>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack foundation, RedHat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program to the program, Carlos Carrera, who's a senior principal product manager with Veritas. Carlos, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you very much. >> Stu: Alright. >> Great to be here. >> So, so many of the things we talk to here in OpenStack and the Cloud World, is relatively short-lived. The average lifetime of the average Cloud deployment, is like 1.7 years. You've been at Veritas at little bit longer with that, had an opportunity to have a conversation with you about some of your history, so we're going to have to take the abbreviated format of that, but give us a little bit about, you know, your time at Veritas, some of the ebbs and flows of your career. >> Yeah, well, again, thank you for having me here. It's great. Having 16 years with Veritas, as I mentioned before to you, you know, back in 1994, 1995 we created the first file system and volume manager, right. A lot of things happened since then, right. At that point in time, the software defined storage store was not yet there. Back, many years ago, we got some piece of software, running on top of any kind of hardware and we were able to help customers to move workloads from one place to another. In a very agnostic point of view, right. And then we move into clouds and now, three years ago, we started looking into what do we do with OpenStack clouds, because this is going to define... It's going to need something very new, something different. So today, this week, we are very happy because we finally announced hyper scale for open stack, which is a software defined storage solution that has been built for an OpenStack clouds. >> When I look at the industry these days, the term lately is storage services. How we're doing things in software more, open stack is the open source infrastructure piece. You guys are the hipster player in this space. You were doing software defined storage and software services not attached to everything else beforehand so it sounds like openstack's a natural fit. Tell us a little bit more about how Veritas fits into that. >> Well, I think that again, it was a perfect fit but we had to review what we was doing. Okay, because again, I've been many years... I was working with traditional legacy architectures in the past. We had to work class defined system that today can work with 128 notes. But we revisit... Is this what we really need to the new OpenStack clouds, are they going to scale? And as you said is that what I need the storage services. So what do we have to rethink? What do we have to do to provide those storage services to the OpenStack clouds? So three years ago, we had this, we call open flame project that today is Hyperscale. It has been building from scratch. New product, what we call emerging product at Veritas, and finally we got separated from Semantec, and we got all the visibility on the storage gain. And using all the knowhow that we have in history, as I say, we're a very big startup, right? But now, emerging with new products, we need new solutions that have been designed for OpenStack from scratch. >> Could you drill down on the product itself? Is this file block object storage? Is this sitting on top of servers. Laid off in a server-based way? How does it interact with OpenStack drivers? That sort of thing. >> Yeah, that's a good question. So it is senior storage. What we provide is block storage for OpenStack. Something key, it is based on commodity hardware of your choice, so you decided what is the hardware that you want to use. Really, it's 86 servers that you can choose in the market, whatever you want. And one of the key differentiators is that we provide block storage, but we separate the compute plane and the data plane. And this is an architectural decision we had to take three years ago. We said we cannot scale, we cannot provide the storage services that you need in a single layer of storage. Because that is what most of the software defined storage solutions on the market are doing today. And then they're having problems with things like noisy neighbor. They have problems with things like the scalability, like the quality of service, and of course they're having problems with protection. How do I protect my cloud environments with OpenStack? And we as a net pack of company, we have our leading net backup solution, we hear that from our customers. That it is not that we're bringing another solution that is going to bring another noisy neighborhood, so we really have to separate two layers. Compute plane, where you have your first copy, and the data plane, where you use cheaper and deeper storage to keep the second, third copy, and do all the data mining operations. >> That's interesting what you just said there too. Two copies, so you do have a copy that's close to the compute. But then you have another. >> Correct. Because, again, if you take a look to what you have in the market, typically it's one-size-fits-all. So, do you need three copies for everything? And today, you have emerging technologies. You can have things like mySQL, where you need high performance, or you can have things like Cassandra where you need nine copies of them, because the application itself is giving you the resiliency. So if you use a standard solution that for each OpenStack instance, you have three copies, that means you have three copies, three copies, three copies. So nine copies. And it's not only the number of copies. It's that when you make a write, you're writing nine times. And you're writing on the single layer. So we said, we have to separate that. The first thing is that what is the workload? Stop thinking about the storage. Stop thinking this is a pool of SSDs or a pool of HCDs, and then start thinking about the workload. And then we connected that very well with OpenStack because OpenStack, you have the definition of flavors, right? That is how many CPUs do you need? How much memory? But also we extend those flavors to say what do you need in terms of storage? What is the resiliency level that you need? What is the number of copies? What is the minimum performance that you need? What is the maximum performance? It's not only about solving the noisy neighbor with the maximum performance? About limiting, it's about guaranteeing that you are going to have a minimum number of IOs per second. At the end, what you can get, you can have a mySQL running with high performance needs with web servers of the same box without fighting each other. >> Carlos, can you speak a little bit about how customers consume this, how do they buy it, how's it priced? How do you get it to market? We've taught before with Veritas. Storage used to always be in an appliance or an array or things like that and the software cloud world's a little bit differently. How does that fit? >> So today's software only? So you make that decision about what hardware to use. We try to simplify the go to market model. So it's based on subscription. You just pay for the max capacity that you have. And you only pay for what you have at the compute plane. So I think a simple model that we could find to go in the open source projects, and being able to attach to that. >> Okay, could you speak to... When you talk about go to market from a partnership standpoint, it's a big market out there. Veritas, well-known name for many years but what partners are involved in this? Any certifications that are needed? We're working with our typical partners that have some expertise with OpenStack and helping with them. We are now also working with hardware providers. We are working with Supermicro and creating reference architectures with them. So we can have at the end, we have to explain to the customers what they can get from different hardware. So we're working with them. And we're also working with new partners. For example, yesterday with us on the stage, we have Verbanks. Verbanks is an OpenStack ambassador in Netherlands. They have been working with us from the very beginning of the project, on the validation. They understand OpenStack. They understand the issues and they have been doing all the validation with us about, yes guys, this is the right thing. You have to do it from the very beginning. Is this product tuned specifically for OpenStack or will it be available for other kind of private cloud applications. >> We have available for OpenStack, we're going to have it. We'll announce, I think we'll watch with you also, guys, we announced the beta version for Containers. At the end, it's the same thing. It's how do you provide persistent storage for Containers? Ninety percent of the product is all the same. It's that compute plane. It's the data plane. How can I protect my workload from the data plane? Because again, it doesn't matter if it's Container. If it's OpenStack, when I have to protect it, how do I do it? How can I read my data without affecting the performance? And that's where we have the value with the data plane. And, of course, our integration with net backup, our leader of backup solutions in the market, where just with a single click, I'm going to connect OpenStack with NetBackup, and define how my workloads are going to be protected, when and how? >> Here at the show, OpenStack Summit, how has it been working with the community? Sometimes, in the open source world, vendors have to have a certain kind of conversation with that open source community to show that they understand their needs and what they need out of the relationship. How has the week been then? >> So yeah, that's a very good question. And that goes to something that we want to announce hopefully at the end of the year. The first version that we announced this week is based on canonical Ubuntu OpenStack. At the end of the year, we are going to have RedHat, and in our DNA is to be agnostic to the pass, any hardware. And of course now, it's any kind of OpenStack distribution. So we will work with any of them. And something that we want to announce at the end of the year is to have a community edition, for Hyperscale. So again, that is our offering to the community. They can both provide-- >> And would that community edition itself be open source, or just available for the community? >> It would be available for that. >> John: For the community. >> We keep our IP. >> Great. As we get towards the end of the event, I'm sure you've had plenty of interesting customer conversations. Any one, I'm sure you can't mention names, but any interesting anecdote or just a general feel of the community? >> I feel that my anecdote for yesterday, when I had to work presentation, we had a customer on the room. We had been working on a POC with them. We have been very, very helpful customer. We finished. "Do you have any questions?" This guys stands up, went to the microphone and I was thinking, what is he going to ask? He knows everything about the product. And he said, he guys, you are doing the right thing. This is great. I'm fantastic, you are bringing a lot of value here. So I was like, wow. >> In my understanding, it was a big brand name customer who actually said where he was from, which is great validation, something we've heard all week is there's that sharing here with the community, so financial companies who, in the past, wouldn't have done that, TelCos who do that in the past, great to see. Give me the final word, Carlos. >> Yeah, the thing, again, is as you said validation is a key thing. I've been a lot of years in the company. I got this project eight months ago, and all the things I've been doing is validation, talking to customers to I don't know how many analysts I've been talking to in this week. And I love Dan said, yeah, you guys are doing the right thing. This is that direction that we have to move, so happy that finally, emerging again from Veritas, being back here with the community on OpenStack. >> Well, the speed of change, constant learning on new things and helping customers move forward. Big theme we've seen in the show. Carlos Carrera. I appreciate you joining us here. For John and Stu, thanks for watching The Cube here at OpenStack Summit. (mid-tempo electronic music)