(upbeat music) >> Live From Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami everybody this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Two days of wall to wall coverage of VeeamON 2019. They selected the Fontainebleau Hotel in hip, swanky Miami. Tad Brockway is here he's the corporate VP of Azure Storage, good to see you! >> Yeah great to see you thank you for having me. >> So you're at work for a pretty hip company, Microsoft Azure is where all the growth is, 70 plus percent growth, and you doing some cool stuff with storage. So let's get into it. Let's start with your role and kind of your swim lane if you will. >> So our team is responsible for our storage platform that includes our disc service for IAS virtual machines, our scale our storage we call Azure blob storage. We have support for files as well with a product called Azure Files, we support SMB based files, NFS based files, we have a partnership with NetApp, we're bring Azure NetApp files is what we call it, we're bringing NetApp on tap into our data centers delivering that as a first priority service we're pretty excited about that. And then a number of other services around those core capabilities. >> And that's really grown over the last several years, optionality is really the watch word there right, giving customers as many options, file, block, object, etc. How would you summarize the Azure Storage strategy? >> I like that point, optionality and really flexibility for customers to approach storage in whatever way makes sense. So there may be customers, there are customers who are developing brand new cloud base taps, maybe they'll go straight to object storage or blobs. There are many customers who have data sets and work loads on-prem that are NFS based and SMB based, they can bring those assets to our cloud as well. We're the only vendor in the industry that has a server side implementation of HDFS. So for analytics workloads we bring file system semantics for those large scale HDFS workloads. We bring them into our storage environment so that the customer can do all of the things that are possible with a file system hierarchy's for organizing their data, use ACl's to protect their data assets and that's a pretty revolutionary thing that we've done but to your point though, optionality is the key and being able to do all of those things for all of those different access types, and then being able to do that for multiple economic tiers as well from hot storage all the way down to our archive storage tier. >> And I short changed you on your title cause your also responsible for media and edge, so that includes Azure stack is that right? >> Right so we have Azure stack as well within our area and DataBox and DataBox edge, DataBox edge and Azure stack are our edge portfolio platforms. So the customers can bring cloud based applications right into their on-prem environments. >> Peter you were making a point this morning about the cloud and it's distributed nature, can you make that point I'd love to hear Tad's reaction and response. >> So Tad we've been arguing in our research here Wikibon SiliconANGLE for quite some time. The common parlance the common concept of cloud, move everything to the center was wrong. We've been saying this for probably four or five years, and we believe very strongly that the cloud really is a technology for further distributing data, further distributing computing so that you can locate data approximate to the activity that it's going to support. But do so in a way that's coherent, comprehensive, and quite frankly confident. That's what's been missing in the industry for a long time so if you look at it that way, tell us a little bit about how that approach, that thinking informs what you're doing with Azure and specifically one of the other challenges is how does then data services impact that? So maybe we'll come to that in a second I'm sure. >> Great insight by the way, I agree that the assumption had been that everything is going to move to these large data centers in the cloud and I think that is happening for sure, but what we're seeing now is that there's a greater understanding of the longer term requirements for compute and that there are a bunch of workloads that need to be in proximity to where the data is being generated and to where it's being acted upon, and there are tons of scenarios here. Manufacturing is an example where we have one of our customers who's using our DataBox edge product to monitor an assembly line as parts come out of the assembly line our DataBox edge device is used with a camera system attached to it, AI inferencing to detect defects in the assembly line, and then stop the assembly line with very low latency where a round trip to the cloud and back to do all the AI inferencing and then do the command and control to stop the assembly line that would just be too much round trip time so in many different verticals we're seeing this awareness that there are very good reasons to have compute and storage on-prem, and so that's why we're investing in Azure stack and DataBox edge in particular. Now you asked well how does data factor in to that, because it turns out in a world of IoT and basically an infinite number of devices over time, more and more data is going to be generated. That data needs to be archived somewhere so that's where public cloud comes in and all the elasticity and the scale economies of cloud. But in terms of processing that data you need to be able to have a nice strong connection between what's going on in the public cloud and what's going on on-prem, so the killer scenario here is AI. Being able to grab data as it's being generated on-prem, write it into a product like DataBox edge, DataBox edge is a storage gateway device so you can map your cameras in the use case I mentioned or for other scenarios you can route the data directly into a file share, an NFS, blob, or SMB file share, drop into DataBox edge, then DataBox edge will automatically copy it over to the cloud, but allow for local processing to local applications as if it were, in fact it is local, running in a hot SSD NVME tier, and the beautiful thing about DataBox edge it includes an FPGA device to do AI inference offloading. So this is a very modern device that intersects a whole bunch oft things all on one very simple, self contained unit. Then the data flows into the cloud where it can be archived permanently in the cloud, and then AI models can be updated using the elastic scale of cloud compute, then those models can be brought back on-prem for enhanced processing over time. So you can sort of see this virtuous cycle happening over time where the edge is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. >> So that's what you mean kind of when you talked about the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge, I was going to ask you you just kind of explained it and you can automate this, use machine intelligence to actually determine where the data should land and minimize human involvement. You talked about driving marginal cost of storing your data to zero, which we've always talked about doing that from the standpoint of reducing or even eliminating labor cost through automation, but you've also got some cool projects to reduce the cost for storing a bit. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about some of those projects a little bit. >> Thats right so, and that was mentioned in the keynote this morning and so our vision is that we want for our customers to be able to keep their artifacts that they store on our cloud platform for thousands of years and if you think about sort of the history of humanity that's not outside the question at all, in fact wouldn't it be great to have everything that was ever generated by humankind for the thousands of years of modern or human history. We'll be able to do that with technology that we're developing so we're investing in technology to store data virtually indefinitely on glass, as well as even in DNA, and by investing in those advance types of storage that is going to allow us to drive that marginal cost down to zero over time. >> Epigenetic storage systems. I want to come back to this notion of services though, and where the data's located. From our research what we see is we see as you said, data being proximate or being housed, approximator created and acted upon, but that increasingly businesses want the options to be able to replicate that, replicates a strong word it's a loaded word, but to be able to do something similar in some other location if the action is taking place in that location too. That's what Kubernetes is kind of about, and server list computing and some of these other things are about. But it's more than just the data, it's the data, it's the data services, it's the meditate associated with that , how do you foresee at Microsoft and what role might they play in this notion of a greater federation of data services that make possible a policy driven, back up, restore, data protection architecture that's really driven by what the business needs and where the actions taking place. Is that something you were seeing in a direction that you see it going? >> Yeah absolutely and so I'll talk conceptually about our strategy in that regard and where we see that going for customers, and then maybe we can come back to the Veeam partnership as well cause I think this is all connected up. Our approach to storage, our view is that you should be able to drop all your data assets into a single storage system like we talked about that supports all the different protocols that are required, can automatically tier from very hot storage all the way down to overtime glass and DNA, and we do all of that within one storage system and then the movement across those different vertical and horizontal slices that can all be done programmatically or via policy. So customers can make a choice in the near term about how they drop their data into the cloud but then they have a lot of flexibility to do all kinds of things with it over time, and then with that we layer on the Microsoft whole set of analytics services. So all of our data and analytics products, they layer on top of this disaggregated storage system so there can be late binding of the type of processing that's used including AI to reason over that data relatively to where and how and when the data entered into the platform. So that's sort of modularity, it really future proofs the use of data over the long haul we're really excited about that, and then those data assets can then be replicated to use your term to other regions around the globe as well using our backbone. So the customers can use our network, our network is a customers network, and then the way that docs into the partnership with Veeam is that just as I mentioned in the keynote this morning, data protection is a use case that is just fundamental to enterprise IT. We can make together with customers and with Veeam, we can make data protection better today using the cloud and with the work that Veeam has done in integrating with 0365, the integration from there into Azure storage and then over time customers can start down this path of something that feels sort of mundane and it's just been a part of daily life at enterprise IT, and then that becomes an entry point into our broader longterm data strategy in the cloud. >> But following up on this if we agree that data is not going to be entirely centralized, but it's going to be more broadly distributed and that there is a need for a common set of capabilities around data protection which is a very narrowly defined term today and is probably going to evolve over the next few years. >> I agree with that. >> We think you're going to have a federated model for data protection that provides for local autonomous data protection activities that is consistent with the needs of those local data assets, but under a common policy based framework that a company like Veeam's going to be able to provide. What do you think? >> So first of all a core principle of ours is that while we're creating these platforms for large data sets to move into Azure the most important thing is that customers own their own data. So there's this balance that has to be reached in terms of cloud scale and the federated nature of cloud and these common platforms and ways of approaching data, while simultaneously making sure that customers and users are in charge of their own data assets. So those are the principles that we'll use to guide our innovation moving forward and then I agree I think we're going to see a lot of innovation when it comes to taking advantage of cloud scale, cloud flexibility and economics but also empowering customers to advantage of these things but do it on their terms. I think the futures pretty bright in that regard. >> And the operative term there is their terms. Obviously Microsoft has always had a large on-prem install base and the software estate, and so you've embraced hybrid to use that term, with your strategies. You never sort of run away from it, you never said everything's going to go into the cloud, and that's now evolving to the edge. And so my question is what are the big gaps, not necessarily organizationally or process wise, but from a technology standpoint that the industry, generally in Microsoft specifically, have to fill to make that sort of federated vision a reality. >> I mean we're just at the early stages of all this for sure in fact as we talked about this morning, the notion of hybrid which started out with use cases like backup is rapidly evolving toward a more sort of modern enduring view. I think in a lot of ways hybrid was used as this kind of temporary stop along a path to cloud, and back to our earlier discussion for by some I guess, maybe there's a debate you all are having there. But what we're seeing is the emergence of edge is being and enduring location for compute and for data, and that's where the concept of intelligent edge comes in. So the model that I talked about earlier today is about extending on-prem data assets into the cloud, where as intelligent edge is taking cloud concepts and bringing them back to the edge, in an enduring way. So it's pretty neat stuff. >> And a big part of that is much of the data if not most of the data, the vast majority even might stay at the edge permanently and of course you want to run your models up in the cloud. >> That's right, at least for realtime processing. >> Right you just don't have the time to do the round trip. Alright Tad I'll give you the last word on Azure, direction, your relationship with Veeam, the conference, take your pick. >> Yeah well I thank you, thanks great to be here. As I mentioned earlier today the partnership with Veeam and then this conference in particular is great because I really love the idea of solving a very real and urgent problem for customers today, and then helping them along that journey to the cloud so that's one of the things that makes my job a great one. >> Well we talk about digital transformation all the time on theCUBE it's real, it's not just a buzz word, it can happen without the cloud but it's not all in the central location, it's extending now to other locations. >> It reflects your data assets. >> And where your data wants to live. So Tad thanks very much for coming to theCUBE it was great to have you. >> Thanks guys! >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is VeeamOn 2019 and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we're live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay, in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the day is Stu Miniman. We're welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE, we've got Anthony Lye SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. >> Hello, thank you very much. >> Fresh from the keynote stage. And we've also got a Tad Brockway, the head of product Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, Tad, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So guys, this is day one, keynote this morning, it was standing room only, 5,000 plus people here, Jean English was on your CMO of NetApp and said, most ever customers and partners under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony, about what you guys are doing, and how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft? >> Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships, Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. It's transformation based on, very reliable infrastructure. So you get all the forward looking values of Azure, complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. >> Yeah, it's a great way to-- >> So a year ago, at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things. One of them being Azure NetApp files. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Tell us about, a year later, where you are with that? I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow, give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into, one year in? >> Well, let me give you my perspective and then Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public Cloud, that they now feel that Azure has distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build the service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, "You manage it." But I think together, we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone, we just wanted storage to be there, and we wanted to give people performance guarantee. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers, we have a backlog that's growing by the day, and customers who have been onboarded onto the system, have rave things to say about it. You'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize the year? >> Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort, and that's the thing that makes this, customers don't care about how something is implemented, they care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies, from an engineering standpoint, that there's nothing like this in the industry today. As we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally, what we're doing is, we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we're wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure. So we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability, all the way down to the switch level, where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure Public Cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customers VMs, directly into ONTAP, very low latency, very high bandwidth. So all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem, and then bringing that into the Public Cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision that app volumes in a way that is fundamentally unique, it fits with the whole Cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is Cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of ONTAP. >> I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today Hybrid Multi Cloud. But Microsoft it's been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong Hybrid strategy. When I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the Stack. If today, and Azure Stack, you've got Storage Spaces Direct, you've got a Cloud first strategy. So I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions, put it in the environment, can you help connect, where does that this ONTAP solution fit in there? Because, some people would say, "Well, come on Microsoft, "wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions?" Why do you turn to NetApp? >> So, it's true, I guess, the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is, it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. That involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud, as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over, that's just not realistic. So, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp, and then our partnership together to meet customers where they are, help them evolve. So scenarios like Hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack and some of the other things that we're doing there with Data Box, and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of Cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets, and then take advantage of the Cloud. That fits with the whole model of what we're doing with ONTAP as well. >> Anthony, we would love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the Cloud but we see Microsoft, the Cloud is the starting point, we start in the public Cloud, and then that pushes out to the edge. >> Yeah, I think, I would make two points, I think, just to reinforce what Tad said, that there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you cannot underestimate the importance of what Dave Hitz really started. I mean, ONTAP does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way, it allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance throughput characteristics. And we've been able to take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So, NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle Database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology, I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads, that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is, I personally agree very much with Tad, but I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by Cloud. What I mean by that is, the Cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and it's sort of it's own access control lists, security models, those will end up getting pushed back to IT. So I think you're going to see a Cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined Cloud. >> Yeah, I buy that. >> And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT, and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. >> So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off, that this is really kind of an engineering partnership, when if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft, have massive install basis of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously, customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT, from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, I will start with you? >> Well, so I would say, my favorite line about Cloud was, actually a line Marc Benioff quoted which was, what Clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission, in many cases, and ideas that would never get through the business case, can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. So what used to be a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new Cloud buyer. To the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. >> Yeah, no, I agree. I think, it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop. This combination, there really is nothing like it in the industry, it's really unique. >> At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here, and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit excited, going to go through some sort of Cloud certification. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to scale up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certification. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? >> Yeah, I think we've sort of, in many ways made, ONTAP, very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP that their skill set now translates into the Cloud compensations. One of the things we'll say, on stage tomorrow is, Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for workloads, strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. It's awesome to be onstage with Tad, we provide a critical service, but Microsoft has how many services now, in Azure? >> Tad: Oh, Gosh, hundreds. >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. And as a developer, I feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure, you can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services. What Microsoft has is a scale so vast, I mean, how many data centers will you be at, by the end of the year? >> Well, we're in 54 regions today, and then each region has multiple data centers. >> Anthony: Hundreds. >> So anyway, we're all over the planet. >> So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution, you guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for-- >> Azure NetApp files. >> Azure NetApp files, any Sneak Peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes like, reducing costs, or speed of transactions, that are going to be here tomorrow? >> You should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think, you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure Netapp files can. I think he's also going to say that as well as benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve. That we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that two dimensional flexibility. >> Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out, if you're not, watch it on their live stream. Tad, Anthony, thanks so much for joining-- >> Thank you, very much. >> Stu and me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. >> Perfect, thank you. >> From Stu Miniman and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018, stick around we'll be back after a short break.