>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was how long ago it was. But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go bad. >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold, an unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stack. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about a very important topic around de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. This is critical, especially in the era of COVID. And with me, to really explore this issue is Dr. Rico, who's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT Doc. Good to see you. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> And Ken Steinhardt, is also here as a field CTO at INFINIDAT and I got to tell the audience, Doc, you're also the chairman of the Mass Motorcycles Association. You're a very cool guy. You're a pilot, you're a firearms instructor, all about safety, and Ken and Doc you're both musicians, right? Doc, I think he played the drums, and Ken, I know when we first met, you're a music guy, so wow. Surrounded by talent so, thank you so much for coming on. >> Glad to be here. Great to see you. >> For the other thing too is that you guys are long time storage industry experts. I've known you both for many, many years. INFINIDAT deep engineering expertise of course, everybody knows about Moshay, he created the most successful product in the history of the storage industry. And we're going to talk about the importance of data, especially in this era of COVID, and how mission criticality has really become more and more important. So, I want to start Doc with you and this notion of business continuity. How are you thinking about, and INFINIDAT thinking about business continuity in this isolation era? >> Well, that's a really great question Dave, because it has changed quite a bit. And as you said, we've known each other a long time, all the way back to when I still had hair, that was (indistinct). But, business continuity is something that every business constantly looks at throughout their evolution. And it's one of these things where certain applications are typically more mission critical than others. And lately, what we've seen is this genre of a lights out data center that has become absolutely critical operating a business today. People can't just be on site anymore. People need to be working remotely, and that includes data center personnel and in many respects. So, this whole concept of business continuity now encompasses not only the operation equipment that's on premises, or sometimes even off premises, but it also encompasses applications that people need access to that they may not have thought of mission critical before, because working from home was a convenience or working remotely was a convenience, not a requirement for that business. >> You, Ken, I know you talked to a lot of CIOs. I was sitting at a CIO round table with my friends down at ETR recently, and one of the CIO said, when COVID hit, we realized that our business quote unquote business continuity plans were just way too narrowly focused on DR. What do you see from the IT community? >> It's funny because I literally was on a CIO round table with the West Coast this morning. And there were a couple of interesting comments that really stuck out to me from some of the people there. One was commenting of just reaffirming, what Doc said, how much people are working from home now. They said, traditionally they'd had traditional offices and they've just recently hired in this company about 250 people. He said, all of them are going to be remote workers and their normal from here on out, for the next 150 they're looking to hire is just that business as usual will be remote work. And one of the other CIOs chimed in with a quote that really stuck out to me. He said, "Remote work requires always on infrastructure in this day and age." And it's just a whole new way of having to make sure that businesses are operational and their workers can do what they're supposed to do. >> Well, so let's stay on that. I mean, ransomware's on everybody's mind. I mean, all you have to do is look at the stock market, you see, what's happened with Zoom, it's exploded. All the end point securities, identity access management security companies are going crazy, because (chuckles) people are now so vulnerable. So, they're more exposed to ransomware, Ken, what do we really need to know about ransomware? First, the smart company, smart organization is the one that is prepared and assumes the worst. Which means don't think it can't happen to you, especially when you look at a couple of the more public examples in the last couple of years in particular. So, it means you must take steps to protect yourself, particularly for the sake of your company, your business, your employees, your shareholders, your customers, everyone else. And that means deploying technology that assumes that if the worst case scenario could happen to you, how do you make sure that you have taken the steps that you can avoid the worst possible scenarios that could happen? >> Well, you know, Doc, lot of times when you have this discussion on ransomware, people say, well, should I pay the ransom? And sometimes people say, well, yeah, maybe it should go. You hope you never get there, right? (chuckles) >> Right, you absolutely hope you never get there. There is such horrible examples of paying ransom that just don't work. Just look at the Somalia pirates as an example, right? It doesn't stop them at all, but, take a look at what the potential impact is, not the potential impact to your business and your employees, but the potential impact to society. A couple of years ago with Sony, was very notorious case. More recently, a couple of months ago, Garmin. As you mentioned, I'm a pilot, but I was very worried as what reservoir, a lot of people in the aircraft and in aviation industry. What's going to happen not only with our private information, the account information, but what's going to happen with avionics updates? If Garmin didn't have a fallback plan, a way to recover, then what was going to happen? And I'm sure they were going through the process and the thoughts of, should we pay this year? How else do we get out of this? But, fortunately they had a very good plan in place and it only took them a couple of days to restore back to normal operations. Arguably as far as avionics goes, they were lucky in the sense that this happened to them right in the middle of an update cycle, which is 28 day cycle. But the fact that it only took them a couple of days, congratulations to them. I'm sure that with even better plans and a little bit of extra effort, it could have been a matter of hours instead of days. >> Well, let's come back to business continuity. Ken, do you feel as though businesses are not prepared based on the conversation we were having earlier? >> Some are, some aren't. It will be getting into that, I think in a little bit more detail as well, but historically, organizations I think have focused far too much just on traditional disaster recovery, usually with things like some of the technologies that have been around a long while like backup, and onto often having focused towards the technologies that really do keep the business running without human intervention if something were to ever go wrong. >> So, Doc, anything you'd add to that? I mean, what's the state of business continuity from your perspective? Are people having to really starting to accelerate a journey because of this COVID? >> I absolutely think they're accelerating a journey. They're also looking now at, this concept of multiple active sites. The concept of active sites is not something new, it's something that dates back a couple of decades and a lot of the financial industry. When they were struck, they were looking at some very significant changes in their operational paradigm because they realized that the system is going down and is only a small percentage of the problem that people impact is far worse. The operational procedures, the human intervention. So, what they would do is typically build out multiple sites and rotate the applications between them. What they really haven't done yet, at least not on a broad scale and certainly not in the U.S and some cases in Europe, they started this journey, having applications running simultaneously in multiple sites accessing the same data sets. It's not a brand new concept, but it's something that has improved significantly. The technologies have improved significantly over the course of the past decade. And with the introduction of our active backend solution, a couple of years ago, even brought it to an entirely new level. >> The people aspect that Doc mentioned is so critical. And that's certainly been one of the key lessons learned when real disasters have occurred is that the systems have to be, if you really want to keep your business operating making an assumption that people are going to have depending upon the nature of the disaster. Very different priorities and one of them is not, Gee, do I keep these ITs systems running or not? They're going to be worried about their co-workers, their families, other things, et cetera. So, the ultimate has to be systems that are capable of continuing the operation of the business in the face of a site failure, a metropolitan area failure or whatever it takes without the requirement necessarily for human intervention. >> So, I want to get into active-active. But before we do, I wonder if we could do a little sort of data protection one on one, a back up, a replication, you got snapshots, Doc, what do we need to know about each in the context of this discussion? >> I think the important thing to look at when you think about the different types of technologies and say you apply the solutions is that some of them apply to specific equipment failures, and some of them apply to data failure. And I separate equipment from data in the sense that data can be corrupted in some shape or form. It can be through malicious attack, like ransomware as an example, only one example, other types of malware can play a factor as well, or it can be incidental. Somebody pressing the wrong button, it can be an operational procedure, perhaps another system failure that causes a change in the data or corruption in the data that makes it essentially unusable. So, whenever we're looking at this, we have to start with what is the recovery point objective. The RPO that's where most people start with. And in the RPO, in essence, if you think of time zero, right now, it's where the failure occurs. Walk backwards. How far back can I go and still sustain my business? Now, there may be other procedural things you can do to catch up as close to that RPO and zero as you can, but each of these technologies that we're talking about give you a different RPOs, like rewinding a tape back to a point in time. So, that's the first place to start. >> Okay. So, let's bring up that slide actually. I actually liked this as the fireball slide I call it, but this is how people measure sort of the business impact, if you will, RPO and RTO. And what I like about this is in this digital world, it's kind of a cliche, but everything's getting more intense. People want, they don't want to lose data when you ask a customer, how much data are you willing to lose? They say none. >> None. >> And you say, well, how much are you willing to pay? So, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of describe that tension and that dynamic that's really underscored in this slide. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah, you hit it on the head David. It's the traditional trade off between RPO, RTO and cost. As Doc described with RPO, the objective would be to get as close to zero data loss as you could possibly get, with RTO which measures the time associated with how long will it take you to get back to your acceptable level of RPO. That is a time factor where for every minute or second, that goes by that you're not in business, that's the extension of the RTO. And historically, the closer you get as you approach zero RPO and zero RTO, usually the greater the cost goes up. And it's always been the eternal trade off, is a great analogy. It's sort of like if you want to buy a car. RPO equates for the quality of the solution, RTO is time or speed and cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast, it won't be cheap. If it's good, and it's cheap, it won't be fast. And if it's fast, and it's cheap, it won't be good. So, usually that's the kind of tradeoff we will have to deal with there. And, the factors that will impact that, as Doc alluded to can be many. There's many aspects that you have to consider in terms of what is the service level that the business requires, and do we have solutions in place that can actually give us what is the real service level of the business requires if something were to go back? >> Because, customers have gone through, unnatural acts, and Doc before you were kind of describing what some people would refer to as, as a three site, data centers and all kinds of things that people will do, but that brings us to active-active, Doc, what is active-active? >> Yeah, let me interject a point there, and then I'll get to your question about active-active. First is the question I can raise about service level, that's absolutely critical. And business may have different service levels for different applications. >> Dave: Right. >> And you never really know what that is. For example, I was working with a university a few years back, you normally think, well, universities is where they worried about, they're worried about their grading systems. Everybody's always worried about their financial systems. This particular university was worried about their golf course reservations system. (laughs) And their number one mission critical application, and I'm sure there was a little chunk tongue and cheek there as well, was the golf course reservation system because that directly impacted, there were alumni and had a direct correlation to the incoming donations for the following year. So, you never know what's going to be mission critical. Closer to home working very recently, there's a great case study from Aultman Hospital on a website. One of the things that they did, which I thought was absolutely astounding, was they took advantage of our offer to loan them free storage for a while, leveraging some of the COD that they're passing on demand that they weren't using. One of the reasons that they wanted this extra capacity was so that they can make telepresence available to their patients to visit with their families. At a time when families can't go into the hospital visit, when people are ill, what a great comfort to their family. So, this is a great way to look at it. When you think about these different service levels now, and you think about the different types of replication technologies that are available. Look at the multisite, what is multisite really doing for you? Multisite is giving you some level of synchronous replication so that you have an RPO of zero recovery point objective. It still may not be an RTO or zero, but it will be darn close to it. But more importantly, it's giving you an additional site to really maintain that RPO of zero in case the disaster radius, the blast area, the impact zone is even further away. Now, this isn't going to prevent any type of malicious intent, it's not going to prevent the ransomware case, and things like that, but it'll certainly prevent the catastrophic failure of the data center. What does active-active do? Well, active-active now, gives you the read write capability. And now our multisite implementation by the way, leverages our active-active. So, gives you the ability now to have the simultaneously running instance of an application in multiple data centers, reading and writing from the same dataset. And what that gives you, is not only an RPO of zero, but an RTO of zero, because now you can have an application in another data center stand in and take over for it. Naturally, the application needs to be able to do that. There are a lot of applications that are capable of it. The Oracle parallel server or rack technology, gives you that capability. There are other types of clustering technologies that will fail almost instantaneously, that will give you that capability. So, that's where really active-active comes into play. >> Yeah, makes sense for me. When I started the industry, the VAX clusters were sort of the now thing, right? >> Yup. >> (indistinct) (Dave chuckles) >> All right. So, what are you seeing in the marketplace? Are you seeing... What's the adoption look like? Are there any differences that you see by region? What can you tell us there? >> Yeah, it's interesting. Some of the first organizations that obviously jumped on to active-active type solutions, were those where there were in particularly, in things like financial services, some compliance requirements or financial incentives or motivation to make sure that the business was always operational. And it's interesting because there was a study that was done all the way back in 2003, by Roper, that asked business executives and IT executives the same questions relative to their perceptions of their companies or organizations ability to meet RPO or RTO service level agreements. >> Right. And we have some data on this that I want to bring up. So, this is the RPO data but please carry on. >> Ken: Exactly, and so they asked questions that really were about RPO or RTO. Hey, if a disaster hit, would you lose data and how much? And what the data showed was that the business executives and IT executives in Europe, were actually pretty much on the same page. They both said, yeah, we probably would lose some data or a reasonable amounts associated with it. But what was a little frightening, was there appeared to be a chasm of disconnect between the business executives, from the IT executives in the U.S. And what it showed was that the IT executives were on the same page as the European IT executives and the business executives from Europe, saying that, yeah, we'd probably lose some data. But it showed that very few of the business executives thought that they would. And then similarly, when they were asked the question about RTO, how long would it take? In terms of days, hours, et cetera, for your full operation to be back in operational and granted they were talking in 2003 terms back then, which was a little longer than where the technology can now address it now. There was, again, this consistency between the IT executives in both continents and countries, as well as the European business executives, but again, a disconnect where the business executives in the U.S thought, oh, no, we'll be fine. We'll have everything back in a couple of days or less than, it won't be an issue. In my opinion, in looking at that data, when it first came out, my impression was, well, now I understand why a lot of business continuity projects don't get approved because the IT people know that they need it, but the business executives have, if I could be so bold and unrealistically optimistic view of their ability to achieve RPO and RTO, I'll give you a great example. There was a major high tech company around that timeframe that actually had a major outage in their email system. And email was not perceived to be at the time, ultra mission critical application for them. I know it seems strange in this day and age, but back then it was considered sort of an afterthought and they had a four hour SLA in case something went down where, hey, if we're down for four hours, we get it back and four hours, we're fine. And so, IT thought, they were doing a great job, 'cause they got it back in less than four. It was about three point something. And it turned out that the real impact of the business was so overwhelming, they had to completely overhaul the IT infrastructure that they've put in place to deliver that. So, it's an interesting issue, and it's the kind of thing where, as a result, I believe that as we sit here today in 2020, the disconnect in the U.S still exists. If you look across Europe, you tend to find a lot of deployments of active-active. The first country that probably did a ton of it was Germany, and then, lot of the other European countries did as well. For a multitude of reasons, you tend to see a lot of active-active deployments in Europe, but you don't see anywhere near as many as if I could be so bold, we probably should be seeing in the U.S, and I believe a major contributing factor to that is that there is still this disconnect, between business executives having a false sense of security that is unfounded by the infrastructures that they have in place. And if they were to ask their IT people, and maybe that's a good idea for them to talk more, they'd probably find that they're more exposed than they ever realized. >> Right. And of course in Europe, you've got, much tighter proximity, and you're up against borders of a 200 mile or a 200 kilometer roll, governments have tried to impose here, really can't be imposed in a lot of cases. Okay. Let's get into what you guys are doing here in the space. So, Doc, how do you approach ensuring access to mission critical data? What's INFINIDAT's angle? >> Yeah, I think it's several different layers that need to be applied here. The first INFINIDAT angle starts with the fact that our storage is a hundred percent data availability guarantee. It's simple enough. It's triple redundant architecture, seven nines reliability design, which equates to 3.16 seconds per year of downtime, which is less than a scuzzy time (laughs) I bet you know. Let's start with just, right, forget the nonsense, the system's are a hundred percent available guaranteed. We put some teeth behind that, and that's a great way to start. It's not necessarily going to fundamentally protect your data from site outages and network outages and server outages and things like that, so, let's be fed up and can go to in active-active infrastructure. And now you can take the system and put it either elsewhere behind a firewall on the same data center floor, or in a metropolitan area. Wherever you need it to be, separate power zones, separate networks zones, make it even more available. And then if you really want to go that next level of protection because you're worried about regional outages and things of that nature, multisite replication. But now it's up the ante even further. Let's look at the malicious intent, let's look at the data corruption. Let's look at all of the other possibilities of things that can happen to your data. So, implement snapshotting technology, in this snapshot technology, and InfiniBox is essentially free. There's no cost for the software, there is no performance impact because it's part of metadata updates that are happening all the time anyway. So, there's zero additional overhead of that. There's no additional, there's no copying of data going on with a snapshot, so there's no additional cost penalty associated with it. And you can snapshot this frequently for a Snapshot any of your data frequently to protect against data corruption. And if you're worried about some sort of malicious aspect, that's going to engage and perhaps gain access to the snapshots, we have immutable technology, and that is also free. It's there, it doesn't cost you anything other than the time it takes for the administrator to determine what the policy is. And now that can not be modified. It can't be deleted, it can't be modified, it can't be updated, can't be written to your inside whatever the polyp the defined policy is. So, now you're protected, you're a hundred percent availability, increase data hundred percent availability with active-active, and then increase your RPO capability with dissonance and protect yourself against data corruption with immutable snapshots. Or some combination of standard snapshots and immutable snapshots. >> Yeah, so, I was going to ask Ken, if this is a cost effective approach, but, I mean, it's free, it comes in the stuff. >> That is the key word, and you both just said it. Standard and included functionality all based on that great snapshot technology, which was the foundation for it that Doc described. Active-active, standard and included, the ability to go to a third site for disaster recovery at the industry's lowest asynchronous RPO with a remote site. Standard and included, immutable snaps, standard and included. So, compared to traditional views of what most people had back to our illustrious triangle earlier of RPO versus RTO versus cost, you're still going to have the additional cost of media and remote site for protecting your data, obviously, but in terms of software license costs, we're making it simpler, we're making it easier, we're making it standard and included, and we're just making it so much more readily available for organizations to be able to achieve superior RTO and RPO at a cost point that maybe certainly is a little bit higher than just having that single system that Doc alluded to, it's still a hundred percent available, but it's way below what the expectations of this industry have been over the last 20 years. >> Yeah, which is double, triple, I mean easily. Well, can I understand you for a second. You've worked for a lot of different storage companies, Doc you as well, but how different is this? How unique is this? >> There are surprisingly few vendors that can offer true zero RPO at two zero RTO. There's really only a handful. We're one of them. And by handful, I mean about three in the industry, including ourselves, and where I think we differentiate is fundamentally to a lot of those points we just mentioned. The software standard and included so we're not going to charge you extra for it. It's going to be relatively simple to deploy and integrate a stock alluded to earlier with server cluster software and the key components that people would use there in terms of databases and in terms of operating systems. And it's fundamentally going to be able to offer not just that zero RPO, zero RTO active-active environment, but if you do, and when you do need to go to a third site at distance for the true disaster recovery, if you ever lost a metropolitan area, we're going to be able to do it at an RPO that is lower than anything else on the market. >> Doc, are there complexities associated with doing this at petabyte scale? I mean, you guys make a big deal out of that, and you're clearly excited about it, but, is it extra hard to do at that kind of volume at scale? >> I'm going to give you two answers, and say, yes, it's incredibly difficult to do, but then I'm going to say it's incredibly easy for the customer to do because we've made it easy. There a lot of ramifications to doing things at petabyte scale. There's the size of the caching cables that you don't have to worry about. There's the numbers of things that need to be checked, and counter checked and constantly crosscheck for validity. There's also the scale of things that happen like silent data corruption that need to be factored in. All of those things are being done by InfiniBox, on a constant basis with no impact to the customer, no impact to the administrator, no impact to the running application. And I think that's a frankly, another differentiator as well. Ken and I have some common history as well. (chuckles) Used to constantly talk about internally, what happens as things get larger, systems slow down. That simply doesn't happen with InfiniBox. And that's why service providers use us as well. Cloud service providers managed service providers are some of our biggest customers. Because they know they can have these large scale systems running with all these different workloads, all these different functions, be they snapshots, clones, whatever they are, with no impact and very easy and rapid to deploy. >> Yeah, I set up top, you got to be storage hardos to make this stuff work. (laughs) It's very complicated and we've seen it for years and years. Last question. Again, huge changes in the last 150 days where people are just really tuned in to things like digital transformation, I talked about security, business resiliency, business continuity. Where... I'll start with you Ken, how should users be thinking about this? What steps should they be taking like now? >> What a great question. And back to sort of where we started, because of the nature of how things have changed, more applications are mission critical than they've ever been before. And providing, and always on infrastructure to make sure that you can give your users and your customers and your business, the opportunity to stay alive in the face of just about anything that could happen has never been more important in the history of this industry. >> Doc, I'll give you the final word, you can pile on that. >> I think Ken summed it up really well, but I'm going to take a different twist on it. It's all about de-risking, and a lot of the CIOs and CTOs of companies that I've been talking to over the course of the past couple of months, have basically said, hey, my digital transformation initiatives are on hold right now because I've got to keep the lights on, I've got to keep my business running. In some cases, maybe I've had to sadly pare down my staff, but I've got, remote workers have got to worry about. So, find a partner that's going to de-risk your infrastructure for you. Take a look at some of the things that we've announced in the past few months as well. We'll take a lot of that risk way, not only from the availability perspective, but we're going to take the risk away from a cost perspective. If you want to talk about INFINIDAT, don't worry about things like, how am I going to migrate over to it? We're going to do that for you. We're going to work with you, we're going to come up with a plan, we're going to make as much of it non-disruptive as we can, and we're going to assume the cost of doing it. We're going to take away all the risk of availability. We just talked about all of that. We're going to give you guarantees, that are a hundred percent availability. We'll help you architect the right solution for you and we'll protect you moving forward. You might need some flex area of capacity as you work through some of these new applications and new initiatives, so, you've got to be willing to take the risk away with our elastic pricing models. Use the storage when you need it, return it when you don't, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. We'll make it that simple for you. We'll give you that cloud operating paradigm on premises, and by the way, no egress costs. (Dave laughs) >> Well, this is a hard problem for people because they've had to do the work from home pivot, IT people, specifically, I mean, they've had to spend to shore up that infrastructure and of course, organizations just saying, well, we're going to pull from other places, but, look, if you're not digital today, you're not being able to transact business. And so, you can't relax your business continuity plans, in fact, you have to evolve them. Guys, thanks very much for sharing your perspectives and insights on this whole notion of de-risking infrastructure with business continuity. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave, is always a pleasure. Thank you. >> Cheers, and thank you everybody for watching, this is Dave Vallante for theCube, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello everyone welcome to the special cube conversation with a remote guest Steve Herod managing director of general kennel s he's a venture capitalist former CTO of VMware cube alumni Steve welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto you're right across town but still we're gonna grab you big news happening and also get your thoughts on the Emerald 2019 welcome to our remote conversation yeah hey Jon yeah we're close and yet this makes it even more convenient go we'd love the new format of bring people into no matter where they are no matter what whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that and and two important ones to having we we know vm world's coming next week but congratulations in order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX another cube alumni firm we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition by Splunk today for over a billion dollars sixty percent in cash and forty percent in stop congratulations you've been on the board you've known these guys from VMware quite a team quite an exit it's a win-win for those guys congratulations yeah great group of guys several of which were at VMware has you as you mentioned and as you've had on your show that's great they were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it and they're marrying it with spunks ability to ingest logs and really understand operational data and I think the combination will be very powerful it brings kind of what we've been monitoring cloud 2.0 essentially monitoring 2.0 is really observability as the world starts moving into the the kinds of services we're seeing with cloud and on-premises operations more than ever that game has changes much more dynamic and the security impact is significant and certainly as applications connect whether it's IOT or any IP device having that data at scale is really a critical part of that and I know signal FX was one of those companies where you invested early and I remember interview them a couple years ago and saying damn these guys might be too early I mean they're so smart they're so on it but this is an example of skating to where the as Wayne Gretzky would say these guys were just hitting their stride Steve can you can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important well they've been at this for a long time and they're a great team I've been involved as an investor less time obviously but yeah it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world and you know as you discovered we're in a world of micro services and containers and that is definitely hitting its stride right now and so they were in the right place knowing how to monitor this very fast moving information and and make some sense out of it so yeah really good job on their part and it was a pleasure to be along for part of the ride with them it's great to meet great founders that have a vision and stay the course because you know it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around ok we're talking micro services and containers way back before it became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises it's easy to get distracted and it's fashion well just jump on this trend or this wave they stayed the course they stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observability which to me is code word for monitoring 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw companies going public companies filing the pager Duty dynaTrace now the you guys with your acquisition with signal FX this is an important sector this would normally be viewed in the IT world as kind of lists of white space but it seems to be a much bigger landscape can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important why is observability so hot Steve well it's been this actually been a great market to be in for quite a while they've been a large number of companies continuing to be both built up and it's pretty simple the amount of e-commerce or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the web has gone up and so anything is not performing well or house downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company and so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on more for revenue and for customer interactions you know simply you have to have better tools and that's gonna be something that continues to evolve we have more complex apps and more commerce is going to go through them complexity is obviously something that people a lot of people are talking about I want to ask you something around today's marketplace but I want you to compare and contrast it similarly to what your experience was at VMware when you the CTO you know virtualization evolved very very quickly and ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure and a lot of people were pooh-poohing that initially at first and then all the sudden became we got to kill VMware and you know so the resiliency of VMware was such that they continued to innovate on virtualization and so that's been you know part of the legacy of VMware and VM roads will cover next next week but when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud opportunities with micro services and other other cool things the the role of the application is being is important part of the equation it used to be the stand up infrastructure and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of changed that game now you don't need to stand up any infrastructure you can just deploy an application then the infrastructure can be code and be self formed so you can have unique requirements as infrastructure driven by the application the whole world seems to have flipped around do you see it that way is that accurate assessment and what's your thoughts on that I think you're right on a bunch of fronts people have been calling it different things but the beauty of VMware and you know this is a while ago now but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use it sort of slid in underneath and added value but at the same time applications evolved and so the path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications you have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new services that are in the cloud and as you build up these as they're called cloud native applications it really is about the infrastructure you know it's job and life as to run applications and it's it sort of felt like the other way around it needs to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was it shouldn't be like that anymore it's about what what you need to do to get the job done and so we see the evolution of the clouds and their services that are there certainly the notion of containers and a lot the stuff that VMware is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure VMware adds value to them whatever type of application they are it's interesting one of the exciting things in this wave that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud and public cloud now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0 you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud even early on around 2012-2013 we were talking about that at VMworld you know certainly Pat Kelson here but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated you got outpost you got Azure stack among other things the reality is if you are cloud native you might not need to have anything on premise like companies like ours with 50 plus people we don't have an IT department but most enterprises have stuff on premise so the the nuance these days is around you know what's the architecture of IT these days when you add security into it's complicated so there's debates can there be a sole cloud for a workload certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jedi contract where it's not necessarily a sole cloud for the entire department of defense it's a sole cloud for the workload the military application workload or app the military it's 10 billion dollar application and it's okay to have one cloud as we would say but yet they're gonna use Microsoft's cloud for other things so the DoD's having a multiple cloud approach multiple environments multiple vendors if you will but you don't have to split the cloud up or say this is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way which was have a multi-vendor environment split two things what's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud is it okay to have a workload have a single clap for that workload and coexist with other clouds it's funny I've been thinking about this more lately where if you went back earlier in time forgetting cloud there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you could run on whether it be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or UNIX system or a Linux system and to some extent people are choosing what would run where based on the demands of the application sometimes on price sometimes on certifications or even what's been ported to the right one so this is I'm beating myself but you know that's that's a while ago it's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud services are out there whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics and it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run and so forgetting VMware exactly but think of a virtualization layer that that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds I do think that's where a lot of the you know the core software is head of these days to really enable that to work better and so a million other use cases with with you know storage being moved around for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might be but that core of flexibility reminds me a lot of you know choosing what application would one run would run where within your own company and the kubernetes trend in container certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VMware's on the ends beams under the covers or put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities so it's exciting and you slap an API in front of them and and micro-services sort of works in tandem with that so that you you could really have your application composed across multiple environments and I think the observable observability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way which is monitoring making sure things are operating effectively and combining with data and so when I heard about the acquisition of signal FX into Splunk I'm like there it is we're back to data so observability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring but it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts so there's more data than ever for sure and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost all that is a big part of our you know the environments we all work and the key thing is turning that into some actionable insight and whether you're using you know interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in do I avoid false false positives how do i only alert people when needed and then that allows you to do what everyone has talked about for 30 years which is automatic remediation but for now let's talk about it is how do i process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action see we want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation you've been with us at the cube since 2010 I think our first cube event was EMC world 2010 that show doesn't exist any longer because that folded into Dell technologies world so VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the cube cubes been around of course you guys had the VM worlds had their 10th anniversary I think was 2013 as a show but this is our 10th year I want to thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral appreciate all that so I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you've been with the cube VMworld what's the most exciting moments what are moments that you can say hey that was an amazing time that was a grind but we got through it funny moments your thoughts yeah boy that's a tough question I've enjoyed you know working with you John and the cube there have been so many really interesting things for me the some of the big acquisitions that we went through at VMware where I think the nsx acquisition when we get nasarah I think that really pushed us in an interesting spot but we had gone through IPOs and acquisition ourselves by EMC and we've gone through some pretty vicious competition from whether it be Citrix or Zin or Microsoft yeah that's just the joy of being at these companies it's lots of ups and downs along the way but they all kind of fit together to make an exciting life what were some moments for you I know you had left was a twenty fifteen or twenty six point eight vs world you go down there yeah about six years what do you miss about VMware the team is what everyone kind of cliche says but it's totally true the chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Co ideas so I definitely missed that miss shipping products you don't get to do that as much as a venture capitalist but but on the flip side this is a great world to be and I get to see enthusiastic you know very optimistic founders all day long pushing the envelope and while that was existing at the EM where it's it's what I see every single day here you've been on the cube ten times at vmworld that's the all time spot you're tied but first congratulations on the leaderboard well it's been a great ten years going forward we've seen more so go looking back I would say that you know Palmer it's taking over from Diane Greene really set the table he actually laid out essentially what I think now as a clearly a cloud SAS architecture I think he got that pretty much right again or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time though some things that didn't materialize as fast but ultimately from a core perspective you guys got that right and then went in try to do the cloud but then and this year it comes in for a software-defined you know line with Amazon and since that time the stock has been really kind of up to the right so you know some key moments there for VMware from small somalia more stuff it's fun to see pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there but I think you know there's there's a hugely talented team of executives there Pat Yeltsin jurors come in and done a great job I think Raghu and all these folks that are in there are good thinkers and so I think you'll consider to continue to see it evolve quite a bit and probably some cool announcements next week talk about the role Raghu and the team played because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight he avoids it I know he'd I've talked to him privately he won't come on the qoi let the other guys go on other guys and gals so he's been instrumental he was really critical in multiple deals could you share some insight into his role at VMware VMware and why it's been so important well I'll push them to get on especially now that you have remote you can probably grab him no he and Rajiv and andraia Ferrell just all the guys are I think he and regime basically split up half and half of the products but I know Raghu is very very similar in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working well he's good friend in a very smart guy well I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna give him in a headlock and tell him to come on the cube this year we want him on he's a great great great guest he's certainly knowledgeable going forward Steve 10 years out we still got 10 more years of great change coming if you look at the wave that's coming you're out investing in companies again you had one big exit today with the billion dollar acquisition that was happening by Splunk and signal affects a lot more action you've been investing in security what's your outlook as you look at the next ten years there's a lot more action to happen we seem to be early days in this new modern era historic time in the computer industry has applications of now dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do what are you excited about there's there's a million things I get to see everyday which are clearly where the world is headed but I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure which the job and life of infrastructure is to run applications and so then you look at applications how are they changing and and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them and if you look at the future of applications it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter it's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking you can do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the backend so I kind of look at all these application patterns and really try to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's going to be needed to run them I think we have plenty of headroom of interesting ideas ahead stew Dave and I were talks to Dave Stuben they want this too many man died we're talking about you know as infrastructure and cloud get automated as automation comes in new waves are gonna be formed from it what new waves do you see is it's like RPAs a I I mean because as those things get sucked in and they ships in to new waves what are the some of the key ways people should pay attention to I'm not saying the inverse tress is going away but as it becomes automated and as the shift happens the value still is there where is those new waves well I think today it looks like most applications are going to be composed of a lot of services and I think they're gonna be able they're gonna need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as headless api friends and so again I think at the end of the day this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability have to crunch through tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and ability in the network and all those are very hard problems that we've been working on for a while I think we're gonna keep working on them and new forms for the next ten years at least awesome see thanks for being a friend with us in the cube what's your funny favorite moment of the Q can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way you've come a long way actually I've enjoyed it I mean it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the cube like that was that was really cool but now the fact that I'm on my laptop you know doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome so I think you're following the same patterns of the other of the other applications moving to the cloud and having good user experience because cube native here software if the male native Steve thank you so much for staying the time commenting on the acquisition I know it's fresh on the press a lot more analysis and cut to come next week it's certainly I'll be co-hosting ATS plunks Kampf later in the year so I'm looking forward to connecting with the team there and again thanks for all your contribution into the cube community we really appreciate it one thank you for your time thanks John you guys are awesome thanks for chatting okay Steve Herod managing director at General Counsel top tier VC from here in Silicon Valley and they have offices around the world I'm Jean ferré breaking down the news as well as a VM real preview with the former CTO of VMware Steve hare now a big-time venture capitalist I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in San Francisco at the Professional Business Women of California Conference, the 28th year, I think Hillary must be in the neighborhood because everyone is streaming up to the keynote rooms. It's getting towards the end of the day. But we're excited to have Adam Smiley on. He's the author of The Quarter-Life Breakthrough. Welcome Adam. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So you gave a talk a little bit earlier on, I assume the theme of kind of your general thing. Would you just, Quarter-Life Breakthrough, what is Quarter-Life Breakthrough? >> So this is a book about how to empower the next generation. How young people can find meaning in their careers and their lives. So the subtitle of the book is Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters. So everyone talks about millennials, you hear them in the news, "Oh they're the lazy generation," >> Right, right. >> "The entitled generation." The Me, Me, Me generation. I actually think that couldn't be further from the truth. So the truth is that actually 50% of millennials would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values. 90% want to use their skills for good. So my book is a guide for people to find purpose in their careers and really help them find meaning at the workplace and help companies empower that generation at work. >> So from being the older guy, so then is it really incumbent, you know, because before people didn't work for good, they worked for paycheck, right. They went, they punched in, they got paid, they went home. So is it really incumbent then on the employers now to find purposeful work? And how much of it has to be purposeful? I mean, unfortunately, there's always some of that, that grimy stuff that you just have to do. So what's the balance? >> Yeah and it's not to say that millennials don't want a paycheck, everyone wants money. I obviously want to make more money than less money. But it's also that this generation is really looking for meaning in the workplace. And one of the main things, if you look at all the studies, whether it's the Deloitte Millennial Study or the IBM Study, this is a generation that wants to move the needle forward on social issues at work. Not just after work or on the weekends, but at the workplace. And I think it's incumbent upon companies to really think about how they're providing those opportunities for purpose. Both in the mission of the company, what someone's doing every day, and opportunities outside of work, whether it's service projects, paid sabbaticals for people to do purpose-driven projects, really thinking about how someone is inspired to do mission during work every day. >> Right, it's interesting, Bev Crair at the keynote talked about, the question I think was, do you have to separate, kind of your personal views from your professional views and your social life? And she made a very powerful statement, she's like, "I'm comfortable enough with my employer that I can say what I feel and if there's ever a question they can ask me about it. But I don't gait what I say based on my employer as long as I'm being honest and truthful." So you know it's an interesting twist on an old theme. Where before you kind of had your separate worlds. You know, you had your work life and your home life, but now between email and text and social media, there is no kind of they're there for work and it's really invaded into the personal. So is that why the personal has to kind of invade back into the work? >> And when it comes to millennials, one word that always comes up is authenticity. People do not want to separate who they are at home from who they are at work. They want to be their whole person. Now obviously there's a line you don't cross. I'm not going to tell someone exactly what I think of them or tell the boss to go screw themselves or insult somebody or put on social media something that's secret that we're doing at the company. But I think that people want to feel that they get to show up who they are, have their beliefs echoed at the workplace, be able to be their full self, their full values, their mission, their goals, have that reflected in what they do, and have people at the company actually acknowledge that. You're not just an employee, I actually know what's going on in your life. I know what your dreams are, I know what your family's going through. I care about where you're headed, not just today or while you work here, but when you leave the company. Because that's the other thing, is that we're accepting that most of the people entering the workforce now or starting a new job, they're going to be there on average two to three years, maybe four, five, or six years. They're not going to be there ten, fifteen, twenty years like they used to be. So how do you actually empower someone to make an impact while they're there. And help them find the next lily pad, as they call it. The next opportunity. Because they're going to have a lot of those lily pads as they go throughout their career. >> It's interesting. We interviewed a gal named Marcia Conrad at an IBM event many years ago. She just made a really funny observation, she's like, "You know, people come in and you interview them and they're these really cool people and that's why you hire them, because they've got all these personality traits and habits and hobbies and things that they do, and energy." And then they come into the company, and then the old-school, you drop the employee, you know manual on top of them, basically saying stop being you. Stop being the person that we just hired. So that's completely flipped up on its head. >> Right, one of the things I talked about in the session today was this idea of stay interviews versus exit interviews. Normally when we do performance managements, kind of like, okay, you're leaving, what did you think? Why are you doing that when someone leaves? Do it to be like, what would make you stay? What do you want to accomplish while you're here? And you're not being graded against what everyone else is being graded on, what do you want to be graded on? What are your goals? What are your metrics for success? Performance achievement versus just performance measurement. I think is very important for this generation, because otherwise it's like, well why am I being judged on the standards that were written in 1986? This is what I'm trying to do here. >> It's interesting, even Jeff Immelt at GE, they've thrown out the annual review because it's a silly thing. You kind of collect your data two weeks before and the other fifty weeks everybody is just working. I have another hypothesis I want to run by you though. On this kind of purpose-driven. Today so many more things are as a service, transportation as a service, you know there seems to be less emphasis on things and more emphasis on experiences. It also feels like it's easier to see your impact whether it's writing a line of code, or doing something in social media. And you know there was an interesting campaign, Casey Neistat did, participated a couple weeks ago, right. They raised $2 million and basically got Turkish Airlines to fly in a couple hundred thousand metric tons of food to Somalia. And my question is, is it just because you can do those things so much easier and see an impact? Is that why, kind of this, increased purposefulness, I'm struggling on the word. >> I think the tools are certainly more available for people to take action. I think the connection is there. People are seeing what's going on in the world in a way that they've never been exposed to before with social media, with communication technology. It's up front and center. I think also that as technology takes over our lives, you see this with kind of statistics around depression and anxiety, people are starved for that in-person connection. They're starved for that meaning, that actual conversation. We're always doing this, but really a lot of data shows that people experience true joy, true fulfillment, true connection, true experience is what you're talking about, when they're in a room with someone. So people want that. So it's kind of a return back to that purpose-driven life, that purpose-driven tribe, village experience because the rest of the time we're on our phones. And yeah, it's cool, but something's missing. So people are starting to go back to work and be like, "I want that inspiration" that other generations may have gotten from church or from outside of work, or from their community, or from their village, or from the elders, or from a youth group or something. They're like, "I want that in the workplace. I want that everyday." >> Well so this is more top-down right? I mean I just think again, kind of the classic, back in the day, you were kind of compelled to give x percentage of your pay to United Way or whatever. And that was like this big aggregation mechanism that would roll up the money and distribute it to God-knows-where. Completely different model than, and you can see, because of social media and ubiquitous cell phones all over the place, you can actually see who that kid is, that's getting your thing on the other side. >> And it's empowering someone to say, "Okay this is what's important to me. These are the causes that I'd like to support. This is where I want my money to go and here's why." >> So what do you think's the biggest misunderstanding of millennials from old people like me or even older hopefully? >> Well one thing that I do think that millennials don't get right is the importance of patience. I think a lot of times people say, you know, "oh millennials, they want things to happen too quickly." I think that that's true. I think that my generation, I'm going to be the first to admit and say that we need to do a better job of being patient, being persistent. You can't expect things to happen overnight. You can't expect to start a job and in two months get promoted or to feel like you're with the Board of Directors. Things take time. At the same time, it's incumbent upon older generations to listen to these young people, to make them feel like they have a voice, to make them feel like they're heard and that their ideas matter, even if they don't have the final say, to make them feel like they actually matter. Because I think sometimes people assume that they don't know anything. They don't know everything, but they have some really brilliant ideas and if you listen to those ideas they might actually be really good for the company both in terms of profit and purpose. So that's one thing I would say. >> Okay, just, so first time with this show, just get your impressions of the show. >> Oh it's great. This is a great show. You all are doing a great job, a great interview. >> No not our show. The PBWC, I mean of course we're doing a good job, we have you on. I mean the PBWC. >> It's a great, you know for me, it's real exciting to be at the end of an event where I'm one of the only male speakers. Because usually, I've been doing the speaking circuit thing now for a year or two. And I go to these events, I go to panels, I go to conferences, keynotes, and it's mostly male speakers, which is a huge problem. There's far far far fewer women and people of color speaking at these events than men. And one of the things I'm really trying to change is that but also pay equity around speaking, because I talked to some of my female colleagues about what they were paid for a specific event, and they'll say, "Well they covered my transportation, they covered my lift and a salad, or my hotel maybe." I'm like, well I got paid $5000. That's messed up. We did the same amount of work. We did the same panel or doing the same keynote, similar experience levels. That's messed up. And so I'm trying to change that by doing this thing called the Women Speaker Initiative. Which is a mentorship program to empower more women and people of color to be speakers and then to make sure that they're paid fairly when compared to men. >> So how do people get involved with that? >> They should just got to my website, smileyposwolsky.com and check out Women Speaker Initiative. >> Alright, well Adam, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Great great topic and I'm sure, look forward to catching up again later. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Alright. He's Adam, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're at the Professional Business Women of California conference, twenty eighth year. Thanks for watching.