>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans. Andrew Christensen is here. He's a senior systems engineer with the Global Data Centres Study Group, higher ed organization. Andrew, welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> You're welcome. So interesting name, tell us about the organization. >> Study Group, Study Group began life as a small education college in the UK, about 15 years ago. Over the time, we've grown to a global organization. We take on about 85,000 students a year, from close on 160 countries. We have 85 sites around the world, very much a global footprint, very thin corporate terms and in IT terms. >> Okay, is this your first VeeamOn? >> No, it's not. I came to the previous one in Las Vegas, and that experience meant that I had to come back to this one in New Orleans. >> Really, why? Tell us about that. >> It's a great experience. They know how to do their events very well. The information is first class, and as a Veeam product user the information and the experience, in the room available to you is wonderful. >> How long have you been a Veeam customer? How did you... Tell us about your journey. >> Well, our journey, we were very much in the legacy ballpark of backups. We had some unnamed products that we were using, which were very old school in their thinking and how they did things. We realized quickly that the amount of data that we took on was growing and it was going to outpace our capacity for backup, and the simplicity and complexity was growing too fast for us, couldn't manage it. It wasn't going to be feasible, went to market to start looking for a better solution, and Veeam was top of the list. >> So, you mentioned data growth as one of the catalysts for, which created more problems, obviously for your backup, made it harder meet, maybe it was backup windows at the time, or RPO and RTO. Did your decision to change your backup also coincide with an increase in virtualization? And did that have a ripple effect? Can you explain, we've been talking about that all week, but I'd like to validate it with a practitioner. >> No, spot on there. We virtualized quite early on in the grand scheme of things. We went to VMware very quickly, we're now running Hypervisor with a vShpere 5.5 environment. Now that was a well good, I don't think the practices that we took in and a lot of the infrastructure alongside that kept up with that, backups is one of those things. And when we started looking at what we needed, to really work with our environment, get the most out of our virtualization project, we needed to do something very quickly and backups is a key feature. >> Andrew, as a global organization, how does Cloud fit into your architecture, what you're doing, maybe you can kind of sketch out a little bit for... So we know where Cloud fits. >> Our solution, although quite simple in principle, it's never simple, let's face it, anything IT, especially in the engineering scope guide, never simple. >> Dave: This keeps getting more complicated. >> Exactly right, and you know for better or worse, that's how we do these things, especially when it comes to a Cloud scenario. You add a little bit of complexity, but often it pans out to be worthwhile, especially in dollar value. Our solution takes local backups in a hub and spoke concept, our data center as being the hub, and our branch starts being the spoke, consolidate the data from all the sites, hold a decent amount of data as backup onsite, and then everything else will actually ship out to the Cloud, and that being AWS in Glacier storage. Now that came about mostly because our core data center is in Las Vegas, that we have no hands on site. So we didn't really have the option of a manual tape service, a paid for service, very expensive. So we needed to shift away from your old school, typical tape service environment. Having good bandwidth in Las Vegas, and availability to get to the AWS readings, made it a good solution for us. Our tool to do that, already in place with Veeam, made it very simple. >> So what are you... So your target is Glacier? >> Correct, yes. So long term retention, and legal retention especially, we push everything out to Glacier to fill that need for us. >> And okay, so that's the last thing, maybe I missed it, there's something in between obviously, if you need to do a recovery right? >> Correct, so we keep some local storage as well, depending on the environment and the data itself, we'll keep it locally on site in our racks for a certain amount of time, maybe a year, maybe two years depending on some of the data. Everything else has a duplicate and a long term, goes out to AWS. >> Alright, there were a couple of announcements this week about AWS and also about Glacier. What did you hear? What interests you? >> Well, I mean the V10 announcement and its interaction with AWS, hooking in your AWS accounts to s3 Glacier and what not, very promising, very promising, very excited. I'm going to hit up my account manager for a trial on that very soon, cuz that could simplify our process, and I imagine a lot of other people with hybrid cloud scenarios will leverage it as well. For those people that have work loads in AWS, the agentless backup function, very promising. It's a logical step I think, in the partnership that's built that is very logical as well, it's going to help a lot of people. >> What is driving, in your industry, the availability needs and how has that evolved over the last couple of years? >> Well, it's a catch 22, for us data security is paramount, a student come to us, they sign up for a course, in a lot of cases it'll be an international student. Now that's a well and good, but when we look at the data that we take from that student to get them into a course, it's essentially a how to kit for data theft and identity theft. So we need to protect our data very well, you know, we've got a lot of personal information, we've got passport photos, we've got visa replications, the whole shabang. So being able to make sure that A, it's available to the people that need it, so that they can get them into their courses, get them learning stuff, which is what our ideal is, and making sure it's secure, no matter where we put it, backups, availability, all that sort of stuff, needs to be secure. So a solution then at all has to incorporate that as easily as possible. >> Bill Philbin was asking the audience this morning, have you ever had to do a recovery? He said about a third of the audience's hands went up, presuming your hand was up. >> Yes we have. We've both tested, and we actually had incidents where we've had malware come to the business in certain aspects and having a good recovery point on site, and a quick easy interface, the single pane of glass, to coin a pro word of the moment, was very useful. You know, stops the heart a little bit when it does happen, but after you go through the hoops, and you understand what you're doing with the product, it really does give you a sense of security. >> You know, large organizations, big banks and the money business for example, they have very explicit disaster recovery plans, they might have three site data centers, they get gobs of money they can throw at this stuff. Higher education tends to be, a little tighter with the budget, fair to say, but also a lot of smaller and mid size organizations, I think it's fair to put you in that category, oftentimes had very little, if any, sometimes data... Disaster recovery, and what they've done is when they re-architected the backup, they said, you know we can kill two birds with one stone. And so to bring those two worlds together. Is that what you did? And how would you describe it? >> I'd call our solution a bit of a hybrid, in line with the backup scenario that we do have, both offsite and hybrid cloud scenario, we also do a DR solution internally. So we have a data center in Las Vegas, we also have one in Sydney. So we do take some DR concepts down to Sydney to hold on to that, very limited. Your bang for buck with DR, it's very hard to justify when you go to manage it and say, well you know, the cost of failure needs to be calculated here. It's very difficult to make that argument successfully. So having a tool, that we already used, that could also do that, very helpful in the first place. You're right in that we are an SMB in the traditional sense and the feature set that does come with Veeam, is quite good for that I think. We're quite OPIC shy, as a tradition, so being able to put a little bit of infrastructure in place, and sort of pre-purchase these things, get the cost out of the way, with CapEx, helped us a lot. So, no more licensing involved, Veeam took care of it in house already, and a little bit of expenditure took that solution very well for us. >> Enter one of the interesting discussions we've seen in the last few years when we talk in the education realm is the importance of data and how can you leverage that data? Of course, we talked about some of the security aspects. How has the role of data changed in your world? >> It's a bit of a catch 22. It's recognized that we do take on a lot of data. How we use that, it's an ongoing question. I mean people have put a lot of BA type roles in place to try and leverage that a bit further, get some use out of it. We have this data, it should be an asset to us. It's very difficult to do successfully I think. People don't really know the questions to ask, of their data. You know, maybe there's a bit of thought leadership or some extra disruptive technology that should come along and help that out a little bit. I think in the near future, it will be a very big question there to be answered and a lot of demands can be met by that. >> How about your students? You know, there's got to be, from all the devices, what kind of pressures does that put on the IT role? >> Well, it's substantial, I mean in our particular role, especially in the UK and Europe, we actually house our students. So, everything from living aspects to education whatnot, everything is handled by us. So their safekeeping, or their lifestyle, their quality of life and such. Now, in today's modern age, you now have two iPads, you have a Chromebook, you have an iPhone and whatnot, all that needs to be handled by us in a secure fashion. The data that comes from that, the content that gets delivered to the students, both privately and during their education, it needs to be both readily available and useful. Making it available to the students, as well as protecting them I suppose, in a secure fashion, making sure that the data that they hand out over these networks and use is safe. That's a big concern to us. >> So a lot of talk this week about ransomware of course. A guy in your position, talk about make the heart stop a little bit. How do you look at that problem? What solutions do you have? And what would you like to see the industry do? >> It's a difficult question. There's no easy answer to that at all. Recently we've heard a lot about machine learning and predictive analytics and whatnot. We use some products that do real time assessment of file stores, file usage, and whatnot, and predict excess usage I suppose. All of a sudden you can start seeing if there are extra files being encrypted very quickly. You can take action based on that, so these are a clear sign of ransomware. That said, we educate a lot of young people, we educate a lot of young people in IT as well. We have identified that a key threat is often going to be from internal. How we protect against that has really shifted our mindset a fair bit. A lot more legislation is coming in, in the UK especially, starting to come in in the US and Austral-Asia, and the requirement for that is only going to grow. It's a challenge that I can't really say in the future how we're going to predict it and act on it, but it is always going to be in front of mind. >> Do you think you could use your backup data, because essentially you're pushing change data over the network, you know, constantly, or at least multiple times per day I presume, right. Do you have the tooling to monitor that activity and identify anomalous behavior, where maybe you're pushing more data, or you're seeing more encrypted data going at a particular time. Do the tools exist to do that today? >> To an extent yes, getting them all together, to be viewable and visible data for your technician, your engineers and whatnot is a bit of a challenge I think. Anti-virus and security software is out there that can do this for you. Also, the data analytics tools, they're out there at the moment. VeeamONE is actually a useful tool on that front, can help us out a lot there. Making sure that the person responsible or looking for that trend knows where to go and has a good single pane of glass per say to actually identify issues. I think that's the key. >> Could you... Another, I've been thinking about sort of how to solve this problem. Could you put like phantom files out there in the network? Phantom high value files like, student credit card list. >> Andrew: You mean the honey pot scenario? >> Yeah use it as a honeypot, yeah. >> Absolutely, I mean a lot of the more enterprise size corporations are doing this, and you can actually leverage that, take them on as a service if you need to. There are companies out there that will offer this service to you. It is quite expensive for what it is, and yet when we calculate the cost of failure, I think the expense might be justified. >> Well like you said, it's hard. Your CapEx, CapEx phobic, I forget what you said, but I'll say CapEx phobic, challenged. Okay, we're out of time so the last question. Takeaways from VeeamON 2017, things that you're excited about? >> Once again, the AWS announcements in v10 and the partnerships coming from that, very exciting, very exciting. Looking forward to that, to being able to test it a little bit. The feature set that keeps growing. When we started out in 8.5, then 8.5 went on to 9.5, and the growth from 8.5 to 995 and now 10 on the horizon, it's massive. If they continue this growth it's going to be one of the best products out there. I'm very happy about that. >> Alright Andrew, thanks very much. Appreciate it. >> Thanks very much for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest, right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamON in New Orleans.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-hosts Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house. We're here with Ryan Rose, Technical Program Manager at Cisco Devnet. Ryan, great to see you. What's goin' on? >> Hey, thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here. >> You know, we have a soft spot in our heart, for Devnet, because of course, we're in the Devnet zone, Devnet is the reason why theCUBE originally came to Cisco Live, and so it's been awesome seeing the evolution and the ascendancy of DevNet. It's now mainstream, you get a lot of love on the main stage, and really, it is the linchpin of the next generation of training and certifications for the engineers, the network engineers. So, tell us, give us a little quick history of Devnet, You've been here since the beginning, you remember the first Devnet. >> Oh yeah, in fact, so during my time at Cisco, like I was originally in learning at Cisco and being able to move over into Devnet, but I remember the very first Devnet experience that I had, and it started back when Devnet started about five years ago now. It was at Cisco Live San Francisco. At the time, they had split us across two streets, you know, they were trying to put, Cisco was trying to put a lot of activities going on in San Francisco. And they put Devnet in this walkway that was next to the Moscone Center, and, inside the Moscone Center. And when you went in there, it was packed. I mean, it was just shoulder to shoulder. Everyone there was just so excited because everyone was trying to learn, like, what is Devnet? And now, to look back on that, it's just so crazy how people have just been so quick to embrace the Devnet mission, the Devnet philosophy. Really getting into automation and programmability. And it's so exciting for us every year to be coming back, seeing you at theCUBE, being here in the Devnet zone, and being able to help people continue on that journey. Yeah, it's been great. >> Yeah, so, and we got some hard news to talk about today, I said in my breaking analysis this week that Cisco, when it rose, it pulled a number of levers, and one of them was really creating the role of the Network Engineer, the CCIE, and the certifications. People have really understood the challenges of what Stu calls the dark art of networking. And now you're bringing that sort of hardware certification to software, so let's get right into the news. What are you guys announcing today, and why is this important? >> Thank you so much for letting us talk about this because I think everybody has been really excited since Chuck came out in San Diego, announced the Devnet certification, said they were going to be, the new exams were going to be available February 24th, so we're about a month out from there. And to help people get started, we just announced here, about two big new offerings. The first is our Devnet Associate Fundamentals Training. Which we'll be launching on February 21st, so that way we can help individuals that are looking to start building up the skills and the exam readiness that they need to pursue a Devnet Associate Certification. We also announced our new Devnet Study Group Platform. Because we don't want people to just find the tools and the training that they need at Devnet, we want them to find each other. We want them to not just build together, but learn together. So we will now have a brand new Devnet Study Group Platform to help people have that type of interactivity. >> Ryan, I'm curious if you have much visibility into who's going to be taking these. You know, how many of them are the ones that, are the NetVets, the CCIE's that have done this year after year, and how many are new? >> Oh, I will tell you right now, we are actually getting this really wide and diverse audience, in fact, in the Devnet zone, we are providing a presentation on getting ready for Devnet certification four times a day, and it is packed every time we do it. And the audience is networking engineers, veteran networking engineers. When we ask people in the crowd how many of you have certifications, how many of you are CCIE's? We get a wide variety of CCIE's. This morning, we had a crew of software developers. So, we are getting people that are coming from kind of, all job roles, at all stages in their career. What they're embracing is that Devnet philosophy, around coding, around automation. They want to bring those practices back, whether that's DevOps, whether that's bringing a greater understanding of programmability, and so we're actually getting everyone, whether again, they're veterans or brand new. >> Yep, now I love that, because about 10 years ago there was this big movement, and they said, network engineers, your future is miserable, you all need to learn to decode, throw out what you learned, and fast forward to today, there's multiple paths to get there. As you were talking about, there's diverse backgrounds, there's lots of ways to be relevant to automation, of course, is hugely important. Coding is a major piece of it, but it's not, forget everything that you knew, it's how everything all works together. >> Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like, especially because the Devnet certifications aren't just the, are only one part of the launch on February 24th. In fact, the entire certification portfolio, and I know you're going to have other Cisco leaders on to talk about this, that is also being updated and launched on February 24th. And what I think you're going to see here is that flexibility that is in the program now, where you can actually have elements of automation baked into that network engineering journey. So you can still have the elements that people have been focusing on and building upon, except now you can stack on these new skills as you go. >> So, if I go back 10 years, maybe even a little bit more, but certainly 10 years ago, people were reticent to embrace automation. You know, you sort of alluded to that Stu, but now in this day and age, automation is fundamental. You can't scale without automation. And so the Devnet zone is really about taking beyond that existing skill set, going to the next level. Okay, so if you think about the network engineer and the training that they've gotten in the past, to deploy, manage, and optimize networks, automation comes in, simplifies all that. How do you describe what the future looks like for that engineer that's been Devnet certified? What are they doing? >> Oh, I think that now it's like, it opens up a brand new horizon of tasks and even efficiencies. New things that people have yet to even, or new job roles that even starting to emerge. A really good example, and one that we even talked about here at the Devnet zone, is the DevSecOps engineer, or the SecDevOps engineer. It's not that, and Susie has even talked about this as well too, Susie Wee, who leads Devnet. It's that jobs are changing, and roles are expanding, and so rather than just having this opportunity where you're looking at supporting a network or acting as a network administrator, now with automation, to your point, we actually can expand the opportunities of the roles themselves, and really open up things like, maybe you want to add those security automation elements, maybe you're interested in adding the collaboration automation elements, but whatever you are looking to do, the way that the program is built, post February 24th of 2020, you're able to actually have the opportunity to add in those skill validation exams, really build upon where you want to go. So I would say the horizon is wide and bright. >> So, to carry this up further, my question is, so the lines are blurring between, you know, Dev and Ops, right, and then, so a network engineer is going to become more Dev oriented, do you see them actually either contributing to or, certainly contributing to, but actually developing apps, say for instance, for the Edge? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Well, we are actually encouraging, as we have more and more people join the Devnet community, we actually have two elements, two exchanges, our automation exchange and our code exchange, to really help people as they're moving through that. We're already starting to see that learners, individuals, are coming through Devnet, making that change themselves, and actually contributing code to our code exchange, but also adding use cases to our automation exchange. So that way they're able to show not only how they're implementing these cases, buy why they're doing it. And the types of business outcomes that they're achieving. So that's a practice that has already started to take off. And I think certifications and things like the automation exchange, they go hand in hand, building the skills, and then adding to the program. >> Well, you hear in the keynote today, all the talk about bringing IT and OT together. Again, part of that, I've always said that the edge is going to be won by developers. Because critical infrastructure needs to be secured. And, you know, developers, the DevSecOps role, and I think this crowd is actually going to be an important lever in terms of bringing those two worlds together, your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I actually think that that bridge is something that everyone is crossing right now. And, in fact, that's one of the motivations behind the updates to the certification portfolio. In fact, you'll find that we have parts of the portfolio that are shared between the hardware side and the software side. So that way we can have people as they're making that transition, as they're starting to move into that world, that larger world of network automation, we're actually having it be more of a clear journey for them, so they're able to work that into their own certification pouch. And I would say that these people that are here in the Devnet zone, they're the pioneers. They're the ones that are out there on that edge that are doing that exploration and building these new things, these new worlds that we are going to start experiencing in automation. >> And I guess Stu, it goes without saying, but it's worth saying, this is really all about programmable infrastructure, infrastructurous code, bringing the cloud operating model to your data, to your infrastructure, wherever it lives, right? >> Yeah, so Ryan, one of the things that struck us is not only is there so much enthusiasm, but the breadth of the offering here, everything from, here's some cool Meraki IOT things, to you, you talked about security, automation sprinkled throughout, can you just remind our audience a little bit as people get through the certifications, you know, what are some of the PaaS that they have for different parts of the portfolio? >> Oh, absolutely, so the certification journey that we have right now within Devnet, we actually align it to all of our five major technology tracks right now, so there are pathways within the portfolio around enterprise networking, security, collaboration, service provider, and also data center. But we also have pathways, as well, around application buildouts in IOT, and Edge computing, WebEx, and also, we have an entire practice that's now just dedicated to DevOps. And because DevOps is a concentration that can be, that is a horizontal throughout all of the certifications, this is something that you can now add to your journey. So we can actually have people here, and in fact, we've been answering this question more and more, how do I become more proficient at DevOps? A part of that is now in the certification journey. And so we've done that here. >> You should mention that we're in the IOT takeover right now in the Devnet zone. >> So Ryan, what about the partner ecosystem, talk to us about how, what impact do they have, how much of the ecosystem is getting involved in certifications too. >> Oh, well, I will say that we've actually, we've brought in a lot of people to help us develop this program initially. And I know that you're going to have additional Devnet leaders, they're going to be coming on, talking about partner ecosystems, so I don't want to take anything away from them, but I will say this. There is a lot of excitement because of the fact that when we brought the Devnet certifications out and what that would mean, for example, the new Devnet partner specialization. This is something that has been embraced by our partner community, but it's been embraced by the developers, whether they're our partner developers, they're our customers, or our networking engineers. Now that they have these as options for them to pursue, we have only been met with like positive enthusiastic engagement. And in fact, even now, we're starting to see a lot of people that aren't asking anymore, in fact, going back to San Francisco, when everyone was saying, what is Devnet, now they're asking how do I Devnet. And it is so great to be able to come and show them not only the certifications, but the associate fundamentals training, these new Devnet study group platforms that we have to show them you know the what now, here's the how. >> So, how challenging, cus I was talking to a lady on the floor yesterday, and we were chatting, and I said, "you were CCIE", she goes, "Oh, it's my dream, you know, I'm working my way there, it's very challenging, but I'm doing really well". Similar challenges, presumably, to get Devnet certified? >> Yes. >> How trivial. >> No, it is not trivial. It is a certification in the exact same hallmark that we hold CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE. The Devnet certifications are just as rigorous. And so we are giving people a lot of tools to help them get ready. And in fact, one of the things that we've done to help people on this journey take the initial steps, is we are not holding back any secrets. We've hosted every one of our exam topics for all 10 of our Devnet exams at developer.cisco.com/certification. There you can find out the exact skills we'll be testing you on for all of those exams. But we went a step further. We found every Devnet learning lab that you can take today for free to start getting ready on that exam journey. And so for every single exam, you can find training that you can engage with. So as people are starting this journey, if they want to get ready and just build their skills, especially if they're starting at zero, for example, if they think python is just a snake, we have a learning lab for them. So we have an entire plan that's built so they can start getting ready, and advance and move forward for that certification process. >> What should a college kid do to get prepared for this? If he or she wants to get into IT, become a network engineer, or Devnet is interested in them, what should they take, what courses should they be interested in? >> Oh man, that is a great question. We talk to a lot of people that are in a CS program, or computer science program, and so many young people that are moving through college now, they're already in the habit of programming. They've been working on things, they might have even been programming their own video games, or adding something to the new Mario games where you can actually build your own levels. What I would recommend to every young person, and in fact, to anyone that's on this journey, come to Devnet. We have an incredible amount of tools. At developer.cisco.com, just by signing up, you get access, not only to training that can take you from zero to coding, to making your first API call, to finding our Sandboxes, where you can take that theoretical knowledge and put it into practice using Cisco hardware and tools, and then you can also find use cases there too. I think everyone is often just looking for where can I start, how do I start. Devnet is gone so far as to even have a Start Now area on the Devnet main page. So when you come to Devnet, we're always trying to meet you where you're at. If you're a veteran networking engineer, if you're a veteran developer, or if you're just starting out, you're a college student, we've got a plan for you to be able to take. >> Awesome, right, check it out folks, you know, career builder, Cisco's always been renowned at that. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it's great to have you. >> Oh, hey, thank you so much for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest from Cisco Live in Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)