from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special cube conversations part of our partner series sponsored by HP e hewlett-packard enterprise and we've been drilling into the role that partners play the value that they add as as they emerge is the sort of new breed of nimble system integrator Tim Ferriss is here and he's with green pages we're going to do a disaster recovery drill down it's a topic that is extremely important it's relevant to this day and age Jim thanks for coming on my pleasure thank you for having Saudi our it's it's traditionally been an expensive complicated hairy scary but necessary what should we know about dr today in the state of dr well like you said i think a lot of people have written it off as prohibitively expensive and certainly in the small and medium business but you know with the advent of cloud with it with the explosion of cloud services dr as a service has made a cloud cloud base dr and disaster recovery affordable for even a small business it's taken a lot of the complexity some of the complexity out of it and it's certainly some for some clients it's the first steps toward a cloud journey you know my my friend Fred Moore former storage tech senior vice president of strategic planning is famous for coining the term backup is one thing recovery is there anything it applies to dr you know failover is one thing failback is is everything and you know a lot of times it's just you know too dangerous to test failing back how is dr evolving particularly for the small and mid-sized businesses so they can have confidence that not only can they check a box sure for their corporate boards but they if there's a disaster they can actually recover the sim is similar to that to that phrase yeah DR is not just a replication exercise right not getting just getting data from point A to point B but automating that and automating the the testing and creating run books around around that data I think some things have certainly made that easier over the years you know I I was an early delivery consultant for solution for VMware Site Recovery Manager thankfully I've used it much more for in cases of data center migration than I have for actual disasters but you know it was a fantastic automation tool but used other technologies to get the data from point A to point B and replicate that data some things that have made that easier over the years for people in more affordable a bandwidth is cheaper so you've got to get that data it still gotta get that data from point A to point B and it was prohibitively the pipe was prohibitively expensive could it keep up with my rate of change so but bandwidth is becoming less and less expensive and less and less of a hindrance there the software and the technologies typically back in the old days it was a ray based replication you needed to have like arrays and in production in dr so i i have an all flash array in production i need that same array in dr well maybe that's maybe i want to spend money on an all flash array for a use case that I hope I never need you know I'll test but never need it and you know our partner HPE has done some great things they're letting you replicate from a nimble all flash array to a hybrid array and ER let's some people save some money there but for our small and medium business for those who want to get out of the data center business maybe they want to start with dr dr as a service has been a you know a big big mover for us you know a lot of a lot of traction with that over the past year into so i mean one of the concerns that you hear this from security practitioners all the time is that they're drowning in point products and sort of dr was sort of the same I asked the customer had to become the system integrator or had engaged and spent a lot of money figuring out that that system so the dr as a service kind of takes care of all that doesn't it does it offloads not only the operational maintenance of the of the dr infrastructure but your you can leverage their years of expertise in indy our functions you know again hopefully folks don't have a ton of experience failing over from disasters you know hopefully you only have that never happens or it happens once but but these folks have are seasoned veterans in indy are so you get to not only leverage them their service taking care of the operations of it but you get their expertise for design so i can actually you mentioned bandwidth in vo is joke gold mainframes that the the fastest way to get data from point A to point B is the Chevy truck access method and and so and that was tape and in the day since big large companies still use tape I mean the big hyper scalar guys use K tape I presume it's not is if I froze it was pretty much dead in small business and maybe even it's very word I get dirty looks yesterday but do people still use tape for dr type of thing people do I would say increasingly if people are using tape it's used for those work those less critical workloads those people are looking people you know hopefully anybody who's performing a business continuity initiative will tear their workloads you know they have their tier zero those things that need to be up and running hot in the data center those tier ones with the RTOS the recovery time objectives in the minutes tape you only want to use that for recovery time objectives maybe in the weeks okay so pretty much I mean I've always hated tape but but but it's still not dead yet now people are trying through okay so thinking as an architect let's say I'm a small let's say midsize business because there's some other challenges that their and I and I used to have you know sort of backup over here and recovery and I think about dr it wasn't integrated what should I be doing in terms of bringing those disciplines together how should I be thinking about architecting a disaster recovery solution from from my client where do I start well you you should start by assessing the the applications so don't start at the VM level or the the physical workload level here from your business what are those services that they need to provide in the event of a disaster so a business continuity plan needs to be in place before we you should take on a disaster recovery architecture initiative so having that input is key to the to the to the disaster recovery process so assess assess what services need to be up and when tear them so and then investigate we investigate with our clients several different methods of protection and a dr a dr architecture won't just consist of dr as a service or a physical prem the prem replication environment it could contain many different types of protection deer as for some products for our virtual workloads application based hot protection for sequel or database workloads and that sort of thing using native application replication so a lot of different things you can you can do and it's not just the one size fits all it's really a mosaic of things tailoring the solution based on the applications value yes that gets into so you know the funny discussions with you know people always say well speak in business terms and so you sit down as business people say what do you want your RPO and arts go to the end they go what ok RPO how much data you're willing to lose and they go how much a problem how fast do you want to get it back what are you talking about instantaneously how much money do you have so it's the notion of recovery point objective recovery time objective it's sometimes not business speak how do you translate a geek into wallet wallet yeah well yeah signing have you you ask the question have you assigned a value to downtime you know how much is it gonna cost you to be down and I don't like to go into customers and hit them with a lot of FUD you know fear uncertainty and doubt and but you you know it should a good business should value how much downtime or loss of data will cost the business and then use that to determine what they need to spend on on dr in order to make sure that that doesn't happen well you're suggesting so and and having had those conversations with many CIOs in the past it used to be email was mission-critical and it still is in many ways but of course the vast majority people have outsourced their their email to the right or ever Microsoft or whomever at Google and so now it becomes so the answer to that question is what does it cost you when it sounds well it depends what system is down you know if it's my transaction system and I'm a retailer online well and it's it's this Black Friday I'm losing a lot of money right and so do people have a sense of the cost of downtime or the the value of their data and their applications I I think a lot of times they do not and and it takes some encouragement in order to to help them realize that I think for some it's just so for our retail customers I think it's just so obvious that to them they're they're hyper focused on on on that value so we get just like you know it's it's unfortunate but during hurricane season we have a lot of conversations with folks about about dr because it's top of mind for everybody for our retail customers their hurricane season is you know Black Friday and beyond they want to make sure that they have a solid solution leading in the Black Friday because you know a minute of downtime can mean you know thousands and thousands of dollars worth of lost business and revenue so I think more and more it's becoming a common place for people to put value on it but you still run into folks who haven't okay so and I get it this it's an insurance cell it's somewhat of a fear it's not a fear of missing out it's a fear of losing you know all your data yeah and and so okay so let's let's assume so you guys can help me get through the business case let's assume I I get there um how are people sort of moving forward how fast are they moving forward and how critical is it for their digital transformations so so how fast are people people I think are moving we're having the conversation with more and more folks more and more folks or finding value in disaster recovery and we are helping them through that helping them through that assessment and providing the value I think another big value for the IT for the IT establishment is not just providing a service the best that they can do but getting some buy-in from the business on let's let's agree what what a reasonable recovery time objective is and let's agree understand that yeah I can give you a zero RPO recovery point objective or a near zero a synchronous replication but it's gonna cost X amount of money so that the business is taking some ownership for the quality of the of the disaster recovery solution and the the tightness of the RPO and RTO and you you empower the business to make those decisions by giving them options and I think we help our businesses the customers we work with so it's important I mean maybe it's worthwhile getting a little didactic here but but we're talking about you know RPO zero it means you're essentially you're not losing any data right on a disaster which is very very probably there's no such thing technically as our poz the closest is you know synchronous replication and and that sort of thing so near zero right so so you take you do synchronous replication you know within some physical metro area metro area yeah of course the problem is if you get hit with a major disaster then they both go out so you have to do async yeah yeah frankly just understanding what type of disaster you're asking me to engineer for is it or is it a localized fire in the data center centers away in an earthquake and regional disaster affecting the whole country now right yeah so so understanding what your or is it you know we to this day IT organizations are getting calls from upper management you know if they have a power failure in the building you know okay let's failover to our disaster recovery site and the power is going to be on in an hour or so and you know knowing when to make that decision is is critical as well and not using it too trivially so if you're in a zone where you have a high probability of some kind of disaster that's gonna wipe out both synchronous you know platforms you go asynchronous but then the problem becomes speed of light there's a there's a little bit of you know or it could be a lot it could affect the performance of the application - while you're waiting for that sink that's right yeah so that could be a revenue hit but it could be you know it can you handle fifty five minutes of lost data yeah yeah sure I can probably recreate that about 15 minutes yeah maybe I'll how about an hour how about half a day mm-hmm how about a day now you start to get into the business discussion of really what's the value and now you can architect around those things you can pretty pretty much if you throw money at it you can solve any problem as an architect mostly you absolutely finish that balance of the business case right exactly so so yeah by and by showing in what we'll often do is we'll do the assessment and we'll perform a workshop on various different ways in which we can solve a problem and we can show the client in the business okay well we can do what you asked for it will cost X and that's very expensive but we can do do it this way a little bit differently or combine a couple ways that may increase your RPO a little bit but they're much more affordable you know is that a and they can make a decision based on something you said before Tim resonated with me which was it's not one size fits all which says to me I need the technology to be able to give me the granularity that I can map to the application based on the cost of downtime or the value of the application it right and it sounds like I'm inferring that that type of modern technology exists today absolutely so besides just that there are a number of different ways that applications can be protected you know Active Directory needs to be protected using its native replication Oracle and sequel have their own methods of protection so does so does exchange but virtual workloads certainly you can dial up or down the protection using dr.azz with a product behind it like a like as erto a replication and automation host based replication capability and it you know host based it makes things a bit easier for clients because they can very granularly choose individual VMS without having to house them on a specific volume that's replicated and and have to do all that mapping in the backend it takes a lot of the complexity out of things and you can assign different priorities to those machines so I could be replicating a hundred machines but ten of them are more important I want to make sure that those ten get all the bandwidth they need to keep the lowest possible RPO and certainly there are technologies out there and we are partners with with some providers who can let you dial in what role does HPE play in this whole equation right so so HPE for four Prem the Prem disaster recovery technologies it's it's fantastic because I think I mentioned it earlier you know it used to be we have some we have some very high end workloads residing in primary data centers living on all flash arrays so a nimble or a three-part all flash array those are those are expensive technologies necessary to run the business in in normal circumstances but for dr for a solution that you hope you never need you can replicate to an all flash nimble to a hybrid solution a hybrid nimble in dr thereby saving yourself some money so you know a hybrid flash array and adaptive flash array in dr that is fronted by SSD and ram but costs more like an HDD or a spinning disk array so HP is allowing us to do some things that help help save some money there as well alright Tim thanks very much it was a great conversation and really appreciate your perspectives all right thank you Dave 500 you're welcome ok thank you for watching everybody this is Dave a latte with cube we'll see you next time