Wow. 'Cause, you know, usually it's-- >> I'm looking at a number right now, and it is 617% three year ROI. >> It's across many customers (mumbles) >> I totally believe you with what-- >> So we are aiming for a U.S. designer came and asked me one day, What should I aim for as a design principle? I said, We should aim for zero UI. That's what we should do. It should be transparent, it should just work. That's what we really aim for. I'm not saying we have zero UI today, but that's our goal. >> It's good to have goals. >> Let's just make it work automatically, right? That's kind of the goal. >> Well, and that was one thing, we wanted something integrated, so we didn't have to go looking. And, that's one thing I tell the engineers all the time. I go into the UI just to kind of see how cool the systems running. You know, because there is no issues. It just works. Everything's integrated, I don't have to go in and click and click and click and click to get through stuff. It just works and integrates well. We're a big Vmware shop, big Dell server shop. All of that, one-stop shop. I was telling Sazzala, you know, it's great when I get the e-mail that there's a problem with my Datrium system before my help desk is getting the notification. I can't buy that service. >> So, Kevin, there's a lot of peers that will be watching this show. Peers of you. Having gone through this process and now you are on the other side and you're on to some new things, in terms of innovation, what would you share with a peer whose trying to sort some of this out? It's a confusing landscape. There's so many options, and you got to do your day job, too. Besides, putting out new technology. What would you share with a peer if you're sitting down over a beverage on a Friday afternoon? >> You know, I would talk to them about having that capability, really a performance scale. Being able to not worry about controllers, not worrying about what SSDs you got to put into something to make it work. Pop 'em in. SSDs are cheap nowadays. Pop 'em in. It increases your reads. Going back to the whole no more third-party solutions for back-ups. Every SIS admin, every manager knows, back-ups are only good for restores. That's the only reason you do a back-up, is 'cause you got to do that restore. And, it becomes invisible. It's all running in the background. I don't even think about it anymore. My old systems, we still think about. That aren't on the Datrium product yet, but all our production (scoffs) When I'm backing up every hour, and my RTO almost becomes zero if something happens, you can't ask for that. That's critical, I think, for every manager, every director, even the SIS admins. No one wants to really think about back-ups. And, when you're comparing your products, take a look at that. How quick can you get something back up when that hard drive went out, you know? That's critical. And, of course, DR is, you know, everyone needs that checkbox checked for recovering. It just comes right away, with that. >> We've run out of time. Going to ask you the big question. Do you sleep better? >> Oh, much better. (laughs) Easily now. Yes. Now I get to worry about other things. Like keeping my CFO happy about something else. >> And, I've got a list of people we need to introduce to you. Definitely. >> Fortunately, you always move through your next point of failure. Once you fix one spot. Watch Lucy check out the chocolate-- >> Hey, but if I can have this one off my plate, that's one better for me. >> Well, Kevin, thanks a lot for telling your story. It's a really impressive story And, I'll think of you as I go across a Dumbarton Bridge some time. >> Think about that, yes! >> Absolutely. >> Thank you for having me. >> Sazzala, great to see you, as always. Lauren, lots of fun. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. We're at AWS re:Invent 2018. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE in Las Vegas. VMworld 2018. Three days wall-to-wall coverage with two sets. We've got about 95 guests and so many sessions that people go to in this, happy to have one of the sessions that just went on come to give you a view into what people attending VMworld are talking about. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Justin Warren. Happy to welcome back to the program Sazzala Reddy, who's the Chief Technology Officer with Datrium. He's brought a customer along with him. His name is also Stuart like mine, spelled the proper Scottish way S-T-U-A-R-T, Lewallen, who is the Data Center Team Lead with Sonoma County. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Stuart, we're going to get to the tech and your role, but first of all Sonoma County. Some, I guess, interesting might not be the right thing to say, but it's been a lot of activity going on. Maybe you can share what's been happening in your neck of the woods. >> Last October, we had a little bit of excitement. We had some wildfires roll through. Burned about 140 square miles. Burned a little bit over 5,000 houses. Unfortunately, 42 people lost their life in the disaster. A lot of lessons were learned from that. >> Horrific. We've seen what's happened. I've got a lot of friends and some family in California. We've seen people far and wide that have been effected. How were you involved with this and I know you talked a little bit about it in your session? >> I was wakened in the middle of the night by a page, somebody letting me know hey, we got a problem here. They were telling me they were already evacuating. At that point, I knew it was something serious so I started getting my family ready for evacuation. Started trying to gather news about what was actually going on and what I had found was the fire had started in Napa County and was being driven by 16 mile an hour winds. It had moved 12 miles in the first three hours. Nobody was able to get a handle on it. Nobody really even knew which way it was going. That's what our emergency operations center was trying to track is where is it and where is it headed to try to get people there. >> We have a bit of familiarity with wildfires in Australia. It's well-known, it's horrific to be involved with. Tell us a little bit about how you were managing that situation day to day. What does that actually do to your normal day, it just goes out the window. What did that feel like, what was that like when you were in that situation? >> That's a fantastic question. My entire team was scattered all over Northern California. I was in San Anselmo, one of my guys was in Fresno, one of the guys had packed up his trailer and went to the beach. One of the guys was in an evacuation center and everybody was ready to go. Everybody was scattered. The county center, the fires had gotten within three blocks of our data center, so the county center had been evacuated and they wouldn't let us back. Everybody was working remote. That mostly worked OK, but again, we had a lot of learning points. From the after action, we learned a lot from what worked well and what didn't. >> Sazzala, people often talk about the human things, but technology's a lot of times involved in a lot of these emergencies, disaster recovery. I remember numerous times in my career when I worked on the vendor side where SWAT teams are helping and you've got the base product, but bring us in as to how technology plays in. >> If you talk to anybody and say what's your dream plan of DR, they can draw a nice picture, but the reality is it can be too expensive. Even if the money's not the problem, then it's painful to set up and it's fearful when you have a problem. You have fear, like is it going to work for me? If you still look at the innovation in the last decade, there was deduplication, VMware has changed infrastructure, cloud is here, AI is here, but still DR happens to be still one of those not moved forward in terms of innovation. That's something where we see the opportunity for us to help customers take to the next level. >> That's true, and maybe you can bring that in of going well how did Datrium actually help you in this situation with that DR aspect? What did that look like? >> During the event, there was really not a lot of involvement of Datrium other than the fact that one of their field engineers emailed me and said hey, do you need anything? Anything at all. I'll bring you a generator, water, food, whatever you need. Which was fantastic, you think who does that? Datrium does. Sorry, I had to get a little plug in there for you guys. Very happy with that. But, in the aftermath, when we were evaluating what we did good and what we did bad, what needs improvement and how do we do that? That's where they really came in and helped us. Helped us to get an easy way to move our data offsite. That was a fantastic product, and that's one we just started using and recently came out is the ability to back-up local data to AWS in a very simplistic way. >> If you have a data center, you also have a second data center most people set up so they can do DR for it. It's an expensive operation. It just sits there, does nothing, and then waiting for one day to show up and be used magically. If you change anything here, you got to go change something there. It is untenable kind of a model. It's a cost center for a CIOs. A lot of people I talk to, that's an easy one to eliminate and get rid of it. The cloud is here, let's take advantage of it. It's an on-demand infrastructure. Let's use that leverage for doing disaster recovery in the cloud. Because it's expensive, as you all know, cloud. There's a 80-page manual for AWS, just for pricing. It's expensive but for a week or two weeks of disaster, it is a perfectly awesome use case. There are a few things you need. It has to work well, it has to be cost effective, and it has to be operationally consistent. What I mean by that is that if you move from your workloads from your data center to the public cloud, it has to look the same. If it looks different from you, then you're not going to use it. Fundamentally, that's a thing where we have helped is that how do we bring that, how do you do back-ups to the cloud? How do you think about the orchestration software and how does that work? How do you bring up the workloads in the cloud so that it looks similar when you move from here to there? To some degree, cloud is a commodity, right? Let's use it that way. Let's take advantage of the hybrid cloud because it's already there. This is what Datrium is doing. >> A few more things that came out of our experience was we realized that failover had to be simple. The reason it had to be simple was exactly what I said before. You have no idea who you're going to have on your staff that's able to pull the trigger on this. It can't be some complex thing that only two people in your organization can do and it takes three days just to get it kicked off. It's got to be a push button, it really does these days. To make it effective. And it's got to be able to be tested. You've got to be able to validate that it's going to work. You can't wait and just hope and pray that when that day comes that it's going to work. I think, finally, it's got to be affordable. If it's not in your budget, it's not even a starter. You're going back to scripts and people running things. >> (laughing) The idea that you have to hope that that script that you wrote once is actually going to work in the middle of that disaster. You're going, oh yeah, that's right, I forgot to fix that bug. It's not something that you really want to do. Just being able to rely on something in that situation is really important. Stuart, you mentioned something before we went on to camera that you were quite interested in, which is coming from Datrium, which is around that movement of data into the cloud. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what that feature is and why you find it interesting. >> Think of it as like on offsite tape back-up, that's basically what it replaced. We used to spend, back in the day when we had mainframes, we spent a bazillion dollars having tapes shipped offsite. That's what everybody did back in the day. Then you went to on-site tapes that got moved, and then you went to disk arrays and you went to a remote disk array. That's kind of how things have transitioned and now instead of having a disk array somewhere else, why not just put it up in the cloud? AWS is very money-efficient as far as putting data there. If you don't need to do anything with it, which is what you're describing is your offsite back-up, it's a fantastic use case. >> This feature's coming out soon, I believe? >> It's coming out soon, we announced it-- >> And I'm sorry, I missed what it's called. >> Sorry? >> The feature? >> Yes, it's going to come out, it's called CloudShift. >> Thank you. >> It's going to be happening pretty soon. We're announcing it today. We have some demos in our booth, you can come by and check it out. If you look at applications, most people think about the application life cycle. There is the running of applications at high-performance, there's backing it up, and then doing DR. That's how the life cycle is. But if you look at the, no company has solved it end to end. I don't know why, but everybody seems to be doing piecemeal solutions, so you end up with five different products in your data center and they work together very well. Then you pray, like Murphy's Law, that it's all going to work together for you, when you actually have a problem, to get it resolved. That's kind of hoping for things to work well for you. >> Stuart, now you like five different products, right? >> No. (all laughing) I like one different product. The reality is everything's been cobbled together for years. Truly, if it was that simple, I'd be doing something else probably, they wouldn't pay me to do what I do. In this particular case, it's got to be simple. You can't rely on having your best or any particular people there in an emergency, so it's got to be simple. Has to be. >> Yeah. >> Having that (mumbles) platform really changes the game, basically. >> Stuart, talk to us, what are you looking for from the vendor community going forward? We talked about this one feature. Anything else on your wish list to make things simpler, as you've said, I think is one of the key criteria that you're looking for? >> You see all the commercials these days. Make it simple. People have simple buttons and everybody wants push button, everybody wants it simple. They want to make technology simple for everybody, for the average person. I think it's a laudable effort. I think that's where it has to go. It can't be all complex and it can't be the old days where you had guys that they were the only guys that knew anything and they became indispensable. These days, everybody has to know how to do things. You can't rely on one person cause, God forbid, what if they get hit by a bus? What if they just go to a different company and then you're left with this big hole? Simplicity is the key to any organization, really. >> You know what's simpler than one click? Zero clicks. Because one click requires you to read the manual. You'll just see what does it do for me? That's something, how we think about it, really try hard to do zero click. But it's very hard, though, because you have to build a lot more things into the system to imagine how this is going to work for the customer and imagine the best case scenario for the customer. >> It's certainly something, we're seeing a trend in a lot of companies here is automation and actually taking all of that manual effort out of things and having that automation actually be baked into the product as well, rather than relying on customers to have to automate their own environment. It just comes with it, which goes to that we just want an easy button. We want to have something which I don't even have to press the button, it presses its own buttons. >> We're living in the age of convenience. >> Yeah. >> (mumbles) Amazon to ship us products before we know it. (all laughing) >> I'll subscribe to that. >> I shudder to think what my house would fill up with there. (all laughing) >> Excellent. Sazzala and Stuart, really appreciate you giving the update. Stuart, we hope that things with the wildfires settle down, we know it's been challenging to deal with there. Thanks so much for sharing the story. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely. Justin Warren, and I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from VMworld 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

(techy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this special Cube conversation, my name is Dave Vellante. I'm very excited to be here in our Palo Alto studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, the innovation hub of technology. In 2015 we introduced a company to your community called Datrium and one of the co-founders, Brian Biles at the time, came on as one of our segments and shared with us a little bit about what they were doing. Well, several years on, three years on, this company Datrium is exploding and we're really excited to have Brian Biles back, who's the co-founder and chief product officer at Datrium and he's joined by Sazzala Reddy, who's the CTO and another co-founder. One of the, two of the five co-founders here, so gentlemen, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> Yeah, so Brian, I remember that interview and I remember, you know, trying to get out of you what that secret sauce was, exactly what you were doing. There were a lot of other start ups, you know, at that time and several have gone by the wayside. You guys are exploding, so I want to help people understand why you're being so successful. Now, I want to start with the two co-founders. Why did you and your other co-founders start the company? >> You know, we started the company... We hired our first people in 2013, and at that time, there were really two separate worlds. There was a cloud world and there was an on-prem world that was sort of dominated by VMware. So, there were these two evolving discussions about how each one was going to grow in it's own way but kind of within its sphere. We thought there was an opportunity to bridge the two, and to do that, you know, ultimately it becomes a questions of how to run sort of coordinating applications on public clouds and deal with data on public clouds but also to have a capable version of the same infrastructure on private clouds. So, our sort of job one was to build up, to sort of import cloud technology onto prem. We currently have, if you want an Amazon-like version of infrastructure on-prem, we're still the best place to go because we have a two layer model, where there's, you know, compute with fast flash, talking to a separate durability layer very much like EC to an S3. You want to do that, we're still the way to go. But the long term story is also developing. We have a footprint on cloud with a backup store on S3 that coordinates all our data services for global deduping security and so on in a very cost effective, simple SAS way, and that part is growing significantly over the next couple of years. So we're, you know, through with sort of phase one. It'll keep, you know, evolving but phase two is really just getting going. >> So Sazzala, as the chief technologist you had to think about the architecture of where the industry was going and the architecture that would fit that. And you know, that people talk about future proofing so if you think back to the original sort of founding premise, what were some of the challenges that you were trying to solve? >> Right, so there's a business use cases and then there's technology use cases. And as a CTO you have to think of both of them, not just technologies, so if you look at technology point of view, you know, in 2000, back in 2000, Google published a paper called Map Reduce that said hey, this is all we can do at large scale. It was the beginning of how to build large scale distributed systems. But it was built for one use case for surge. But if you look at, we started in a time when Google was already there and they built a system for multiple, unpredictable use cases. So you think differently how the problem is whereas Google start from, though. Some of the CI vendors, they've done good things. They kind of evolved in that direction. We have evolved in a new direction. To the technology point of view, that's kind of what we thought about. But from a business perspective, what do people want? You know, if you look at the next generation, the millennials, and look beyond that they're used to iPhone experience. They don't want, if you tell them about LUNs, they don't re-phone LUNs, they're going to just say what is this and why do you have this stuff, right? So you have to evolve away from that. So, it's the CIA wants to think about how do I make my idea the service? How do I consume, you know, how do I make it a consumption model, how do I make my IT not a cost center but a friendly way to you know, grow my business? And the developers want a platform they can develop things faster, they can adapt to newer, kind of newer technologies coming in, there's Mesos, there's Docker container, there's Kubernetes, thus things change rapidly. So that's going to build a framework in how we wanted to start the company. Basically build a cloud-like experience simple as a SAS, simple as a click and then just make that work. >> The thing that's interesting to me about Datrium is you know, the simplicity, like open. You know, I remember when Unix was considered open and then obviously the definition changes, simplicity has changed. I remember when converged infrastructure, bolting together, compute storage and networking, simplified things. Hyperconverge took that to another level. You guys are going beyond that taking it to yet another level of simplicity, so I wonder if you could talk about that-- >> Yeah, so-- Specifically in terms of the problems that you're solving today for customers. >> So if you look at the V block, I guess the VCE was the first, I guess that they made a successful convergence. So they did hardware convergence-- >> Right. which is a useful thing to do. Same thing with your head CI, the traditional vendors, they do hardware convergence, if you look at Hecht, probably stands for hardware convergence, maybe. But we took a little bigger step in the sense that what you really want us to think about is data convergence. Not, hyperconvergence is useful, but you also think operating about data convergence. What's the point of building your on-prem cloud- like experience when you still have to do backups and some other you know, some other boxes you are to buy. That's not a really good experience, but you need is this whole new hardware convergence, we also need data convergence to get that experience of like cloud-like simplicity in your on-prem. >> Right, in the cloud you don't think of backing it up, right, it's self protecting. That's just the nature of how you should be thinking about on-prem as well. So, when we imported that technology to be a two-layer approach, we built that stuff in so you don't have to think about it. It's kind of like there's no SQL or we're sort of like no backup. >> Yeah, we're going to talk some more about that but that's an important point is you get backup and data protection, you know, full capability, it's just there. I always use the example of Netflix or Spotify. I don't have to call up a salesperson or the billing department or the customer service department, it's just there and I deal with it. >> Right and it gives you, you know, this combination of, in the two layers, the ability to run multiple workloads at big scale, which is otherwise hard in some of these more historical approaches, with great performance that you know is off the charts. But it also means you don't have to move data around as much. So you restore, you restart, you don't restore. You don't copy stuff in and out. >> Yeah. >> That data mobility efficiency it turns out, is also super critical when you think about multi-cloud behavior. >> You have to be in the business to actually feel like you talk to backup admins and life is hell. It is really painful and it's also very fearful if you have a problem, you have to restore and everybody's watching you when you're restoring. So we try to eliminate all those problems, right? Make it, just, why worry about all these things? We are living in a new world, let's adapt to it. >> I think I've, tongue-in-cheek I think about the show Silicon Valley and you guys didn't start out to build a box. >> No. >> No. >> You settled this off some problems and so what you have is a set of best of breed storage services that are running the cloud, called multi-cloud, meaning on-prem or in the cloud so I want to try to juxtapose that to sort of the traditional storage model or even some of these emerging storage models of some of the very successful companies. So, how do you guys differentiate, help us understand what's different about Datrium from the classical storage model and even some of these emerging storage models? >> I'll kick it off and Sazzala can expand on it. You know, first we're bringing a cloud experience to on-prem, so it's not a storage system that you, like a SAN. We, you know, offer compute as well and a way to make that whole operation simple around you know, standard and emerging standard coordination frameworks like VMware and Red Hat and Docker. It includes these really powerful data services to make life simple so you don't have to add on a lot of different control panes and spots of data storage and so on. By getting that right, it makes multi-cloud coordination a lot easier because the hardest problem getting started in that, aside from, you know, just doing SAS applications to run it and so on, is getting data back and forth. Making it efficient and cost effective to move it. So, you want to expand? >> Yeah, so you know, I think you give examples of like maybe there are some successful companies in the market today. There is old school array market and there's the new school head CI markets. So, the old school array market, I mean, if some people are still comfortable with that model, I think they just because the flash array market has some performance characteristics but still it's, again, going back to that rotary phone landing, it doesn't map your, the lands don't map your business. It's just a very old school way of thinking about it. Those will probably vanish at some point because it makes no sense to have them around. And yes, they do provide higher performance but they're still, you know, it's still not providing you that level of ideal service. From a developer point of view, I can make my application life easier, I can do things like test and dev. Test and dev, simple thing like test and dev requires you to clone your application so they can run test and dev on them. It's a very powerful use case, it's a very common use case for most companies, including ours. So, you can't do any of that stuff with that old school style of array. And the new school style, they are making progress in terms of making that developer life a little bit more easier but they haven't thought deeply about data services. Like they built a nice packaging and like some UI frameworks but ultimately, data needs to be like stable. They didn't, you think about data in a how do you make it compressed, efficient and cost effective and make it so that it is easy to move data around. And you're think about the backup and DR. Because if we look at application, you've run it, you have to back it up and you have to do archiving for it. You have to think up the entire lifecycle of it. Which is kind of what most people are not doing, thinking of the entire lifecycle. They're solving a small piece of the puzzle but not the entire thing. >> I'll give you another example of that. In you know, to the operator of a private cloud, you're thinking about workloads, you're thinking about relationships between VMs you know, how to get them to the right place, copy them at the right rate, secure them in the right way. In a sort of old style, that kind of thinking about say protection, you might have a catalog in a backup software but you have volumes of VMs in a SAN. Those are completely different mindsets, we've merged them. So we have a completely scalable catalog you know and detailed validation, verification information about every scrap of data on the system that we can test everything four times a day for test restores. All that kind of stuff is organically in a single user interface that's VM focused, so you don't have to think about these different mindsets. >> But it's SAS really for data services. >> For data services, yeah. >> I mean is that a fair way to think about this? >> Yeah, I think so because what's better than one click? Zero clicks, so lot of people are aiming for one click. We are aiming for zero clicks. That's actually a harder problem to do. It's actually hard to actually think about how do I automate everything so they have to do nothing? That's kind of where we have really, really tried hard is that, as little clicks as possible. Aim for zero as much as possible. That's our goal, in the internal company engineers are told you must aim for zero clicks, actually a harder problem. >> Right so, when you think about how to then expand that to managing multiple sort of availability zones across multiple clouds there are additional problems. But starting from these capabilities, starting from great indexing of data, great cataloging of relationships between things, everything's workload specific and great data mobility infrastructure with data reduction and encryption and so on. As we forecast where we can go with that, it's profound. You can start to imagine some context for how to deal with information across clouds and how to both run and protect it in a way that's really just never been in the market. >> So I want to talk about that vision but before we do, before we leave sort of the differences let's take two examples. Two very successful companies, Nutanix and Pure, so how are you different from, let's start with Nutanix, for example. >> I think that there's some good things, I think they're moved the industry forward quite a bit. I think they've brought some new ideas to the market, they made it VM-centric, they said no LUNs. They've made quite some improvements, and then they're a successful company, but ultimately I think their focus tends to be mostly on how to make the UI shiny and how to kind of think about the hypervisor, which is kind of where they're going to. They don't hypervise in the world today, we don't want to go invent another hypervisor. >> Mm-hmm. >> There are so many other options and the world is changing a lot. Like you said, Kubernetes is coming, Mesos is coming, so we want to adapt to those newer ways or style of doing it, and we don't want to invest in making or building a new hypervisor, and we're good partners with VMware, so that's one angle to it. If you look at, you know, how... Because if you're going to go to large enterprises, they want to consolidate the workloads. They want large scale, they want exabyte scale, so you meet customers now who have exabyte scale data, they think they're the cloud. They're not thinking of any other cloud, they think they're the cloud, so how do you make them successful? So, you have to think about exabyte scale systems where basically you can operate it as a cloud internally, so we build those kinds of infrastructures and those kinds of tools to make that exabyte scale successful, and we probably are the fastest system on the planet. Right, so that's kind of where we come from is that we not only say that we scale, we actually prove that we scale. It's not just enough to say we have Google style and the scale, so it's actually you have to prove it, so we actually have tests where we can, we actually have run with other people that it actually works as we say it does. So, I think it's important that you have to speak, you have to not only produce a product which is useful from a UI point of view, that's useful, but also it has to actually work at scale, and we make it more resilient. We have a lot of features built in to make it more resilient and at scale, like what does a tier one mean, what is mission critical apps, how do you make sure that we don't lose data, for example. It runs at the highest performance possible at a price which is reasonable. >> Okay, and I guess the other difference is you're a pure SAS model in that you're responsible for (chuckles) the data services, right, and-- >> Yeah, that's right. >> Yeah, we've pulled a lot more into the data services in our cloud approach. >> Mm-hmm. >> And we've separated from the performance elements, so they're these two layers, so it's both self-protecting in a way that's independently provisioned if you want to expand capacity for backup retention, that's a standard thing. If you want to expand performance or workloads you do that independently on stateless hosts. >> Mm-hmm. >> An example of where this pays off is just the resilience of the system. In a standard hyperconverged model a good case is like what's the crater size when a, or the risk, you know, profile when a single component fails. So, if a motherboard fails in a sort of hyperconverged model that's standard, you know, a single layer thing, then all the data on that system has to be rebuilt. That puts enormous pressure on the network, and you know, some of these systems can have 80, 160 terabytes of data on a single node, that's like a crazy week, and if two of them go down then the whole thing stops. In our model the hosts are stateless, if any number of them go down for any reason the data's still safe, separate-- >> Mm-hmm, right. >> You know, in a hyperconverged model you can't really integrate backup well because when primary goes down back up goes down, too, then what? >> Okay, so that's, I think, clear how you differentiate from hyperconverged. Did you have another-- >> Yeah, I have one more point, it's about the data services you mentioned. We have, again, going back to zero-click, we built all our features into the system. For example, you know, there are a lot things like deduplication, compression, image recording, those are like, I mean, they're not like details, but ultimately they do bring the cost down quite a bit, like by 10 X to five X, right, that's a big difference. >> So, those are services that are inherent. >> That are inherent in the system. >> Yeah, okay. >> Either you can have check boxes, you can say one click and have to like check box, all that. I mean, you have to go and click it, but to click it then you must read a manual, you must do the manual, so then what is this right click and what happens to me, why isn't not on by default. >> Yeah. >> So, those are the problems, I think the differences between them, I think Nutanix and us, is that we kind of made it all, like, be seamless and all built in. >> Yeah, and when we, you know, if you have to, if it's an option that you ask for later that means it probably has some impact on the system that you have to decide about. In our case you can't turn it off, it's always there and we do all our benchmarking with all that stuff turned on, including software-based encryption. It's just a standard thing, and we still are like the fastest thing on the planet. >> Yeah. >> And let's talk about Pure a little bit, because they don't have-- >> Yeah. >> The networking component and then the compute component, it's, you know, flash array, so how would you position relative to Pure? >> Okay, so again, going back to that SAN array was built before the internet, it is just the same. It is just the same, it's just to deport SSDs behind those controllers in central hard drives. It is likely faster, but ultimately the bottleneck is those controllers, those two controllers they have, that's what it is. No matter how many, how awesome your... You put envy in drive, it doesn't matter. It's going to be as much as speed as your network pipe is going to be, and as much faster as your controllers are going to be. Ultimately, the latency, you cannot, like, basically it's over the wire. It will always be slower than what kind of having... >> So, the big thing here is-- >> Yeah, and it's not a private cloud. You know, that kind of model is for someone who's assembling a lot of parts to create a cloud. >> Yep. >> You know, we're integrating these parts, so it's a much simpler deployment of a cloud experience and you're not integrating all these double parts. >> I'm getting a cloud, I'm buying a cloud experience from you guys with the sets of services, let's talk about those services. So, mobility, discovery, analytics. >> Yeah. >> Governance, talked about the... >> Encryption, yeah. >> The other data reduction services, encryption... >> Right, the cataloging and indexing of the data so you can, you know, restart from old data. >> And I can run this on any cloud, including my on-prem cloud, correct? >> Well, that's the direction, we have some parts now and you know, you... (laughs) Sorry, Sazzala can talk about where we're going. >> So, architecturally it's designed to run on... >> Yeah, because I think fundamentally we chose that design philosophy that it has to be two-layer, right, that's a fundamental decision we made long ago, and it's a detail but it's a fundamental decision we made long ago that because if you go to Amazon it is two-layer. You cannot make one-layer work there. Like, you know, compute and storage has to be split to through that part, but they must work together in a nice way, and also S3's very weird. I don't know if you know about S3. S3's very weird behavior, it does not like random writes, it has to be all sequential writes, and that also happens to be how we built it. The way our system works is that we only do sequential writes to any device. It works beautifully in S3 with EC2, so just to step back a little bit, taking big picture, like so, we wanted a cloud-like experience for your on-prem, right. That's kind of what we built, we built a Datrium cloud on-prem, and then we, as of beginning of this year, we started offering services, multi-cloud services and started with Amazon first. The first service we enabled was backup and archiving, that's our first service. A lot of people like it and you have some stats from that, like from last quarter, like how people like it, because people like it because you don't have to have another on-prem infrastructure. You can just consume it as a SAS model, it's very convenient and it's as easy as an iPhone backup. I don't know if you use iPhone backup, it's like a click. >> Yeah. >> Okay, unfortunately it's a click. We have tried to avoid the clicks, but we can't really avoid it all the way, so you have to click it so that you can then start doing backups into the cloud and then can retrieve them in a very simple single pane of glass. It's very cost-effective because we do dedupe on the cloud and we dedupe over the wire, but dedupe over the wire, by the way, it's actually a very unique feature. Not many companies have it, like Nutanix and Pure you mentioned, they don't have it, so you know, so that's one of the things where I think we differentiate because data has gravity, right, so to move it somewhere you need an antigravity device. So, you need something to actually move this data faster, how to defeat speed of light. You have a pipe, you have a VAN network, so how do you defeat the speed of light, so what we have built is a feature, it's called Global Dedupe, is that you can move data in a much more efficient way across the cloud. So, now you may question, "Hey, I'm moving my data "from here to another place," obviously we have these cloud services... The question you may ask is, "Okay, how do "I know I get guaranteed security? "How do I know that it's going to be correct, "that I moved all these places," right? So, we do multiple things, one is that we have built in encryption. It's going to be globally encrypted, it's like an encryption across the whole thing, we call it blanket encryption. >> Mm-hmm. >> The other one is that we have blockchain-like features that are built into the systems so that if you move an object, like an app or whatever, you're going to move from one place to the other, it's built in kind of blockchain features where you cannot move something to another place and get it wrong. It's fundamentally going to be correct for you, so those are the kind of things we thought about, like never to worry about it again. It's going to guarantee the data's correct and it's moved in the most efficient way, so that's our first landing thing we've done is that we wanted to build an experience which is like on-prem cloud, I mean, onto also the cloud. Right, what other experience people are... People like simplicity, people want the SAS-like experience. They don't want to manage it, they don't want to think about it. They just consume the services, so the first service we have in Amazon is what we chose, is backup and DR. The next thing we are going to be shipping soon, announcing soon, and we'll have a demo in the VM World is something we call Cloud Shift. It's an app mobility orchestration framework where you can just click and move your workload to somewhere else, to Amazon, and you can run, so it's not just a backup thing, it'll also become you can run your workloads in Amazon and get a consistent experience from your on-prem and the cloud. So, one of the challenges is that if you move to another place, is it different tool sets, I have to change my whole lifestyle, no. >> Mm-hmm. >> We want to provide that seamless operational consistency that-- >> That's the key, right. >> That's the key. >> Whether it's on-prem or it's in the cloud it operates the same way. I'm accessing those sets of data services and-- >> Yeah. >> I don't really care where it is, is that-- >> That's right. >> The vision? >> Yeah, that's right. >> Exactly. >> That's right, so if it turns out that there's a cost advantage in moving from, you know, A to B, we make it super easy and the control panel from our standpoint is consistent, and it's... So, all of our control orientation moving forward will literally be SAS. It'll be running on a cloud even if you're managing on-prem stuff, because that way, assuming you're multi-cloud, you need a control plane to be dealing with the cloud stuff anyway, and it just sort of neutralizes the experience so that in a multi-cloud way it's always consistent, it's always simple, and the nice thing about sort of true SAS is you don't have to upgrade software parts. We do that for you in the background. >> Mm-hmm. >> So, it's just always up to date. >> So, I was saying before, Datrium takes care of everything. >> Yeah. >> And it's the true cloud experience. >> Just consume it. >> Right. >> Okay, I want to talk about, end on the two other areas: the operational impact and the developer impact. So, when you think of operations, we've talked about LUNs before. I've always said if you're in the business of managing LUNs you really want to think about, you know, updating your skill sets (chuckles) because that capability is not really going to be viewed as valuable. It isn't today and certainly in the future, so the operational impact, the degrees of automation that IT operations are driving is going through the roof. Cloud-like, we've talked about that, and the other is developer productivity. People are using containers, you know, Kubernetes... >> Yeah. >> And new styles of writing software-- >> Yeah. >> As everybody becomes a software company. So, can you talk about those two aspects? >> And ultimately there's going to be serverless. >> Right. >> Right. >> As we think about if you take a leap, in another 10 years I think serverless will probably be one of the important ways, because why do you even care how it runs. You just write some software and like, you know, we can run it. It should be that way, but I think we're not there completely yet, I think, so we want to adopt a methodology where we provide the framework where we don't dictate what apps, how we write your apps. That's, I think, very powerful because that's actually evolving faster as we move forward, because serverless is a new app framework. >> Mm-hmm. >> You cannot anticipate this, right, you cannot anticipate on building everything but what you can anticipate is services we can provide for the developers, which is, you know, no matter... Because it's the granularity of it. We can map their application granularity into our system, we have that fine level granularity, so that kind of was what you want to provide as a primitive. LUNs don't have that primitive, right, so we provide that level of primitive that whatever apps you have will have that level of primitives to global data services for you, and once you have the data services like that we'll guarantee that it's highest performance, which is what app developers want. Like, I get the highest performance, I can easily... And then we will also provide a way to clone those things easily, those apps, because sometimes you're at an app, you want to test it, too. Like a hundred times, you want to just... If you can copy all the data a hundred times or you can just, say, you know what, clone this thing a hundred times in a millisecond and run my tests fast and then okay, I'm done with my test, it looks good, I'll deploy it. >> Mm-hmm. >> That's kind of what developers really want is that they are able to run, write faster, develop faster, because tests on dev cycles are important. A lot of people think that hey, I can put my test on dev in some old box over there, but that's really bad because from business perspective testing does, engineering's expensive. Their test cycles have to be fast so that they can e-trade faster and kind of produce faster. The harder you make it to test your system, this is like, this is what happens in our company today. The harder it is to test your logic and your code, the longer it takes to, like, do e-trade. >> In some ways test and dev is becoming more strategic than the production system, I mean, really-- >> Well, it-- >> (chuckles) Because of speed. >> Yeah, I mean, it can take immediate advantage of some of these improvements in, you know, stacks. Like if, you know, if Kubernetes is better just, you know, go quickly to it. The things that these new stacks assume, though, is that it's, you know, a server-based data, so on-site you can accelerate mobility significantly by, you know, when people ask to copy things from here to there, clone it, you know, start another instance, we can help them do that by just, you know, faking it out with metadata-- >> Mm-hmm. >> And deduplication, and so we tried this with Jenkins just in our own development, moved to that model and you know, everything was suddenly twice as fast in development. To do a build all of a sudden you didn't have to copy data here to there. You were cloning, you know, with metadata. The way to do it across clouds is, again, kind of dedupe focused. If you have to actually move the data it takes a long time and it's expensive, especially for egress costs. If you can just, you know, validate which elements of the data are new versus old on either site you can move a lot less. >> Hmm... >> It might be, you know, six times less, and then the costs go down, the speed goes up, you defeat data gravity. >> Yeah, so-- >> Excellent, all right, we have to leave it there. >> Okay. >> Out of time, thanks so much, you guys, for helping us better understand, you know, Datrium. Congratulations on your success so far and all the great innovations that you've achieved. >> Okay, thank you. >> Okay, thanks for watching, everybody, this special CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, see you next time. (techy music)

(techy music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante from theCUBE's Palo Alto studios, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know, theCUBE and SiliconANGLE/Wikibon have been documenting the evolution of data and storage over the last decade or so, and what we've seen is the simplification of storage. Going from hardware consolidation with conversion infrastructure and we saw hyper conversion infrastructure and sort of software-defined come on the stage, but now we're, you know, in the heart of the cloud era, and what we're seeing emerging is true cloud-like models for data services. So, we've asked Brian Biles and Sazzala Reddy from Datrium to come back into our CUBE studios and talk about this a little bit. Brian and Sazzala are both co-founders of Datrium. Brian is the chief product officer and Sazzala's the CTO. Gents, let's get into it, thanks for coming back on, and let's talk about that a little bit. So, your model, as we've talked about in the past, is a pure SAS model. You're accessing data services in a SAS-like, cloud-like experience, and people might say, "Well, isn't everything SAS today?" But in the storage world that's not the norm. Typically you would either install a box, you know, and that box might have a very rich set of software-defined services on top of it, but it's not really a cloud experience. We're starting to see certain models pop up. You're seeing some companies actually delivering that. You guys started there, that's your DNA, so let's talk about what you're doing and how that's different in the marketplace, Brian. >> Sure, you know, the way to maybe start the conversation is imagine that you're already, you know, embracing a multi-cloud, you know, plan in your IT organization, so you know, you might have a little Amazon, you might have some SAS. You know, software company, stuff going on, and you have some on-prem experience, and you want to make that as simple as possible-- >> You just described everybody. >> We want to make it as unified... (laughs) Yeah, as unified as you can, as simple as you can. You know, at that point you want to think about, you know, what is the highest leverage, simple thing to do on-prem that connects to that, you know, world of services in the cloud. How can you align that as closely as possible, so what Datrium is doing is trying to do that. We have, you know, our on-prem software is very Amazon-like, it has two layers, it operates in a very similar way, supporting many types of frameworks from VMware to Docker to Red Hat. What we've done with how to store, manipulate, mobilize data and orchestrate, you know, transitions between clouds is, it ends up feeling fundamentally different from other types of ways that you can deal with on-prem infrastructure. It's just much simpler, much more coordinated, and it allows more flexibility over time. So, Sazzal can maybe tell you about it. >> Okay, so but Nutanix, Sazzala, would say, "Okay, well we're cloud, we're creating "a cloud-like experience for on-prem," how are you guys different? >> I guess the fundamental difference is how we think of the problem. We want to say our goal is to run, protect applications in any cloud, because we cannot be in the business of building the infrastructure because that's an investment. There already are three players. What most customers want is to commoditize the cloud. They could care less if they're running on Amazon or Azure. In fact, they care that they're tied to one cloud vendor, so our goal is to make that cloud, commoditize the cloud, make it all seamless so they can move from one place to the other, whatever agreements you have. Tomorrow Google may give you credits, say, "You know what, I'll give you one year free, come on over." What you want is a one-click and move everything over to their stuff over the weekend. That's kind of where we are, that we want to provide that level of simplicity, run, protect your workloads in any cloud you want. So, Nutanix is, I think it looks like from at least from what we read from their press releases, is their cloud. They say one OS, one cloud, we are seeing any cloud. So, that's, I think we want to give that flexibility for people to not be locked in by any cloud vendor, that you can take advantage of it. You know, tomorrow Amazon may not be doing that well or tomorrow Amazon may be enemy to your business, so you want to click it and move it away to some other cloud-- >> Separating the data services from the underlying infrastructure. >> Yeah, that's right, so I think you have to separate the data services and the data management to the best, abstract it so it's so high level that then you don't care where it runs. It runs on-prem, it runs on Amazon, so it looks the same experience for you, that's what we're aiming for, that level of simplicity, but remember, to do these things you must run and protect. You can't just do run only, you must also protect because it's part of your data, you know, your IT philosophy that you must protect your data, you must have copies of it to guard against ransomware and other things, but compliance reasons, right? You want to manage your data, so it has to be a holistic view of the entire end-to-end lifecycle of your data. It cannot just be, "Run my apps here and there." >> How about Pure, how would you differentiate from Pure? Let's say pure wants to, say, OEM its stack to a cloud service provider, how is it different? >> So, the common denominator in cloud services is the workload, the instance, the VM. >> Mm-hmm. >> All of the coordination between clouds is going to be on that granularity. That's what we focus on, so, you know, we have a catalog to show relationships between VMs so that, you know, when we DR you can restart in a certain order or you can validate, you know, workload granularities, have policies at a workload granularity. That's how clouds', you know, behavior is sort of itemized today. If you buy separate parts, like you know, a SAN array, you have to buy something else to do that work. So, it's fundamentally limiting. You know, if you just take VMware because it's so well understood, you know, VMs are going to be put into a LUN as, you know, a file system of VMs. So, to transfer a LUN to a cloud, and then what do you do with it? You know, are... There's no instance to restart. So, you know, it doesn't, it just doesn't operate on the same granularity. >> Speaking different languages, essentially. >> Yeah, so you're either, you know, an ingredient to somebody who's building a cloud who's assembling lots of things to get to the level where Datrium is offering it today, or you could just be simple and... >> Ultimately are you a software company, are you a hardware company, right? That's the thing and the difference is how we are a software company. You have to think about it as a software scaling. You can scale and make it all scale quite well. >> So, let's talk about some of those services-- >> Yeah. >> Which are all software, so let's list some, and we've talked in the earlier segments about data reduction and... >> Right, so I think the company has built that background that we're going to enable the services one day, so the first service we enabled, and this, the beginning on the year, was backup and data archiving. So, it's a SAS platform, it's a multi-cloud services, this first one. Second one we are building right now, we're going to ship it pretty soon, it's something called Cloud Shift. It's a DR orchestration, app mobility orchestration kind of framework. You can just click, move your workloads anywhere you want, any cloud you want. It's a big piece of our next offering. The third offering we're going to be doing is how do you manage all these different data sets you have across multiple places you have, so we're going to offer that next. So, we also have something called Providence built into the system, like every object knows where it came from, where did it, like all these apps, they kind of know we have all the data, we kind of know where they came from, so that's the next one, we call it a Global Ledger, how do you keep track of all this stuff. And the fourth one is we have all this data now, we have all this metadata, how do we provide governance for the end user, because ultimately they do care about compliance, they do make sure, they want to make sure that they're not moving data to the wrong place, that they have made the SLAs, so that's the ultimately kind of like where are we going to, kind of that's a two-year road map-- >> Mm-hmm. >> Idea. >> Okay, so I've got mobility, discovery, there's analytics in here-- >> Analytics, yeah. >> You've got governance and compliance, obviously backup is something we talked about. >> Yep. >> Now, these are discreet services that I can acquire separately-- >> Yeah. >> Is it all included-- >> Well, in a SAN, yeah, you'd have to buy them separately. >> Yeah, okay, right, right, you do. >> In a cloud approach like ours, they're just automatic and always on, so you don't have to think about them. Global dedupe is an example, if we always have that on you can't turn it off, that helps it locally for cloning so you don't have to move data from server to server-- >> Mm-hmm. >> In a developer shop, for example. It's just, you just boot, you know, start it up and it all has access and it's very fast, or across clouds we don't send all the data when somebody says to move it. We look for the deltas between site A and site B and only send those in a compressed, encrypted way. So, having that stuff just be fundamental and always on means cloud mobility gets a lot easier and a lot faster. >> And I, backup's another good example. I don't need to go buy backup software from a backup software-- >> Or hardware. >> Vendor, or... (chuckles) >> Yeah, that's right. >> Or hardware, right, it's there. >> It's just standard. >> Yeah. >> It's self-protecting, so you know, when you think about cloud mobility it changes the way you think about the problems. For example, if you want to, you know, enable a context for automated DR from prem to cloud, there are a lot of risks in many of the current systems. I don't want to go through the whole, you know, problem set because it's bad and we're solving it in our own way, but just take the conversion problem. If you have to move from point A to point B, you know, 90% of the time if you convert a VMware VM to an Amazon instance it'll kind of work. Well, for DR that's not sufficient, so we're taking a much more sort of thoughtful and open approach to how we deal with, you know, stack providers. So, you know, we'll be able to... In the VMware case, for example, move things straight onto their cloud from our S3 data so that you don't have to convert, so it just always works. >> And I'm interfacing with your SAS, it looks the same where it's on-prem, whether it's in the cloud-- >> Yep. >> It's the same experience. >> We're hoping you have to do less work and less interaction because it's all built in, it all just works. >> Okay, so that, the vision is sets of discreet services separated from the underlying infrastructure-- >> Infrastructure. >> Able to call those services as needed, run on any cloud, on-prem-- >> Run, protect, any cloud. >> Full set of services. >> Right. >> Right. >> Integrated-- >> Right, and as time goes on all our sort of operating software and analytic software and governance, and so on, will actually be, you know, literally SAS in a cloud. That makes it much easier to control a multi-cloud deployment, to control stuff in the cloud, but it also means you don't have to update software, we do it for you. It's just way simpler, so as time goes on, you know, on-prem infrastructure, in our belief, will become more and more the, you know, the thing operated by the cloud and the sort of puppet master will be outside. >> And performance, can you address performance? >> Yeah, so we ran, so basically our system scales quite well because of the way we built it, and we ran, you know, benchmark to take some of the vendors because we wanted to prove it that we're really good at this stuff, and we are the fastest probably on the planet. Our performance is really, really, very good, and it's not because everybody wants it, it's because you don't have to think about it anymore. You don't have, you don't, like it's one of those things again, don't think about it, just works for you, the performance is super high. >> Hm... >> We have customer validations, via the way, we have gotten our reviews from customers who are really, really five-star. We have, like, raving fans for our product. >> Excellent, well guys, thanks very much for helping us parse through that and appreciate you coming back on. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, thanks for watching, everybody, this special CUBE conversation from out Palo Alto studios. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (techy music)

(inspirational music) >> Hi everybody, this is, Dave Vellante, from our Palo Alto Cube studios. Welcome to this Cube conversation with two gentlemen from Datrium. Tushar Agarwal is the Director of Product Management, and Sazzala Reddy is the CTO and co-founder of Datrium. We're going to talk about disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has been a nagging problem for organizations and IT organizations for years. It's complex, it's expensive, it's not necessarily reliable, it's very risky to test, and Datrium has announced a product called CloudShift. Now, Datrium is a company who creates sets of data services, particularly for any cloud, and last year introduced a backup in archiving on AWS. We've written about that, we've profiled that. Gentlemen welcome to the Cube, >> Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Thank you (mumbles). >> So tell us about, CloudShift. >> Yeah, sure, great. So if you kind of step back and look at our journey starting with Cloud DVX, which was what we announced last year, our end goal has been to simplify infrastructure for customers and eliminate any access infrastructure that they need, starting with Cloud DVX, which addressed the backup part of it Where the customers do not need to keep a dedicated off-site backup anymore and extending that with CloudShift, which now brings it to a DR context and makes the economics so phenomenal that they don't need to keep a DR site anymore just waiting for a disaster to happen. So, CloudShift, at very beginnings, is a sort of a multi-year journey where we bring the ability to do workload mobility orchestration across an on-premises DVX system to a DVX running in the cloud, leveraging Cloud DVX backups, so that customers can do just-in-time DR. >> Sazzala, I talked earlier about some of problems with DR, and let's talk about what you see. I mean, I've talked to customers who've set up three sites, put in a fireproof box, I mean all kinds of just really difficult challenges and solutions. What are you seeing in, terms of some of the problems and challenges that customers are facing, and how are you addressing this? >> Yeah, so like you said, I don't think I've heard anybody saying my DR plan is awesome. (Laughing) or it works, or I'm enjoying this thing. It's a very fearful situation because when things go down, that's when everyone is watching you, and then that's when the fear comes in, right? So, we built kind of a. We built our service, CloudShift service. It's very easy to use, firstly, step one. And the reason, the other goals, kind of, so, if you click a button, you want to just (mumbles) to some new place, right? But to make that really work well, what are the customers, I mean, if I was a customer, what would I think about? I want the same experience no matter where I moved, right? But it has to be seamlessly like, you know, I don't have to change my tool sets, I have the same operational consistency, that's got number one, and number two is that, does it really work when I click the button, is it going to work? So if you go to Amazon, it'll convert VMs. That's a different experience completely, right? So how do you make that experience be likely foolproof? It will work fundamentally. So we've done lot of things like no conversion of VMs. And the second one is that we have built-in compliance checks. Every half an hour it checks itself to see that the whole plan is compliant. You know that when actually there is a problem it'll actually, the compliance actually has caught the issues before hand. And the third one is that, you can do schedule testing. That you can set up schedules and say know what test it every month for me. So that you know. And test it, give a report to you saying okay it's all this, all looking good for you. So that's kind of things you maybe do to make sure that it's going to be foolproof, guaranteed DR success when you initially have to hit the button. >> Yeah and just to add to that. I think, if you look at a DR equation for a customer it's really two things. I'm paying a lot for it. What can I do to address that problem? And will it work when I need it to work, right? I think it's really fundamentally those two problems. And cloud gives us a great way to address the cost equation because now you got an infrastructure that is truly on tank, can be truly on demand. And so you don't really keep those resources running unless you have to, unless you have a test event or you have the actual DR event. On the will it work when I want it to work, Cloud has typically had a lot of challenges that's a lot of outline, right? You have VMs that are going from a VMware infrastructure to an Amazon infrastructure which means those washing machines now need to be running in a different format. You don't have a simple, single-user interface to manage those two environments where you have an Amazon console at one end and a VMware recenter on the other. And then thirdly, you have this data mobility problem where you don't have the data going across a consistent, common architecture. And so we sort of solve all these problems collectively by making DR just in time because we only spin up those resources when they need to be there in the cloud. There is no VM conversion because we are building this, leveraging the benefits of VMware Cloud in AWS. There is a common single pane of glass to manage this infrastructure. And there is a tremendous amount of speed in data mobility and a tremendous amount of economics in the way that we store that data in a de-duplicated compressed way all the time so it kind of checks off the cost equation and it checks out the fact that it actually works when it needs to work. >> So, let's unpack that a little bit. So normally what I would have is a remote site and that site has resources there. It's got hardware and software and building and infrastructure hopefully far enough away from whether it's an earthquake zone or a hurricane or whatever it is and it sits there as an underutilized asset. Now maybe there's some other things that I can do with it, but if it's my DR site, it's just sitting there as insurance. >> Right. >> That's one problem. >> The other problem is testing, DR testing is oftentimes very risky. A lot of customers we talk to don't want to test because they might fail over and then they go to fail back and oops, there's a problem. And what am I going to do? Am I going to stop running my business? So maybe talk about how you address some of those challenges. >> So I think yes, that's true. We heard people like spent half a million dollars in testing DR and never be able to come back from it. Like that's a lot of money and a lot of (mumbles) and then you can't come back is a completely different business problem. So you know, more than just having the DR site, there's like expanse and maintenance, but the other problem is that when you add something, new workloads, you have to add more work. It would kind of change. It would kind of beget new licenses, get new new other, like you know more and more things. So all of this actually is a fundamental problem but if you go to the cloud, just-in-time on-demand thing is amazing because you are only paying for the backups which is you need to do. If you cannot lose it, there are backups. You need backups fundamentally to be on another site because if ransomware hits you, you need to be able to go back in time so you need copies of deep copies to be in another place. And so the thing about just-in-time DR is that you pay for the backups, sure. It's very cost-effective with us, but you only pay for the services for running your applications for the two weeks you have a problem and then when you're done with it, you're done with paying that. So it's a difference with paying everyday versus paying for insurance. Sometimes insurance pays for those kind of things. It's very cost effective. >> Okay, so I'm paying Datrium for the service. Okay, I get that. And I'm paying a little bit, let's say, for instance it's running on Amazon, a little bit for S3, got to pay for S3 and I'm only paying for the EC2 resource when I'm using that resource. (crosstalk) It's like serverless for DR. >> It actually goes beyond that, Dave, right? >> Actually I like that word that you used. You should probably use that. >> Absolutely because I think it's not just the EC2 part but if you look at a total cost of ownership equation of a data center, right, you're looking at networking, you're looking at software, you're looking at compute, you're looking at people managing that infrastructure all the time, you're looking at power cooling and so I think by having this just-in-time data center that gets spun up and you have to do nothing, literally, you just have to click a button. That saves you know a tremendous amount. That's a transformational economics situation right there where you can simply go ahead and eliminate a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of costs that customers pay and have to deal with to just keep that DR site running across the board. >> Mm hm. >> Let me give one more savings note. So let's say you had 100 terabytes and you failed over, so when you're done with two weeks' testing, only one terabyte changed. Are you going to bring back everything or are you going to bring only one terabyte? It's a fundamental underlying technology thing. If you don't have dedupe over the wire, you'll bring back everything 100 terabytes. You're going to pay for the digress cost and ultimately it'll be too slow for you to bring it all back. So what you really want is underlying technology which has dedupe over the wire. We call it global dedupe that you can only move back what's changed and it's fast. One terabyte moving there is not that bad, right? Otherwise you'd end up moving everything back which is kind of untenable again. So you have to make all these things happen to make DR really successful in the cloud. >> So you're attacking the latency issues. >> Latency and bestly 100 terabyte moving from one place to the other, it'll take a long time because the vanpipe is only that much and you're paying for the egress cost. >> We always joke the smartest people in Silicon Valley are working on solving the speed of light problem. >> That's right so if you look at data, if you're going to move from one place to the other. First of all, data has gravity, it doesn't want to move, right? So that's one fundamental problem. So how do you build a antigravity device to actually fix that problem, right? So if you leap forward, global dedupe is here where you can transfer only what's changed to the other side. That really defeats light speed, right? And then, both ways, moving it here and moving it there. Without having this van deduplication technology, I think you will be paying a significant amount of time and money, so then it becomes untenable. If you can't really move it fast, then it's like people don't do it anymore. >> And in the typical Datrium fashion, it's just there. It just works. (crosstalk) >> I think that's such a good point, Dave, because if you look at traditional DR solutions today, the challenge is that there are a collection of software and services and hardware from multiple vendors. And that's not such a bad thing. I think the challenge that that causes is the fact that you don't have the ability to do an end-to-end, closed loop verification of your DR plan. You know the DR orchestration software does not know whether the VM that I'm supposed to protect actually has a snapshot on the storage array on which its protecting it, right, and so that, in many ways, leads to a lot of risk to customers and it makes the DR plans very fragile because you know, you set a plan on day one and then let's say three months down the line, you know, something got changed in the system and that wasn't caught by the DR orchestration software because it's unlinked. It doesn't have the same visibility into the actual storage system. The advantage we get with the integrated, built-in backup in DR system is that we can actually verify that the virtual machine that you're supposed to protect actually has all the key ingredients that are needed for a successful DR across the stack as well as in target fader ware site. >> It's kind of the perfect use case, a perfect use case for the cloud and I think, you know, there's something even more here is that because of the complexity of the IT infrastructure around DR and the change management challenges that you talked about, the facilities management challenges that all of the sudden an organization becomes, they're in the DR business and they don't want to be in the DR business. (crosstalk) >> Show no value, I mean, really it's not really adding significantly. It's not improving organization. >> That's actually true and I think the way we have tried to tackle that problem, Dave, is kind of going back to the whole premises of this multi-cloud data services. We will make DR, you know, as simple as possible and what we really enable for them to do is to not have to worry about installing any software, not have to worry about upgrading any software, managing any software. It's a, you know, service that they can just enter their DR plans into. It's very intelligent because it's integrated very well with the DVX system. And they can schedule testing. They don't even have to click a button to actually do a plan failover and in case of an actual event, it's just a single click. It's conveniently checked all the time so you kind of take away a lot of the hassles and a lot of the worry and a lot of the risks and make it truly simple, give them a (mumbles) software as a service experience. >> So I'm kind of racking my brain here. Is there anything out there like this that provides an on-demand DR SaaS? >> I don't know of any actually. >> Yeah, I think, so if you you kind of look at the landscape, Sazzala is right, actually there is none and there a few solutions from leading providers that focus on instantiation of a virtual machine on native AWS, but they don't enter the challenge that they have to convert a virtual machine from a VMware virtual machine to an Amazon AMI and that doesn't always work. Secondly, you know, if you run into that kind of a problem, can you really call it true DR because in case of a DR, you want that virtual machine to come up and run and be a valid environment as against just a test-of-use case. >> So the other one is that backup vendors can't do this. Generally, they traditionally can probably, but I think because they are one day behind, they backup once a day, so you can't do DR if you are one day behind. DR wants to be like, okay, I am five minutes behind, I can recover my stuff, right? And then primary vendors like Pure, for example, like whole flash vendors, they focused on just running it, not about backup, but you need the backups to actually make it successful so that you can go back in time if you have ransomware. So you need a combination of both primary and backup and the ability to have it running in the service in the cloud. That's why you need all these pieces to work together. >> So you talked about ransomware a couple of times. Obviously, DR, ransomware, maybe talk a little bit more about some of the other use cases beyond DR. >> So I think that kind of goes back to why we decided to name this feature CloudShift, right? If you think about a traditional DR solution, you would call it something like DR Orchestrator, right, but that's not really the full vision for this product. DR is one of the very important use cases and we talked about how we do that phenomenally well than other solutions out there but what this solution really enables customers to do is actually look at true workload mobility between on-prem and cloud and look at interesting use cases such as ransomware protection. And the reason why we are so great at ransomware protection is because we are an indicated primary and backup from a restart points perspective and in a ransomware situation, you can't really go back to a restart point that's, you know, a day before or two days before. You really want to go down to as many points as you want and because we have this very efficient way of storing these restart points or snapshots in Cloud DVX, you have the ability to instantiate or run a backup which is from sufficiently long time ago, which gives you a great amount of ransomware protection and it's completely isolated from your on-prem copy of that data. >> Let me add one more point to that. So if you just go beyond the DR case, from a developer perspective, right, from a company perspective, developers want a flexible infrastructure to like try new stuff and try new experiments in terms of building new applications for the business, they can try it in the cloud with our platform. And when they're done, for three months, they'll like, you know, have the, because they figured out okay this is how it's going to work, this is how much (mumbles) I need, it's more elastic there. When they're done testing it, whatever they built it, they can click a button with our CloudShift and move it all back on-prem and then now you kind of have it more secure and in an environment you want to. >> Alright, guys, love to see the evolution of your data services, you know, from backup, now DR, other use cases. Congratulations on CloudShift and thanks for explaining it to us. >> Thank you very much. >> Pleasure being here. >> Okay, thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante from our Palo Alto Cube studios. We'll see you next time. (inspiring music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. (soft electronic music) >> Back on the Cube we are live here in Las Vegas at re:Invent, AWS putting on a show for about 45,00 of its closest friends. You might hear some of the cheering behind us. It's happy hour here, lot of happy folks having a good time. John Walls along with Justin Warren and we're now joined by a couple of fellows from Datrium. We have Sazzala Reddy who is the co-founder of Datrium and Craig Nunes who is VP of marketing. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. We appreciate the time. >> Thanks for having us here. >> First off, let's talk about Datrium for those who are watching might not be familiar with your particular offering. If you would, Sazzala, give us a little thumbnail of what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so we're kind of a new breed of unifying compute, primary storage, and backup all built in to the same product so that it becomes convenient for the end user so they don't have to manage multiple pieces of infrastructure. It's a unifying way of managing it. It's a new way of doing convergence. It's the next evolution of hyperconvergence and now in this particular AWS event, we are here to announce that our backup extends beyond the data center to be having it as a service running in Amazon. That's our new offering today as of this event. >> Yeah, so a little bit more about the announcement, then, because this was, again, why you're here in terms of becoming even more enjoined with AWS, that offering. I mean, if you would Craig, run through that a little bit and the prominence of that announcement, why you think this is a significant moment for you all. >> So we have seen, first of all, a huge attraction with our customers to bring the backup or data protection function into their Tier 1 environment. One individual can do it all, manage it all. At the same time we talk to a lot of folks who've got an AWS strategy and they might even have some developers doing stuff with AWS but they haven't, broadly, been able to take full advantage of backup DR in the cloud because when they do the math the numbers just haven't been there in terms of the economics of that. We felt like we could do something about that with some innovative technology that Sazzala and his guys put together around what we call Global Cloud De-duplication. Might want to talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so before Datrium I was a CT of a company called Data Domain, you probably heard of it. So being there, what we did there was being they're one of the pioneers in doing the global de-dup. So we learned a few things there and the other thing we learned about being in that company was that I learned that many people ignore backup. Backup seems to be one of the like-- If you have a car, you don't think of the insurance you pay for it, but it's an important part. Your family jewels are there. You gotta make it too. And if you look at the backup administrators, their life is not very happy, because everybody ignores them but we didn't want to do that. >> We were just talking about that in our last segment, too, weren't we buddy? Nobody wants to be the backup guy, right? >> Actually we want to solve that problem. >> It's great until that one mistake. >> Exactly, exactly, so we want to solve that problem very nicely which is why we have converged backup into our product because it's not another thing just to the side, it is your main family jewels so that's what we've tried to do. But to make it really work well you must have the fundamentals of storage and that's a little bit of a inf-- Like, you know, the details but details do matter in how we do this. So dedupe is a old thing, but still a lot of people don't have it. If you don't have dedupe and compression, all the other data reduction features, backup, you really can't do backup. And then how do you extend it beyond the data center. So if you're gonna do like tape, you do fulls and every weeek in incrementals. If you do the same thing to the cloud, you know the expense of that story, it's a thing. So it's not really practical anymore. What we wanted to do was bring two things to the cloud. One is that we know that AWS is expensive and secondly, AWS is hard to use. It's like Lego pieces, right? If you're a developer, you can put it together, but if I want to just use it, consume it, how do you bring that to the market? So we did two things. One is that we extended the global dedupe all the way to the cloud so everything ends up there. It's all globally deduped. We got like five to like 15X dedupe over there. If you have multiple sites going into a offering, it all gets deduped. Very convenient. Over the wire transfer is very, very convenient, very, very cheap. And also the other thing we have done is that we made it as a SAS offering. See the world is moving towards a SAS offering so in the near future you'll see some of our new announcements, which I can't talk about it right now, it's still secret, but that's what the conception model is gonna be. It's a SAS model. There is developers who want Lego, right, for Amazon, but there is a lot of other people who want to run a business, not just build pieces so for that we want to build as a SAS offerings. Convenient to use, it runs in the cloud, don't have to manage it, don't have to run all these things in your data center. So this backup offering is our first entry, a backup as a service. It's very unique. It's all this global dedupe and it's a service, nothing to do. You don't have to upgrade it. You don't have to manage it. You just have to use it, consume it as a product. >> The other thing that I was gonna say is when we've introduced this to our customers, pretty much everyone has said, "Yeah, we have a strategy "to incorporate public cloud in what we're doing," but almost to an individual none of them had done it yet. I mean, certain people in their company may have accounts, but for a lot of these guys it was their first ever engagement with AWS and so for them, they understood our product. They just wanted that experience to just kind of extend to AWS and not have to figure out how much EC-2, how much Dynamo DB, how much S3 bucket size, whatever. They didn't want any of that. Just help me do what I need to do on your platform leveraging public cloud. >> Yeah, they want to run a business, not manage Lego pieces. >> John: They don't care how the watch works, just what time is it? >> Exactly. >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> And we are very good at what we do. >> So you've taken compute and storage and you've convert, you put all of that together, and you've added backup and you're basically making it a one-stop shop for people to do something so as you say, I want to tell the time, just give me a watch. You've added this remote backup capability all in there. It's like, what's left for me to do? Do I just buy some of your stuff and say, "Okay, I'm done"? There isn't anything else. >> Actually, we have customers. They haven't talked to us for six months. We call them back, "Are you okay?" They're like, "Nothing to do. "I forgot about it because it just works and it runs." That's what you get with us. >> John: Don't tell my boss. >> Yeah sure, there is that. I mean, I think there are other things to do. >> John: But still, yeah. >> Other pieces to develop which don't work as well. So they were managing those. >> And by the way, the strategic stuff that's on their plate that they've never been able to get to in the past, maybe they're managing LUNS on the storage side or dealing with backup stuff that would give them headaches. That is out and they can focus on things that accelerate the business, drive revenue, top line, and make IT a hero again. >> Yeah, making something that's simple and easy to use like that, that takes a lot of engineering and in a lot of ways people underestimate how much work goes into making something easy to use. Now you've been working on this for a little while and you've change-- Like, people might be familiar with hyperconversion, but you guys are doing things in a slightly different way, which is clearly a much better way of doing things, so could you maybe explain a little bit more about how that global dedupe works in conjunction with the stuff that's onsite which makes it a really good fit to go and expand out into the cloud. >> Sure, so firstly we believe in the philosophy of not one click but zero click. One click is too hard. You gotta read the manual to know what the one click is. So that's where our design thinking has come from. If we can eliminate that click, that's even better. Why give a choice to the customer because it means that we have not thought about it. That's kind of what the design philosophy is of our company. For the first three years, we didn't ship our product because we spent the time to build the fundamentals of the product. We can't build this later on. Like global dedupe, it was harder to build later on. It just, it's not possible. So global dedupe is this concept that if something is there already, you can avoid sending it there. You negotiate from Site A to Site B or whatever it is. It's a multi-cloud world. Wherever it is, you can negotiate and say, "Do you have this?" "Yes and No." You don't have it, then they can send you the copy and keep it there so you tend to have this massive reduction of data that also, remember, is not just that global dedupe is gonna save you cost. Ultimately, backup is about recovery. You also need a sufficient amount of tools and workflows to be able to recover what you want efficiently and also, ultimately, backup is useful if you can recover it. If you don't check it, you're gonna-- If you ever have a problem at the time of recovery you're gonna lose your job so we also do the other thing of, okay, we saved your costs but also we check it regularly to make sure that the backup data is recoverable when you need to recover it. That's also an important aspect of it. So global dedupe is like block chain. Think of it like block chain. So how do you know, for example, if you have a piece of data here, you send it somewhere else. How do you know that it all went there? Somebody said so, but how do you verify that? Fundamentally, as architecture, so our global dedupe is like block chain a little bit. We know that they sent all these pieces over there. We can verify at the high level, yes, this is the signature of the data. It's all there and say, "okay, they're good." So now you can send the data anywhere you want and you can be sure that the data you send is what you're supposed to send. >> And Justin, you mentioned kind of the difference between what we're doing and hyperconverge and if you think of hyperconverge. It has brought compute, storage, network all in the box. Our approach is different. It's more like the modern hyper-scalers in that we split that compute and active data from durable capacity. >> I like to think of it as taking all the great advantages that you got from hyperconverge but then getting rid of some of the limitations where it's like we can scale compute and storage independently of each other but we still get all the great benefits from an integrated platform. >> Yeah and the interesting proof point is when we did the cloud-native port, not a code, not a lick of code was changed in the underlying file system that users don't ever see, but that just kind of shows you that kind of approach works in a world that's gotta embrace public cloud as part of your IT strategy. >> Well before we say goodbye, I just want to get your take on the show in general. Knowing that you both probably have some history with what AWS has been up to in the past, but this is not the same as in the past. At least, that's what we're hearing from people. What's your take on what you're seeing here, what you're feeling here? >> Fair enough. So I'm a computer science kind of guy so I kind of enjoy the show because it's all familiar stuff a little bit. So what they've done is an amazing job. It's a amazing business, to be honest, how they've built all these pieces and they've executed pretty well. Their service model is pretty good. I mean, sometimes things don't work as well, the pieces, but they're willing to spend the time to work with you, which to me is pretty awesome. They're willing to have the service level agreement to call you and they're willing to forgive you. I mean, they're willing to do all these things for you. This is why people like Amazon because of the service model. So they have a lot of building blocks so I'm talking to people, I'm going to some of the sessions. What I found is that there are two kinds of people. There is the developers. They love some of the things here because it's a building block. I mean, Lego. Who doesn't wanna play Legos? >> You love your Legos, don't you, Sazzala, yeah you do. >> But I think a lot of companies don't have the time, luxury to spend time with this. They want a simpler higher-level constructs so SAS applications for example. You can build it in Amazon, so the SAS people who are building the product can build it using Lego pieces but the higher level businesses want to use SAS model. They want to use more simpler model so that's the difference between VM Ware and Amazon. I think there's a lot of developers here. In VM Ware it was mostly I think the IT folks were there because it's about operating the business, right? So I think it's interesting to see as the future goes where is that shift? Is everybody gonna be a developer? I don't think so. It's very complicated. I think as I've used some of the Amazon API's, they're actually not trivial. Have to think about what happens if it fails, what happens if this dies? I mean, they're thinking about all these things. It's pretty complicated model. >> Craig: Well, it's a good formula though and it's working for them, obviously. >> Yeah totally. >> It's all the show here, we just had Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You look around here, this is like AWS Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I mean, everyone is here, everyone is kind of shopping the new tech that's integrated with their favorite public cloud. It's a huge mixer of technology and AWS is after all, they probably learn a lot from the e-commerce side, the store front, and they have kind of worked that in to their show and their partnership bringing in companies like Datrium to really leverage their infrastructure as a service. It's awesome. It's great for us. >> Well it's been a great show and thank- We appreciate the time here. Good luck with the Legos. >> Sazzala: Thank you. >> No, no, no, all right. Back with more live. We are in Las Vegas. We'll continue and almost coming down the home stretch of our live coverage here on the Cube. Back with a little bit more in just a moment. (electronic music)

(light music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. This one is part of a very, very special digital community event sponsored by Datrium. What are we gonna be talking about today? Well, Datrium's here with a special product announcement that's intended to help customers do a better job at matching their technology needs with the speed and opportunities to use their data differently within their business. This is a problem that every single customer faces, every single enterprise faces and it's one that's become especially acute as those digital natives increasingly hunt down and take out some of those traditional businesses that are trying to better understand how to use their data. Now, as we have with all digital community events, at the end of this one, we're gonna be running a crowd chat, so stay with us. We'll go through a couple of Datrium and Datrium customer conversations and then it'll be your turn to weigh in on what you think is important, ask the questions of Datrium and others in the community that you think need to be addressed. Let's hear what you have to say about this increasingly special relationship between data, technology and storage services. So, without further ado, let's get it kicked off. Tim Page is the CEO of Datrium. Tim, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> So, Datrium, give us a quick take on where you guys are. >> Yeah, Datrium's formulated as a software defined converged infrastructure company that takes that convergence to the next level, and the purpose of us is to give the user the same experience whether you're working on-prem or across multicloud. >> Great, so let's start by saying that's the vision, but you've been talking to a lot of customers. What's the problem that you keep hearing over and over that you're pointing towards? >> Yeah, it's funny, meeting with a number of CIOs over the years and specifically as related to Datrium, they'll tell you we're on an on-demand economy that expects instant outcomes, which means you have to digitally transform and to do that, you've gotta transform IT, which means it's gotta be easy, it's gotta be consistent. You've gotta get rid of a lot of the management issues and it's gotta feel or take advantage of the services that cloud has to offer. >> All right, so that's the nature of the problem. You've also done a fair amount of research looking into the specifics of what they're asking for. Give us some insight into what Datrium's discovering as you talk to customers about what the solutions are gonna look like. >> It's interesting, if you look at how to resolve that, you've gotta converge to transform in some form or fashion. If you look at the first level of convergence a lot of people have done, it's been directly as it relates to hardware architecture. We've taken that to a whole new level to a point where we're saying how do you actually automate those mundane tasks that take multiple groups to solve. Specifically, primary, backup, disaster recovery, all the policies involved in that. There's a lot of work that goes into that across multiple groups and we set out to solve those issues. >> So, there's still a need for performance, there's still the need for capacity, to reduce management time and overhead, et cetera, but, Tim, as we move forward, how are customers responding to this? Are you getting some sense of what percentage of them are going to say, yeah, that's it? >> Yeah, so interesting, we just ran a survey and got over 500 people, IT leaders to respond to it and it's interesting 'cause they talk about performance, management, security, but they're also talking about consistency of that experience. Specifically, we asked how many of you is it important to have your platform have built-in backup and policy services with encryption built-in, et cetera and we got a 70% rate of those applicants, of those people interviewed saying it's really important for that to be part of a platform. >> Now, it sounds like you're really talking about something more than just a couple of products. You're really talking about forcing customers or you're not forcing, but customers are starting the process of rethinking their data infrastructure. Have I got that right? >> That's right. If you look at how infrastructure's grown over the last 20 years, 20 years ago, SAN technology was related and every time you threw up an app, you had to put different policies to that app or put different LUN type management to how much of my resources can go to certain things. We set out to actually automate that, which is why it took us four years to build this platform with 100 programmers is, well, how do we actually make you not think about how you're gonna back up. How do you set a policy and know disaster recovery is gonna run? And to do that, you gotta have it in one code base. And we know we're on to something even based on our survey because the old array vendors are all buying bolt-ons because they know users want an experience, but you can't have that experience with a bolt-on. You have to have it in your fundamental platform. >> Well, let me step in here. I've been around for a long time, Tim and heard a lot of people talk about platforms and if I have one rule, companies that introduce platforms that just expand typically fail. Companies that bring an opinion and converge more things so it's simpler, tend to be more successful. Which direction is Datrium going? >> Yeah, definitely, that's why we took time. If you wanna be an enterprise class company, you can't build a cheap platform in 18 months and hit the market, 'cause where you architect, you stay. Our purpose from the beginning was purposefully to spend four years building an enterprise platform that did away with a lot of the mundane tasks, SAN management. That's 20 years old technology, LUN management. If you're buying your multi-cloud type technology experience in cages, you're just buying old stuff. We took an approach saying we want that consistent approach that whether you're running your services on prem or in any type of cloud, you could instantly take advantage of that and it feels the same. That's a big task 'cause you're looking to run the speed of storage with the resiliency of backup, which is a whole different type of technology, which is how our founders who have built the first version of this went to the second and almost third version of that type of instantiation of a platform. >> All right, so we know what the solution's gonna look like. It's gonna look like a data platform that's rethought to support the needs of data assets and introduces a set of converged services that really focus the value proposition to what the enterprise needs. So, what are you guys announcing? >> That's exactly right. So, we've finalized what we call our AutoMatrix platform. AutoMatrix inherently in it will have primary backup, disaster recovery, DR solution, all the policies within that and encryption built-in from the very beginning. To have those five things, we believe to actually have the next generation experience across true multicloud, you're not bolting on hardware technologies, you're bolting on software technologies that operate in the same manner. Those five things have to be inherent or you're a bolt-on type company. >> So, you're not building a platform out by acquisition. You're building a platform out by architecture and development. >> That's right and we took four years to do it with 100 guys building this thing out. It's released, it's out and it's ready to go. So our first we're announcing is that first instantiation of that is a product we're calling Control Shift, which is really a data mobility orchestrator, true SaaS based. You can orchestrate prem to prem, prem to cloud, cloud to cloud and our first iteration of that is disaster recovery. So, truly, to be able to set up your policies, check those policies and make sure you're gonna have true disaster recovery with an RTO of zero. It's a tough thing. We've done it. >> That's outstanding. Great to hear, Tim Page, CEO Datrium talking about some of the announcements that we're gonna hear more about in a second. Let's now turn our attention to a short video. Let's hear more about it. (light music) >> Lead Bank is focused on small businesses and helping them achieve their success. We want through and redesigned the customer engagement in defining the bank in the future. This office is our first implementation of that concept. As you can see, it's a much more open floor plan design that increases the interaction between our Lead Bank associates and our clients. With Datrium's split provisioning, all of our data is now on the host. So, we have seen 80 times lower application latency. This gives our associates instant responses to their queries, so they can answer client questions in real-time. Down time is always expensive in our business. In the past, we had a 48 hour recovery plan, but with Datrium, we were able to far exceed that plan. We've been able to recover systems in minutes now. Instead of backing up once per day, with that backup time taking 18 hours, now we're doing full system snapshots hourly and we're replicating those offsite. Datrium is the only vendor I know of that can provide this end-to-end encryption. So, any cyber attacks that get into our system are neutralized. With the Datrium solution, we don't have to have storage consultants anymore. We don't have to be storage experts. We're able to manage everything from a storage perspective through vCenter, obviously spending less time and money on infrastructure. We continue to leverage new technologies to improve application performance and lower costs. We also wanna automate our DR failover, so we're looking forward to implementing Datrium's product that'll allow us to orchestrate and automate our DR failover process. (light music) >> It is always great to hear from a customer. Once again, I'm Peter Burris, this a CUBE Conversation, part of a digital community event sponsored by Datrium. We've been talking about how the relationship between the new digital business outcomes highly dependent upon data and the mismatch of technology to be able to support those new classes of outcomes. It's causing problems in so many different enterprises. So, let's dig a little bit more deeply into some of Datrium's announcements to try to find ways to close those gaps. We've got Sazzala Reddy, who's the CTO of Datrium with us today. Sazzala, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey Peter, good to see you again. >> So, AutoMatrix, give us a little bit more detail and how it's creating value for customers. >> Yeah, if you go to any data center today, you notice that for the amount of data they have, they have five different vendors and five different products to manage that data. There is the primary storage, there is the backup and there is the DR and then there's mobility and then there is the security you have to think about. So, these five different products are causing friction for you. If you wanna be in the on-demand economy and move fast in your business, these things are causing friction. You cannot move that fast. What we have done is we took a step back and we built this Automatrix platform. It has this data services which is gonna provide autonomous data services. The idea is that you don't have to do much for it. By converging all these functions into one simple platform will remove all the friction you need to manage all your data and that's what we call Automatrix platform. >> As a consequence, I gotta believe then, your customers are discovering that not only is it super easy to use, perhaps a little bit less expertise required, but they also are more likely to be operationally successful with some of the core functions like DR that they have to work with. >> Yeah, so the other thing about these five different functions and products you need is that if you wanna imagine a future where you're gonna leverage the cloud for a simple thing like DR for example, the thing is that if you wanna move this data to a different place, with five different products, how does it move? 'Cause all these five products must move together to some other place. That's not how it's gonna operate for you. So, by having these five different functions converged into one platform is that when the data moves to any other place, the functions move with it giving you the same exact consistent view for your data. That's what we have built and on top of all this stuff is something we have, this global data management applications to control all the data you have in your enterprise. >> So, how are customers responding to this new architecture of AutoMatrix, converged services and a platform for building data applications? >> Yeah, so our customers consistently tell us one simple thing is that it's the most easiest platform they ever used in their entire enterprise life. So, that's what we aimed for simplicity of the customer experience. Autonomous data services give you exactly that experience. So, as an example, last quarter, we had about 40 proof of concepts out in the field. Out of them, about 30 have adopted it already and we're waiting for the 10 of them for results to come out in this quarter. So, generally we found that our proof of concepts don't come back because once you touch it, you experience the simplicity of it and how you get all these service and support, then people don't tend to send it back. They like to keep it and operate it that way. >> So, you mentioned earlier and I summarized the notion of applications, data services applications. Tell us a little bit about those and how they relate to AutoMatrix. >> Right, so once you have data in multiple places, people are adopt multi-cloud and we are going to also be in all these different clouds and we provide that uniform experience, you need this global data management applications to extract value out of your data and that's the reason why we built some global data management applications as SAAS products. Nothing to install, nothing to manage them, then they sit outside and then they help you manage globally all the data you have. >> So, as a result, the I&O people, the infrastructure and operations administrators, do things in terms of AutoMatrix's platform, the rest of the business can look at it in terms of services and applications that you're using in support. >> That's exactly right, so you get the single dashboard to manage all the data you have in your enterprise. >> Now, I know you're introducing some of these applications today. Can you give us a little peek into those? >> Yeah, firstly, our AutoMatrix platform is available on prem as a software defined converged infrastructure and you can get that. We call it DVX. And then we also offer in the cloud our services. It's called Cloud DVX. You can get these. And we're also announcing the release of Control Shift. It's one of our first data management applications, which helps you manage data in two different locations. >> So, go a little bit more specific into or detail into Control Shift. Specifically, which of those five data services you talk about is Control Shift most clearly associated with? >> Right, so to go to again back to this question about if you have five different services, if you have to think about DR. DR is a necessity for every business. It's digital protection, you need it, but the challenge is that there are three or four challenges you generally run into with most common people talk about is that one is that you have to plan. You have to have a proper plan. It's challenging to plan something and then you have to think about the file drill we have to run when there's a problem. And then lastly, when you eventually push the button to fail over, does it really work for you. How fast is it gonna come up? Those are three problems we wanted to solve really solidly, so we call our services, our DR services as failproof DR. That's actually takes a little courage to say failproof. ControlShift is our service which actually does this DR orchestration. It does mobility across two different places. It could be on-prem to on-prem, on-prem to the cloud and because we have this end-to-end data services ourselves, it's easy to then do compliance checks all the time. So, we do compliance checks every few minutes. What that gives you, that gives you the confidence that your DR plan's gonna work for you when you need it. And then secondly, when you push the button because you want some primary storage and backup, it's then easy to bring up all your services at once like that. And the last one is that because we are able to then work across the clouds and provide a seamless experience, so when you move the data to the cloud and have some backups there, you're gonna push a button to fail over, we'll bring up your services in VMware cloud, so that the idea is that it look exactly the same no matter where you are, in DR or not in DR and then watch the video, watch some demos. I think that you can see that you can't tell the difference. >> Well, that's great, so give us a little bit of visibility into how Datrium intends to extend these capabilities, give us a little visibility on your road map. What's up next? >> We are already on Amazon with the cloud. The next thing we're gonna be delivering is Azure, that's the next step, but if you step back a little bit and how do we think about ourselves? If you look at as an example Google, Google federates all the data, the internet data and processes an instant search, provides that instant click and access to all the data at your fingertips. So, we wanna do something similar for enterprise data. How do we federate, how do we aggregate data and provide the customer that instant management they can get from all the data they have. How do you extract value from the data? These set of applications are building towards some examples are we're building deep search. How do you find the things you want to find in a very nice intuitive way? And how do you do compliance, GDPR and also how do you think about some deep analytics on your data? So, we also wanna extend our Control Shift not to just manage the data on our platform, but also to manage data across different platforms. So, those are the kind of things we're thinking about as a future. >> Excellent stuff. Sazzala Reddy, CTO of Datrium, thanks so much for talking with us about AutoMatrix, Control Shift and the direction that you're taking with this. Very, very interesting new vision about how data and business can more easily be brought together. You know, I'll tell you what, let's take a look at a demo. Hi and welcome back to another CUBE Conversation. Once again, I'm Peter Burris and one of the biggest challenges that every user faces is how do they get more out of their technology suppliers, especially during periods of significant transformation. So, to have that conversation, we've got Bryan Bond who is Director of IT Infrastructure at eMeter, A Siemens Business. Bryan, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, tell us a little bit about eMeter and what you do there. >> So, eMeter is a developer and supplier of smart grid infrastructure software for enterprise level clients, utilities, water, power, energy. My team is charged with managing infrastructure for that entire business units, everything from dev tests, QA and sales. >> Well, the intelligent infrastructure as it pertains to the electronic grid, that's not a small set of applications, a small set of use cases. What kinds of pressure is that putting on your IT infrastructure? >> A lot of it is the typical pressures that you would see with do more with less, do more faster. But a lot of it is wrapped around our customers and our other end users in needing more storage, needing more app performance and needing things delivered faster. On a daily basis, things change and keeping up with the Jones' gets harder and harder to do as time moves on. >> So, as you think about Datrium's AutoMatrix, how is it creating value for you today? Give us a peek into what it's doing to alleviate some of these scaling and other sorts of pressures. >> So, the first thing it does is it does allow us to do a lot more with less. We get two times the performance, five times the capacity and we spend zero time managing our storage infrastructure. And when I say zero time, I mean zero time. We do not manage storage anymore with the Datrium product. We can deploy things faster, we can recover things faster. Our RTO and our RPO matrix is down to seconds instead of minutes or hours. And those types of things really allow us to provide a much better level of service to our customers. >> And it's especially for infrastructure like the electronic grid, it's good to hear that the RTO, RPO is getting as close to zero as possible, but that's the baseline today. Look out and as you envision where the needs are of these technologies are going for improving protection, consolidating, converging data services and overall providing a better experience for how a business uses data, how do you anticipate that you're going to evolve your use of AutoMatrix and relate it to Datrium technologies? >> Well, we fully intend to expand our use of the existing piece that we have, but then this new AutoMatrix piece is going to help us not with just deployments, but it's also gonna help us with compliance testing, data recovery, disaster recovery and also being able to deploy into any type of cloud or any type of location without having to change what we do in the back end, being able to use one tool across the entire set of the infrastructure that we're using. >> So, what about the tool set, you're using the whole thing consistently, but what about the tool set went in easiest for you within your shop? >> Installing the infrastructure pieces themselves in its entirety were very, very easy. So, putting that into what we had already and where we were headed was very, very simple. We were able to do that on the fly in production and not have to do a whole lot of changes with the environments that we were doing at the time. The operational pieces within the DVX, which is the storage part of the platform, were seamless as far as vCenter and other tools that we were using went and allowed us to just extend what we were doing already and be able to just apply that as we went forward. And we immediately found that again, we just didn't manage storage anymore and that wasn't something we were intending and that made our ROI just go through the roof. >> So, it sounds like time value for the platform was very, very quick and also it fit into your overall operational practices. You didn't have to do a whole bunch of unnatural acts to get there. >> Right, we did not have to change a lot of policies, we did not have to change a lot of procedures. A lot of times, we just shortened them, we took a few steps out in a lot of cases. >> So, how is it changing, being able to do things like that, changing your conversation with your communities that you're serving as they ask for more capabilities? >> First off, it's making me say no a lot less and that makes them very, very happy. The answer usually is less and the answer to the question of how long will it take changes from oh, we can get that done in a couple of days or oh, we can get that done in a couple hours to I did that while I was sitting here in the meeting with you and it's been handled and you're off to the races. >> So, it sounds like you're placing a pretty big bet on Datrium. What's it like working with them as a company? >> It's been a great experience. From the start in the initial piece of talking to them and going through the POC process, they were very helpful, very knowledgeable SCs and since then, they've been very, very helpful in allowing us to tell them what our needs are rather than them telling us what our needs are and going through and working through the new processes and the new procedures within our own environments. They've been very instrumental in performance testing and deployment testing with things that a lot of other storage providers didn't have any interest in talking with us about, so they've been very, very helpful with that and very, very knowledgeable. The people that are there are actually really smart, which is not surprising, but the fact that they can relay that into solutions to what my actual problems are and give me something that I can push forward onto my business and have a positive impact from day one has been absolutely without question one of the better things. >> Well, that's always one of the biggest challenge when working with a company that's just getting going is how do you get the smarts of that organization into the business outcomes and really succeed. It sounds like it's working well. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Bryan Bond, Director of IT Infrastructure at eMeter, A Siemens Business. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Bryan: It's been great. >> And once again, this has been a CUBE Conversation. Now, what we'd like to do is don't forget this is your opportunity to participate in the crowd chat immediately after this video ends and let's hear your thoughts. What's important in your world as you think about new classes of data platforms, new roles of data, new approaches to taking greater advantage of the data assets that are differentiating your business. Have those conversations, make those comments, ask those questions. We're here to help. Once again, Peter Burris, let's crowd chat. (light music)