(bright music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube! Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back. Eric Bassier is here. He's the senior director of data center products at Quantum, Veeam partner. Big announcement this week. Eric, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> Thank you guys for having me. >> So, big theme of this event is, of course, the ecosystem. Veeam sells exclusively through channel partners. Very partner-friendly. Obviously, you guys are the leader in the backup in data protection space. Give us the lowdown on what you guys have announced this week, and we'll get into the partnership. >> Yeah, absolutely. Really excited about what we've announced this week. We've announced new integration with Veeam, both with our DXi deduplication appliances, as well as with our scalar tape products, and we can kind of talk about both individually. On the DXi side, we've integrated with Veeam's data mover service. And what that means is that some of the advanced features that Veeam has, like instant VM recovery, synthetic full backup creation. Historically, we haven't been able to support that on the DXi. And with this latest integration, we've improved performance quite a bit to where we can support those advanced features. And, you know, happy to talk more about that. We think this is a, it's a big step for us. It's a bit of a gap we've had with our DXi a little bit with Veeam. And I think it's going to bring a lot more value to Veeam customers using that deed of appliance. >> Eric, you know, there's always in the keynote, tape gets mentioned, and there's some people that are excited, and some people that look at it sideways and say, "Wait, we still use tape?" I saw tweets going out there, tape and VTL both alive and well, doing there. But, what are you seeing? Maybe help clear up any misconceptions. >> You know, I had a conversation today at VeeamON with a joint Quantum and Veeam customer, and it was an interaction that perfectly summed it up. And they said they were planning to move away from tape and get rid of it. And the events of this last weekend changed their mind. Verbatim. >> Ransomware. >> Ransomware. And Veeam has been good, actually, about promoting why they love tape and why it's important to their customers, and they talk not so much about low cost, long term retention, right? I think there's a really good place for tape as long-term storage for massive scale unstructured data. That's more on kind of the other side of our business. But in the data protection realm, it's about that offline or air-gapped copy to protect against ransomware. And we're seeing, I would almost say, a resurgence in relevance, just from that perspective. It's changing how people use tape, but from that perspective, I think it's as relevant as ever. >> Are your customers actually thinking that way and actually deploying tape in that context? And how does that all work? I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I think they are. I think many of them have been doing it for a number of years. We, at this show, and for a while with Veeam, we've been promoting the old rule or adage, 3-2-1 data protection best practices. I think a lot of our customers that use tape follow that practice. And... You know, they... They're probably not... We've certainly seen customers use less tape for backup. No doubt about it. They're consolidating it in the data centers, but they still create that offline copy. And then they keep it either offsite, or even just on premise, and it's got that air gap. It's not on the network, so it's not susceptible to these ransomware viruses. >> So I want to unpack that a little bit. I had a conversation with Edward, our buddy Edward Helekiel, give him credit for this idea. And I was sort of making that argument that it has that air gap, and his point was, "Well, yeah, but you got to recycle the backups, "the offline tape." And I said, "Okay." His point was, if you... 'Cause my understanding is with ransomware, everything starts to get encrypted. And then you got to pay for the keys. So if you're backing up encrypted data, eventually you're in trouble, unless you have a way to detect it. So, is that part of the... Again, we're sort of veering off into a tangent of ransomware. >> No, that's all right. >> But you would think that a backup supplier like Veeam would be able to detect anomalies because you're doing incremental change data every day or multiple times per day, and if you're starting to see some uptick in anomalous activity, say, "Whoa, hold on!" Maybe that's a signal. Is that the right way to think about it? >> You know, I do think, I think that Veeam, and I think that some of the other data protection applications are starting to build a little bit of intelligence and to try to detect it. I don't know... I'm not an expert on that. I can't speak to it. I would say that, we would advocate as a best practice that customers should be making that offline copy on tape with adequate frequency so that the feel like they're protected. Because I wouldn't say that you need to rotate the tapes, but I would think about it as if you create tapes once a day, and then you get hit with a ransomware attack, the data that's going to be susceptible is any new data that's been created since the last backup you made on tape a day ago. It's kind of that old backup rule a little bit. >> Dave: So your RPO is one day? >> That's right, and so... But once you've got that offline copy created on tape, it can be on premise, or it can be offsite at a vault or something, and keep it there for as long as you need to keep it there. It's offline, it's not on the network. >> And the backup software vendor is in a good position to provide visibility to those anomalies. Okay, let's go back to the appliance that you had asked. >> Before I do, actually, just so we're on the segue, it actually goes, let's stick with tape for a second. >> Dave: Yeah, be happy to. >> And... We can come back to dedup side. The cool thing we've done is, for Veeam customers, historically, it's been difficult to create tape in a Veeam environment because they've required an external physical tape server. And, of course, their customers are largely virtualized, right? Well, we've solved that. So what we've done is we've, we just announced what we call our Scalar iBlade for our new scalar tape libraries. It's an embedded intel-based blade server that fits in the back of our library chassis. And it comes with a Windows operating system on that. And... What it does, we've designed it so it can actually host a Veeam tape server, a Veeam proxy server. Really easy to install, and I can talk more about that. Net for customers is, they can now create tape in a Veeam environment without this external dedicated physical server. >> Dave: You just utilize the resource on your appliance. >> So on the one hand, it's not anything super revolutionary. On the other hand, there's nobody else in the market that has anything like this for tape. I joke that it's converge tape, or it's hyper converge tape, because we built the compute in. But... It's more of a marketing thing. I think for customers, it is providing a really good value. Because they're able to create tapes in a Veeam environment now, really easy way, and if they're in a 100% virtualized environment, they can do that without having to install that separate physical server. So that's iBlade. That was one of the big things we announced, and certainly sort of a cornerstone of what we talk about for 3-2-1 data protection. >> So Eric, of course, one of the big announcements this morning was the version 10 of the Veeam Availability Suite. What does that mean to your customers and kind of joint development? >> There's a few things. There's one minor thing that I'll put a plug in, in that, in Veeam version 10, we'll actually have the, our DXi appliance be added to the Veeam user interface. So kind of a user usability enhancement. >> Simplifies things. >> Yeah, it simplifies things. I'm excited about the direction Veeam is taking in terms of... In fact, I just saw Jason talk about it a little bit. It's kind of this progression from backup to availability, and now to almost data management and getting more value out of that secondary storage. And when I think about Quantum, our focus is about secondary storage. It's about data protection and archive storage. And we've got some unique solutions there. I think we can have a hardware or storage portfolio that complements Veeam really well. It will be able to kind of bring that much more to the table for their customers. I'm excited about the direction that they talked about. I'm interested in learning more about it, but I'm excited about it. >> So, let's go back to the dedup appliance. You were saying that you've made really some enhancements to be able to exploit some of the things that the features at Veeam has been introducing over the years. Can you explain that a little bit further? >> Yeah, we... We... So the DXi's an inline variable dedup appliance. So the benefits of that, really good data reduction, et cetera, et cetera. One of the sort of gaps that we had was we just needed to make communication more efficient between a Veeam proxy server and our dedup appliance. And we've been working with the Veeam engineering team on this for about a year or something. We decided to go the route where we were going to use their data mover service. And so we've now announced that integration. The way it works from a customer perspective, pretty simple. Configure the DXi as a target. Once that backup job kicks off, Veeam actually installs a little data mover agent right on the DXi. And then we can use their data mover protocol to be able to communicate between the proxy and the dedup target. Net for a customer, it just makes operations, like instant VM recovery or creating a synthetic full backup 10 times faster or 20 times faster than where we were previously. >> Which was using a different data mover. >> Yeah, it was just a using a CIFS, NFS, or just standard kind of-- >> So not really a high-speed data mover designed to, okay. >> And we've done some things in our software through our, just our learnings, and the work that we've collaborated on with the Veeam engineering team. We've done some things in our DXi software to try to optimize reads and kind of how we do that under the covers, just to speed up things like instant VM recovery. So we've done some things there that I think will have a good benefit in terms of improved performance. >> I'm hearing a lot of just really practical activities going on in the partnership ecosystem, which says, "Okay, we got this big TAM. "How do we actually penetrate it? "How do we increase our ability to capture that TAM?" A perfect example here. >> Eric: Yeah, that's right. >> So where do you guys go from here? >> You know, I think we've been partnered with Veeam for a number of years now. We've got a lot of joint customers. I think this integration is just kind of, kind of the next step in our partnership, and... I think that given Veeam's direction, I just think we have even more opportunity to integrate with them, and I think it's going to be in the areas of not just data protection, but archive and kind of managing data over its life. You know, and I mean, that's... We already talk about that in terms of some of the things we do for our customers in different industries, like broadcast or post-production. I'm excited to kind of bring that into the data protection realm and the data center. And I think we'll be able to do some really cool things with it. >> Last question I have for you is sort of customer interactions. What are you hearing from them these days? Beyond the digital transformation bromide. What are some of the hardcore gnarly things that they want you to solve? >> You know, when I'm out talking to customers, I think it's... It seems to be all about Flash. It's all about the Cloud, and it's kind of all about convergence or hyper convergence. I think our customers, especially in IT, they're wrestling with this completely new infrastructure design. And what's the right roadmap for them to kind of go from here to there? And that's where, you know, that's where we're investing. That type of a transition doesn't happen overnight. And so, I think we just want to be there to help our customers kind of along that roadmap and along that journey. Embrace the Cloud and embrace these new technologies. Help 'em get to where they need to go. (chuckles) >> Excellent, well, Eric, thanks for sharing your announcements, and congratulations on all the hard work you're getting to market. We know how much goes into that, so we really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thank you guys very much. Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, so that's a wrap for us today. We'll be back tomorrow. We start at, what time do we start tomorrow, Stu? >> Stu: Right after the keynote. >> Right after the keynote. >> Stu: So, 11 o'clock. >> 11 a.m. local time. We're in New Orleans. >> Stu: Central. (chuckles) >> So that's central. And check out siliconangle.tv for all the videos today. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. And we'll see you tomorrow, everybody. Thanks for watching. (energetic music) (typing) (plane engine accelerating)