(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back covering AWS Storage Day 2022 with Ashish Palekar. Who's the general manager of AWS EBS Snapshot and Edge and Cami Tavares. Who's the head of product at Amazon EBS. Thanks for coming back in theCube guys. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Great to see you, Dave. Ashish, we've been hearing a lot today about companies all kinds of applications to the cloud and AWS and using their data in new ways. Resiliency is always top of mind for companies when they think about just generally their workloads and specifically the clouds. How should they think about customers think about data resiliency? >> Yeah, when we think about data resiliency it's all about making sure that your application data, the data that your application needs is available when it needs it. It's really the ability for your workload to mitigate disruptions or recover from them. And to build that resilient architecture you really need to understand what kinds of disruptions your applications can experience. How broad the impact of those disruptions is, and then how quickly you need to recover. And a lot of this is a function of what the application does, how critical it is. And the thing that we constantly tell customers is, this works differently in the cloud than it does in a traditional on-premises environment. >> What's different about the cloud versus on-prem? Can you explain how it's different? >> Yeah, let me start with a video on-premises one. And in the on-premises one, building resilient architectures is really the customer's responsibility, and it's very challenging. You'll start thinking about what your single points of failure are. To avoid those, you have to build in redundancy, you might build in replication as an example for storage and doing this now means you have to have provision more hardware. And depending on what your availability requirements are, you may even have to start looking for multiple data centers, some in the same regions, some in different geographical locations. And you have to ensure that you're fully automated, so that your recovery processes can take place. And as you can see that's a lot of owners being placed on the customer. One other thing that we hear about is really elasticity and how elasticity plays into the resiliency for applications. As an example, if you experience a sudden spike in workloads, in a on-premises environment, that can lead to resource saturation. And so really you have two choices. One is to sort of throttle the workload and experience resiliency, or your second option becomes buying additional hardware and securing more capacity and keeping it fair low in case of experiencing such a spike. And so your two propositions that are either experiencing resiliency, challenges or paying really to have infrastructure that's lying around. And both of those are different really when you start thinking about the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a third option too, which is lose data, which is not an option. Go ahead- >> Which is not, yeah, I pretty much as a storage person, that is not an option. The reason about that that we think is reasonable for customers to take. The big contrast in the cloud really comes with how we think about capacity. And fundamentally the the cloud gives you that access to capacity so you are not managing that capacity. The infrastructure complexity and the cost associated with that are also just a function of how infrastructure is built really in the cloud. But all of that really starts with the bedrock of how we design for avoiding single points of failure. The best way to explain this is really to start thinking about our availability zones. Typically these availability zones consist of multiple data centers, located in the same regional area to enable high throughput and low latency for applications. But the availability zones themselves are physically independent. They have independent connections to utility power, standalone backup power resources, independent mechanical services and independent network connectivity. We take availability zone independence extremely seriously, so that when customers are building the availability of their workload, they can architect using these multiple zones. And that is something that when I'm talking to customers or Tami is talking to customers, we highly encourage customers to keep in mind as they're building resiliency for their applications. >> Right, so you can have within an availability zone, you can have, you know, instantaneous, you know when you're doing it right. You've got, you've captured that data and you can asynchronously move to outside of that in case there's, the very low probability, but it does happen, you get some disasters. You're minimizing that RPO. And I don't have to worry about that as a customer and figuring out how to do three site data centers. >> That's right. Like that even further, now imagine if you're expanding globally. All those things that we described about like creating new footprint and creating a new region and finding new data centers. As a customer in an on-premises environment, you take that on yourself. Whereas with AWS, because of our global presence, you can expand to a region and bring those same operational characteristics to those environments. And so again, bringing resiliency as you're thinking about expanding your workload, that's another benefit that you get from using the availability zone region architecture that AWS has. >> And as Charles Phillips, former CEO of Infor said, "Friends, don't let friends build data center," so I don't have to worry about building the data center. Let's bring Cami into the discussion here. Cami, think about elastic block storage, it gives, you know customers, you get persistent block storage for EC2 instances. So it's foundational for any mission critical or business critical application that you're building on AWS. How do you think about data resiliency in EBS specifically? I always ask the question, what happens if something goes wrong? So how should we think about data resiliency in EBS specifically? >> Yeah, you're right Dave, block storage is a really foundational piece. When we talk to customers about building in the cloud or moving an application to the cloud, and data resiliency is something that comes up all the time. And with EBS, you know EBS is a very large distributed system with many components. And we put a lot of thought and effort to build resiliency into EBS. So we design those components to operate and fail independently. So when customers create an EBS volume for example, we'll automatically choose the best storage nodes to address the failure domain and the data protection strategy for each of our different volume types. And part of our resiliency strategy also includes separating what we call a volume life cycle control plane. Which are things like creating a volume, or attaching a volume to an EC2 instance. So we separate that control plane, from the storage data plane, which includes all the components that are responsible for serving IO to your instance, and then persisting it to durable media. So what that means is once a volume is created and attached to the instance, the operations on that volume they're independent from the control point function. So even in the case of an infrastructure event, like a power issue, for example, you can recreate an EBS volume from a snapshot. And speaking of snapshots, that's the other core pillar of resiliency in EBS. Snapshots are point in time copies of EBS volumes that would store in S3. And snapshots are actually a regional service. And that means internally we use multiple of the availability zones that Ashish was talking about to replicate your data so that the snapshots can withstand the failure of an availability zone. And so thanks to that availability zone independence, and then this builtin component independence, customers can use that snapshot and recreate an EBS following another AZO or even in another region if they need to. >> Great so, okay, so you touched on some of the things EBS does to build resiliency into the service. Now thinking about over your right shoulders, you know, Joan Deviva, so what can organizations do to build more resilience into their applications on EBS so they can enjoy life without anxiety? >> (laughs) That is a great question. Also something that we love to talk to customers about. And the core thing to think about here is that we don't believe in a one size fits all approach. And so what we are doing in EBS is we give customers different tools so that they can design a resiliency strategy that is custom tailored for their data. And so to do this, this resiliency assessment, you have to think about the context of this specific workload and ask questions like what other critical services depend on this data and what will break if this data's not available and how long can can those systems withstand that, for example. And so the most important step I'll mention it again, snapshots, that is a very important step in a recovery plan. Make sure you have a backup of your data. And so we actually recommend that customers take the snapshots at least daily. And we have features that make that easier for you. For example, Data Lifecycle Manager which is a feature that is entirely free. It allows you to create backup policies, and then you can automate the process of creating the snapshot, so it's very low effort. And then when you want to use that backup to recreate a volume, we have a feature called Fast Snapshot Restore, that can expedite the creation of the volume. So if you have a more, you know a shorter recovery time objective you can use that feature to expedite the recovery process. So that's backup. And then the other pillar we talked to customers about is data replication. Just another very important step when you're thinking about your resiliency and your recovery plans. So with EBS, you can use replication tools that work at the level of the operating system. So that's something like DRBD for example. Or you can use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, and that will replicate your data across availability zones or nearby regions too. So we talked about backup and replication, and then the last topic that we recommend customers think about is having a workload monitoring solution in place. And you can do that in EBS, using cloud watch metrics. So you can monitor the health of your EBS volume using those metrics. We have a lot of tips in our documentation on how to measure that performance. And then you can use those performance metrics as triggers for automated recovery workflows that you can build using tools like auto scaling groups for example. >> Great, thank you for that advice. Just quick follow up. So you mentioned your recommendation, at least daily, what kind of granularity, if I want to compress my RPO can I go at a more granular level? >> Yes, you can go more granular and you can use again the daily lifecycle manager to define those policies. >> Great, thank you. Before we go, I want to just quickly cover what's new with EBS. Ashish, maybe you could talk about, I understand you've got something new today. You've got an announcement, take us through that. >> Yeah, thanks for checking in and I'm so glad you asked. We talked about how snapshots help resilience and are a critical part of building resilient architectures. So customers like the simplicity of backing up their EC2 instances, using multi volume snapshots. And what they're looking for is the ability to back up only to exclude specific volumes from the backup, especially those that don't need backup. So think of applications that have cash data, or applications that have temporary data that really doesn't need backup. So today we are adding a new parameter to the create snapshots API, which creates a crash consistent set of snapshots for volumes attached to an EC2 instance. Where customers can now exclude specific volumes from an instance backup. So customers using data life cycle manager that can be touched on, can automate their backups. And again they also get to exclude these specific volumes. So really the feature is not just about convenience, but it's also to help customers save on cost. As many of these customers are managing tens of thousands of snapshots. And so we want to make sure they can take it at the granularity that they need it. So super happy to bring that into the hands of customers as well. >> Yeah, that's a nice option. Okay, Ashish, Cami thank you so much for coming back in theCube, helping us learn about what's new and what's cool and EBS, appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having us Dave. >> Thank you for having us Dave. >> You're very welcome now, if you want to learn more about EBS resilience, stay right here because coming up, we've got a session which is a deep dive on protecting mission critical workloads with Amazon EBS. Stay right there, you're watching theCube's coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. (calm music)

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

overnight covid completely exposed those companies that were really not ready for the digital age there was a mad rush to the cloud in an effort to reshape the very notion of business resiliency and enable employees to remain productive so that they continue serve customers data protection was at the heart of this shift and cloud data protection has become a fundamental staple of organizations operating models hello everyone this is dave vellante and welcome to this cube conversation i'm joined by two long time friends of the cube rob emsley is the director of product marketing at dell technologies and stephen manley is the chief technology officer at dhruva guys great to have you on the program thanks for being here yeah great to be here dave this is the high point of my day dave all right i'm glad to hear it stephen it's been a while since we missing you guys so tell you face-to-face maybe it'll happen before 22. but we haven't aged a bit david ditto listen we've been talking for years about this shift to the cloud but in the past 12 months boy we've seen the pace of workloads that have moved to the cloud really accelerate so rob maybe you could start it off how do you see the market and perhaps what are some of the blind spots maybe that people need to think about when they're moving workloads so fast to the cloud yeah good question dave i mean you know we've spoken a number of times around how our focus has significantly shifted over the last couple of years i mean only a couple of years ago you know our focus was you know very much on on-premise data protection but over the last couple of years you know more workloads have shifted to the cloud you know customers have have started adopting sas applications and and all of these environments uh you know are creating data that is is so critical to these customers to protect you know so you know we've definitely found uh the more and more of our conversations have been centered around what can you do for me when it comes to protecting workloads in the cloud environment yeah now of course stephen this is kind of your wheelhouse how how are you thinking about the these market shifts yeah you know it's interesting and the data protection market heck the data market in general you know you see these these these sort of cycles happen and and for a long time we had a cycle where applications and environments were consolidating a lot it was all vms and oracle and sql and and we seem to be exploding out the other way to this there's a massive sprawl of different types of applications in different places like rob said you've got microsoft 365 and you've got salesforce and you've got workloads running in the cloud the world looks different and and you add on top of that the the new security threats as people move into the cloud i mean we you know a number of years ago we talked about how ransomware was an emerging threat we're way past emerging into you know there's a ransomware attack every six seconds and everybody wakes up terrified about it and so so so we really see the market has shifted i think in terms of what the apps are and also in terms of what the threats and the focus uh has come into play right well thanks for that there's there's some hard news which we're going to get to but but before we do rob stephen was mentioning the sas apps and we've been sort of watching that space for a while but a lot of people will ask why do i need a separate data protection layer doesn't my sas provider protect my data don't they replicate it they're they're cloud vendors why do i need to buy yet another backup product yeah there's there's a fairly common misconception dave you know that both sas application vendors and and and cloud vendors you know inherently are you know providing all of the data protection that you need um the reality is that they're not you know i think when you think about a lot of the data within those environments you know certainly they're focused on providing availability you know an availability you know is absolutely one thing that you can for the most part rely on the uh the cloud vendors uh to deliver to you but when it comes to actually um protecting yourself from you know accidental deletion you know protecting yourself from uh cyber threats and cyber crime that may infect your data you know through malicious acts you know that's really where you need to supplement the environment that the cloud providers provide you you know with you know best-in-class data protection solutions you know and this is really where you know we're really looking to introduce new innovations into the market you know to really really help customers you know with their client-based data protection yeah now you got some news here uh but let's kind of dig in if we we could to the to the innovations behind that maybe rob you could you could kick it off and then stephen will bring you in yeah so first piece of news that we're really happy to announce is the introduction of a new dell emc paraprotect backup service which is a new cloud data protection solution powered by druva you know hence you know the reason that stephen and i are here today it's designed to deliver additional protection without increasing it complexity so what powered by druva what does that mean can you add some color to that absolutely so you know when we really started looking at the expansion of our powerpatek portfolio you know we already have the ability to deliver both on-premises protection and to deliver that same software within the public cloud from a a paraprotect software delivery model but what we really didn't have within the portfolio is a cloud data protection platform and we really looked at you know what was available in the market we looked at our ability to develop that you know ourselves and we decided that the best path for our customers to bring capabilities to them as soon as we possibly could was to partner with druva you know when we really looked at the capabilities that that druva has been delivering for many years you know the capabilities that they have across many dimensions of of of cloud-based workloads and we're already engaged with them probably about six months ago you know first introduced druva as a an option uh to be resold by ourselves uh salesforce and partners and then we're pleased to to introduce uh a dell emc branded service power protect backup service okay so just one more point of clarification then stephen i want to bring you in so we're talking about this includes sas apps as well i'm talking 365 the google apps which we use extensively with crm salesforce for example what platforms are you actually you know connecting to and providing protection for yeah so the the real priority for us was to was to expand our power protect portfolio to support a variety of sas applications you mentioned you know uh real real major ones with respect to microsoft 365 um google workplace as well as um as uh as salesforce but the other thing that we also get with patek backup service is the ability to provide a cloud-based data protection service that supports endpoints such as laptops and desktops but also the ability to support hybrid workloads so for some customers the ability to use private backup service to give them support um for virtual machine backups both vmware and hyper-v but also application environments like oracle and sql and lastly but not least you know one of the things that backup service also provides when it comes to virtual machines is not only virtual machines on-premises but also virtual machines within the public cloud specifically vmware client on aws so stephen i i mean i i i remember i was talking to just several years ago and i've always liked sort of the druva model but it felt at the time you're like a little ahead of your time but boy the market has really come to you maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about the just generally cloud-based data protection and and the sort of low down on on your platform yeah and again i think you're right the market has absolutely swept in this direction like we were talking about with applications in so many places and endpoints in so many places and data centers and remote offices with data sprawled everywhere we find customers are looking for a solution that can connect to everything i i don't want seven different backup solutions one for each of those things i want one centralized solution and so kind of a data protection as a service becomes really appealing because instead of setting all of these things up on your own well it's just built in for you uh and and then the fact that it's it's as a service helps with things like the ransomware protection because it's off site in another location under another account and so we really see customers saying this is appealing because it helps keep my costs down it helps to keep my complexity down there's fewer moving parts and one of the nicest things is as i move to the cloud i get that one fixed cost right i'm not i'm not dealing with the oh wow this this bill is not what i was expecting it just comes in with with what i was what i was carrying and so it really comes down to as you go to the cloud you want a platform that's that's got everything built in uh something that and let's face it dell emc is is this this is this has always been the case you know that storage of last resort that backup that you can trust right you want something with a history like you said you've been talking to jaspreet for a while druva is a company that's got a proven track record that your data is going to be safe and it's going to be recoverable and you're going to want someone that can innovate quickly right so that as more new you know cloud applications arise you know we're there to help you protect them as they emerge so so talk a little bit more about the timing i mean we talked earlier about that okay covered really forced to shift to the cloud uh and you guys clearly have skated to the puck and you also you referenced sort of new workloads and and i'm just wondering how you see that from a you know timing standpoint and at this moment in time why this is such a you know the right fit yeah we we've seen a lot of customers over the last again 12 months or so you know one really accelerate their shift to things like sas applications microsoft 365 you know and and we're not just talking exchange online and onedrive but sharepoint online microsoft teams really going all in because they're finding that as as i'm distributed as i have a remote workforce my endpoints became more important again but also the ability to have collaboration became important and the more i depend on those tools to collaborate the more i'm depending on them to to replace what used to be in-person meetings where we could have a whiteboard and discuss things and it's it's done through collaboration online tools well i need to protect that not just because the data is important but because that's not how my business is running and so that entire environment is important and so it's really accelerated people coming and looking for solutions because they've realized how important these environments and this data is so stephen you mentioned you guys i mean i obviously have a track record but you got some vision too and i want to sort of poke at that a little bit i mean essentially is is what you're building is an abstraction layer that is essentially my data protection cloud is that how we should think about this and you've got your reference pricing i've seen your pricing it's clean it looks to me anyway like a like true cloud pricing gonna dial it up dial it down pay as you go consume it as you as you wish maybe talk about that a little bit yeah i mean i think if you think about the future of uh uh of consumption is that you know so many customers are looking for different choices than what many vendors have provided them in the past you know i think that you know the the days of of going through a you know a long procurement cycle and uh you know working through purchasing in order to get a big capital expense approved you know is it's just not the way that many of our customers are looking to operate now so i think that you know one of the things that we're looking at you know across the portfolio you know whether or not it be you know on-premises solutions or or cloud-based services is to provide all of that capability as a service you know i think that that will be you know a real future point of of arrival for us is we really rotate to offer that across all of our capabilities dave you know whether or not it be you know in the domain of storage or in the domain of data protection the concept of everything as a service is really something which is going to become more of the norm you know versus the exception so what does a customer have to do to be up and running what's that experience like is this going to log on and and everything's sort of you know there to them they what do they see what's the experience like yeah well that's one of the great things about parapatek backup service is that you know once the customer has has has worked through their you know their their uh their dell technologies you know sales uh team or their or their dell technologies partner you know they effectively you know get an activation um you know code to to sign up and and set up their credentials with powerpit backup servers and once they actually do that you know one of the things that they don't have to worry about is the deployment of the infrastructure the infrastructure is always on ready to go so what they do is they simply point powerpit backup service at the data sources that they wish to protect you know and that's one of the the great advantages around you know a sas based data protection platform you know and it's one of the things that that makes it very easy to get customers up and running with powerpath backup service so i'm guessing you have a roadmap you may be you maybe not you may be holding out on us and some of the other things that you're doing in this space but but what can you tell us about about other things you might be doing or that might be coming what can we expect well i mean you know dave that one of the things that you know we always talk about it's the power of the portfolio so so with the addition of private backup service it's not the only news that we're making with respect to cloud data protection you know i mentioned earlier that uh we have the ability to deploy our on-premises solutions in the public cloud with powerprotect data manager and our powerprotect virtual appliances you know and with this uh announcement that brings backup service into the portfolio we're also uh pleased to expand our support of the public cloud with full support of google cloud platform making powerprotect data manager available in the google marketplace and then lastly but not least you know our other cloud snapshot manager offering you know is now also fully integrated with our powerprotect virtual appliances to allow customers to store uh aws snapshots in a deduplicated fashion within aws s3 so that's an excellent capability that we've introduced to reduce the cost of storing um aws infrastructure backups for longer periods of time so really you know we've really continued to double down in bringing new cloud data protection capabilities to our customers wherever they may be yeah nice now steven you guys must be stoked have a partner like dell just massive distribution channel i wonder if you could give us any final thoughts you know thoughts on on the relationship how you see the future unfolding yeah i mean and obviously i've got you know history with with dell and emc and rob and one of the things you know i think dell's always been fabulous at is giving customers the flexibility to protect their data when they want how they want where they want with the investment protection but if it shifts over time they'll be there for them right going all the way back to the data protection suite and all those those those fantastic things we've done historically and so it's it's really it's great to to align with somebody that's got the same kind of values we do which is at druva it's that same model right wherever you want to protect your data wherever it is we're going to be there for you and so it was great that i think dell and druva both saw this demand from our customers and we said you know this is the right match right this is how we're going to help people keep their data safe as they start you know and continue and extend their journeys to the cloud and so you know dell proposes the the power protect backup service powered by druva and and everybody wins the dell's customers are safer dell completes its offering and let's face it it does help druva accelerate our momentum so this is this is this is and it's a lot of fun just hanging out with the people i used to work with especially wrong it's good seeing him again well you guys both have kind of alluded to the portfolio and the optionality that dell brings to its customers but rob you know i'll give you the final word a lot of times optionality brings complexity but this seems to be a really strong step in the direction of simplifying the world for your customers but rob i'll give you the last word yeah for sure i mean we've always said that it's not a one-size-fits-all world you know i think that you know one of the things that this um evolution of our powerpatek portfolio brings you know is an excellent added option for our customers you know many of the customers if not almost all of the customers that we currently sell to you know have a requirement for sas application protection you know many of them now especially after the last year have an added um sensitivity to endpoint protection you know so so those two things alone you know i think are are two things that all dell technology customers can really take advantage of with the introduction of private backup servers you know this is just a continued evolution of our uh capabilities to bring innovative data protection for multi-cloud workloads that last point is a great point about the endpoints because you got remote workers so exposed guys thanks so much for sharing the announcement details and the relationship and really good luck with the offering we'll be watching thanks dave thanks dave and thank you for watching this cube conversation this is dave vellante for the cube we'll see you next time you

>> From the SiliconAngle media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston-area studio. Welcome back to the program, CUBE alum, Ashok Ramu, Vice President and General Manager of Cloud at Actifio, great to see you. >> Happy New Year, Stu, happy to be here. >> 2020, hard to believe it said, it feels like we're in the future here. And talking about future, we've watched Actifio for many years, we remember when copy data management, the category, was created, and really, Actifio, we were talking a lot before Cloud was the topic that we spent so much talking about, but Actifio has been on this journey with its customers in Cloud for many years, and of course, that is your role is working, building the product, the team working all over it, so give us a little bit of a history, if you would, and give us the path that led to 10C announcement. >> Sure thing. We started the Cloud journey early on, in 2014 or 2013-ish, when Amazon was the only Cloud that really worked. We built our architecture, in fact, we took our enterprise architecture and put it on the Cloud and realized, "Oh my god," you know, it's a world of difference. The economics don't work, the security model is different, the scale is different. So, I think with the 8.0 version that came out in 2017, we really kind of figured out the architecture that worked for large enterprises, particularly enterprises that have diverse data sets and have requirements around, you know, marrying different applications to data sets anywhere they want, so we came up with efficient use of object, we came up with the capability of migrating workloads, taking VMware VMs, bringing up on Azure, bringing up on DCP, et cetera. So that was the first foray into Actifio's Cloud, and since then, we've been just building strength after strength, you know. It's been a building block, understanding our customers, and thank you to the customers and the hyperscalers that actually led us to the 10C release. So this, I believe, we've taken it up a notch wherein, we understand the Cloud, we understand the infrastructure, the software auto-tunes itself to know where it's running on, taking the guessing game out of the equation. So 10C really represents what we see as a launchpad for the rest of the Cloud journey that Actifio's going to embark upon. We have enabled a number of new use cases like AI and ML, data transformation is key, we tackled really complicated workloads like HANA and Sybase and MySQL, et cetera, and in addition to that, we also adopt different native Cloud technologies, like Cloud snapshots, like recovery orchestration of the Cloud, et cetera. >> Yeah, I think it's worth reminding our audience there that Actifio's always been software. And when you talk about, you know, I think back to 2013, 2014, it was the public Cloud versus the data center, and we have seen the public Cloud in many ways looks more and more like what the enterprise has been used to. >> Absolutely. >> And the data centers have been trying to Cloud-ify for a number of years, and things like containerization and Kubernetes is blurring the line, and of course, every hyperscaler out there now has something that reaches their public Cloud into the data center and of course, technologies like VMware are also extending into the public Cloud, or, SAP now, of course is all of the Cloud environment. So with hybrid Cloud and multi-Cloud as kind of the waves of driving, help us understand that Actifio lives in all of these environments, and they're all a little bit different, so how does Actifio make sure that it can provide the functionality and experience that users want, regardless of where it is? >> Absolutely, you said it right. Actifio has always been a software company. And it is our customers that showed us, by Cloudifying their data centers, that we had to operate in the Cloud. So we had on premises VMware Clouds, not before we had Amazon and Azure and Google. So that evolution started much early on. And so, from what, you know, Actifio's a very customer-driven company, be it, you know, all segments of the company are driven by the customers, and in 2019, and even before, when you see a strong trend to migrate workloads, to move workloads, we realized, there is a significant opportunity, because the hardest thing to migrate is the volume of data because it's ever-changing, and it is ever-growing. So, the key element of neutrality was the application itself. Microsoft SQL's a SQL no matter how you run it. It could be on a big Windows machine in your data center or a NGCP, it makes no difference. So Actifio's approach to start application down basically gave us the freedom to say, we're going to create SQL to SQL. I don't know if you're running in Azure, Google, DOP data center, or AliCloud, it makes no difference to me. I understand SQL, I understand SQL's availability groups, I understand logs, I can capture it and give it back to you, so when we took that approach, it kind of automatically gave us infrastructure neutrality, really didn't care. So when we have a conversation with a customer, it basically goes around lines of, "Okay, Mr. Customer, how much data do you have? And what are your key applications? Can you categorize them in terms of priority?" It usually comes out to be databases are the crown jewels, so they're the number one priority in terms of data management, migration, test Av, et cetera. And then, we basically drill down into the ecosystem the databases live into. So, because we walk application down, the conversation is the same whether the customer is in the data center, or in the Cloud. So that is how we've evolved, and that's how we're thinking from a product standpoint, from a support standpoint, and then the overall company is built that way. So it makes it easy for us to adapt a new platform that comes in. So, when you talked about, you know, how does, each Cloud is different, you're absolutely right, the security concepts are different, right? Microsoft is built on active directory, Google is built on something very different. So how do you utilize and how do you make this work? We do have an infrastructure layer that basically provides Cloud-specific capabilities for various Cloud platforms. And that has gotten to a point where it understands and tunes itself from a security standpoint and a performance standpoint. Once that's taken care of, the rest of the application stack, which is over 90% of our software, stays the same, there's no change. And so that is how we kind of tackle this. Because the ecosystem we live in, we have to keep up with two people. We have to keep up with the infrastructure people who are making it bigger, faster, and we also have to keep up with the application people who are making it fancier and more complicated. So that's unfortunately the ecosystem we live in, and taking this approach has given us a mechanism to insulate us from a lot of the complexities of these two environments. >> Yeah, that's great, 'cause when you talk to customers and you say, "What's going on in your environment," change is difficult. So, how many different pieces of what I'm doing do I need to move to be able to take advantage of the modern economics. On the one hand, you know, if I have an application and I like it, well, maybe I could just lift and shift it, but if I'm just lifting, shifting, I'm not necessarily taking advantage of the full Cloud native environments, but I need to make sure that my data is protected, backup, you mentioned security, are of course the top concerns, so. It sounds like, in many ways, you're talking, helping customers work through some of those initiatives, being able to take advantage of new environments, but not need to completely change everything. Maybe, I'd love to hear a little bit, when you talk about the developers and DevOps initiatives that are happening inside customers, where does that impact, where does that connect with what Actifio's doing? >> Well, that's a great question. So, let me start with a real customer example. We have this customer, SEI Investments, who basically, their business model is to grow by acquisition, so they're adding on tens, hundreds of developers every quarter. So it's impossible to keep up with infrastructure needs when you grow at that pace. They decided to adopt a Cloud platform. And with each Cloud platform comes some platform-specific piece that all these developers now have to re-tool themselves. So, I'm a developer, I used to come in the morning, open up my machine and start working away on the application, now I have to do something different, and if there is 300 of me, and the cost of moving to the Cloud was a lot less than training the developers. It was much harder to train the developers because it has been ongoing process. So we were presented the challenge of how do you avoid it? So, when we are able to separate the application layer from the data layer, because of the way we operate, what we present as a solution was to say, just move your, what is the heaviest layer you have? That's the database, okay. And what are the copies you're creating? I'm creating hundreds of copies of my Oracle database, okay. Let's just move that to the Cloud. All of the front-end application doesn't see a change, thanks to the great infrastructure work the Cloud providers do, you add 10 Gigabyte to everywhere. So network is not a problem, computer's not a problem, it's just available on an API call, so you provision that. All they did was a data movement, moved it from Point A to Point B, gives you the flexibility to spend up any number of copies you want in the Cloud, now, your developer tool sets haven't changed, so there's no training required for developers, but from an operations standpoint, you've completely eased the burden of creating a hundred more copies every month, because Cloud is built for that. So you take the elasticity of the Cloud, advantage of that, and provide the data in the last mile to the Cloud, thereby, developers, they will access the application with the same level of ease. So, that is the paradigm we're seeing, we're seeing, you know, in some of our customers, there is faster and better storage provision for Actifio because there are 190 developers working off Actifio, where there's only about a handful of people running production. So, it's a paradigm shift is where we see it. And the pace at which we bring up the application wherein we're able to bring up 150 terabyte article database in three hours. Before Actifio, it used to be, maybe, 30 days, if you were lucky. So it's not just an order of magnitude, it's what you can do with that data, is where we're seeing the shift going to. >> Yeah, it's interesting, when you go back and look at some of the changes that have happened in the Cloud, Cloud storage was one of the earliest discussed use cases there, and backup to the Cloud was one of the earlier pieces of the Cloud storage discussion. Yet, we've seen changes and maturation into what can actually be done, explain a little bit how Actifio enables even greater functionality when you're talking about backup to the Cloud. >> Absolutely. You know, the object storage technology, it's probably the most scalable and stable piece of storage known to mankind, because nobody can build that level of scale that Amazon, Azure, and Google have put into it. From a security standpoint, performance standpoint, and scale standpoint. So I'm able to drop my data in Boston and pick it up in Tokyo seamlessly, right? That's unheard of before. And the biggest impediment to that, was a lot of legacy application data didn't know how to consume this object storage. So what Actifio came up with on onboard technology was to light up the object storage for everybody, and basically make it a performance neutral platform, wherein you take the guessing game out of the customer. The customer doesn't need to go research S3 or Google Nearline or Google Persistent Disk and say I want ten copies there versus five copies there, Actifio figures it out for you. You give us your SLA, you give us your RTOs and RPOs, and we tell you, okay, this is the most cost effective way to store your data. You get the multi-year retention for free, you get the GDPR, appchafe and protection for free, you get the geo-redundancy for free. All this is built into the platform. In addition, you also can run DevOps off the object store. You can run DR off the object store. So we enabled a lot of the legacy use cases using this new technology, so that is kind of where we see the cusp, wherein, in the Cloud, there's always a question and a debate, does D-doop make sense? D-doop consumes a lot of compute, takes a lot of memory, you need to have that memory and compute whether you want it or not. We're seeing a lot more adoption of encryption, where the data is encrypted at source. When you encrypt data, D-doop is just a big compute-churning platform, it doesn't do much for you. So we went through this debate actively, I think four or five years ago, and we figured out, object store's the way to go. You cannot get storage, I mean, it's a buck a terabyte in Google, and dropping. How can you get storage that's reliable, scalable, at a lower cost? All we had to do was actuate the use of that storage, which is what we did. >> Yeah. I'm just laughing a little bit because, you know, gosh, I think back a dozen years ago, the industry knew that the future of storage would be object, yet it's taken a long time to really be able to leverage it and use it, and the Cloud, the hyperscalers of course, have been a huge enabler on that, but we don't want customers to have to think about that it's object underneath, and that's the bridging the gap that I think we've been looking for. There, what else. We talk about really being able to extract the value out of Cloud, you know, data protection, disaster recovery, migrations are all things that are top of mind. >> Yeah, absolutely. All those use cases, and we're seeing some of the top rating CIOs talk about AI and ML. We've had a couple of customers who want to basically take their manufacturing data from remote sites and pump it into Google bit query. Now we all know manufacturing happens in Taiwan and Singapore and all those locations, now how do you take data from all those applications, normalize it, and pump it into Google bit query and get your predictable results on a quarterly basis, it's a challenge. Because the data volumes are large. So with our Cloud technology and our onboard capability, we're able to funnel data directly into Google Nearline, and on a quarterly basis, on a scheduled basis, transform it, push it into bit query, and bring out the results for the end user. So that journey is pretty transformated, from a customer standpoint. What they used to have five people do maybe once a year, now with a push of a button happens every quarter. So it's a change in how the AI and ML analytics evolve. The other element is also you know, our partnership with IBM, we're working very closely with their Cloud bag for data. Cloud bag for data is an awesome platform built to analyze any kind of data that you might have. With Actifio's normalization platform, you basically can feed any data into Actifio and it presents a unified interface into the slow pack, so you can build your analytics workloads very quickly and easily. >> So we've talked a lot about Cloud, one of the other C's of course in 10C is containers, if we look at containerization, when it first started, it was stateless applications, most applications that are running in containers are running for very short period of time, so help us understand where Actifio fits there, what's the problem statement that you are solving? >> Oh, absolutely. So containers are coming up, up and coming and out of reality, and as we see more applications flow into containers, you see the data lives outside the container. Because containers are short-lived, they're microservices, they come up and they go down, and the state is maintained in a storage platform outside the container, so Actifio tackles containers by taking the data protection strategy we have for the storage platform already, Bell defined, but enhancing the data presentation into the container as it comes up. So a container can be brought up in seconds, maybe less. But the container is only brought to life when it can lead to data and start working again, so that's the bridge Actifio actuates. So we understand, you know, the architecture of how a container is put together, how the container system is put together, and basically, we marry the storage and the application consistent in the storage into the container so that the container's databases, or applications, come to life. >> And that could be in a customer's data center, in a public Cloud, Kubernetes enabled, all of that? >> Absolutely, it can be anywhere, and with 10C, what we have done is we've also integrated with Cloud Native Snapshot, so if you talk about net neutrality for the container platform, if it's on premises, we have all kinds of access to the storage, the infrastructure, and the platforms so our processing is very different. If you take it to the Cloud, let's say Google, Google Kubernetes platform is fairly, it's a black box. You get some storage, and you get containers. And you have an API access to the storage. So in Google, we automatically autotune and start taking the Google snapshots to take the storage perfection, so that's the other way we've kind of neutralized the platform. >> Yeah, you've got a, thinking about it just from a customer's standpoint, one of the big challenges there is they've got everything from their big monoliths, they're big databases, through these microservice Cloud native architectures there, and it sounds like you know, is that just one of the fundamental architectural designs to make sure that you can span across those environments and give customers a common look and feel between those environments? >> Absolutely. The single pane of glass is a big askt and a big focus for us, not just across infrastructure, it's across geos and across all platforms. So you could have workloads running AIX6, VMware, in the Cloud, all the way through containers, and manage it all to a single console, to know when was the last good backup, how many copies of the database am I running, and each of these databases could have their own security constructs. So we normalize all of those elements and put them in a single console. >> Okay, 10C, shipping today? >> 10C shipping today, we have early access to a few customers, the general availability releases possibly in the February timeframe. >> Okay, and if I'm an existing Actifio customer, what's the path for me to get to 10C? >> Our support will reach out and do a simple software upgrade, it's available on all Cloud platforms, it's available everywhere, so you will see that on all the marketplaces and the regular upgrade process will get you that. >> Okay, and if I'm not an Actifio customer today, how easy is it for me to try this out? >> Oh, it is very easy, with our Actifio go SAS platform, it's a one-click download, you can download and try it out, try all the capabilities of the platform, it's also available on all the Cloud marketplaces for you to go and access that. >> All right, well, Ashok, a whole lot of pieces inside of 10C, congratulations to you and the team for building that, and definitely look forward to hearing more about the customer deployments. >> Thank you, we have exciting times ahead. >> All right. Lots more coverage from theCUBE throughout 2020, be sure to check out theCUBE.net, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Fontainebleau, Miami, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host for this segment, Justin Warren. Justin it's great to see you. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, day two of our coverage of VeeamON 2019 here in Miami. Jason Buffington, @Jbuff is here, he's the vice president of solution strategy congratulations on the promotion and great to see you again, my friend. >> Thank you very much. >> Dave: And Nathan Hughes who is the IT director at Flex-N-Gate. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. We love to get the customer's perspective, so welcome. >> Great to be here. >> Okay, so, Jason let me start with you. Former analyst, you've been at Veeam now for long enough to A, get promoted, but also, get the Kool-Aid injection, you're wearing the green, and, what are the big trends that you're seeing in the market that are really driving this next era, what do guys call it? Act two of data protection? >> Sure. So, I preached on this even before I joined Veeam that every 10 years or so, when the industry shifts the platform of choice, the data protection vendors almost always reset, right? The people that lead in NetWare don't lead in Windows. The people that lead in Windows didn't lead in Vert. The next wave is we're moving from servers to services. Right, we're going from on prem into cloud and so, and every time the problem is the secret sauce doesn't line up, right? So you got to reinvent yourself each time. And what we saw in the past generations, what we learned from, is, you can't be so busy taking care of your install base that you forget to keep innovating on what that next platform is and so for us, act two is all about cloud. We're going to take everything we know about reliability but we're moving into cloud. The difference is, that in virtualization there was one hero scenario. VMs, right? This time around it's IaaS, it's SaaS, it's PaaS, it's using cloud storage, it's BaaS and DRaaS, there's not a single hero scenario which means we have a lot more innovation to do. That's round two. >> And you made that point today, you used the Archimedes quote, give me a lever and a fulcrum and I'll change the world. You used the analogy of backup as now becoming much more than just backup, it's data protection, it's data management, we're going to get into that. And test some of that with Nathan. So, Nathan, tell us about Flex-N-Gate what does the company do and what does your role as IT director entail? >> Okay, so Flex-N-Gate is a tier one automotive supplier. Which means that we provide parts, most of the things that go into a car besides electronics and glass, to the final automotive makers. So most of the companies that you're familiar with when you go to buy one. >> Okay, so you guys are global, I think you've got what, 24,000 associates worldwide, 64 locations. So what're some of the things that are, fundamental drivers of your business, that are rippling through to your IT strategy? >> Well, our business is varied in the sense that we do a lot of different things in house so, we do, obviously, manufacturing, that's a big part of what we do. And then, even that is broken down into different kinds and then beyond manufacturing we have advanced product development and engineering so we do a lot of that in house. >> Dave: You support it all? >> Yes. >> So you've got diverse lines of business, you've got different roles and personas, you know, engineers versus business people versus finance people. And you got to make 'em all happy. >> We've got to make 'em all happy. >> So, one of the things I love about manufacturing examples, is if you think about it it's the two extremes of high tech and low tech, right? On the low tech side of things you've got this manufacturing floor and it's just producing real stuff, not the zeros and ones that we live with, but real things come off this line. And then you have the engineering and R and D side. Where they're absolutely focused on stuff that comes out of some engineer's head into a computer, which is truly unique data, so, one of the things I love about the story is, talk about the downtime challenges you have around the manufacturing floor. Because I learned some things when we first met, that I think is phenomenal when it comes to manufacturing things that I didn't realize. >> Sure. So, we have a lot of different kinds of manufacturing environments. Some of them are more passive and some of them are more active. The most active environments are, a form of manufacturing known as sequencing. And it's sort of where you bring final assembly of parts together right before they go to the customer. The way that customers order up parts these days, it's not like they used to back in the 70s and 80s. Where they would warehouse huge volumes of everything on their site and then just draw it down if they needed it. And you just kept the queue full. Now they want everything just in time delivery. So they basically want parts to come to the line right when they're needed and actually in the order they're needed. So, a final car maker, they're not necessarily making, 300 of the same thing in a row, they're going to make one of this in blue and one of that in red and they're all going to be sequenced behind each other, one right after the other on the assembly line. And they want the parts from the suppliers to come in the exact right order for that environment. So, the challenge with that from our perspective is that we have trucking windows that are between 30, maybe 60 minutes on the high end, and if anything goes badly, you can put the customer down. And now you're talking about stopping production at Ford, Chrysler, GM, whatever. And that's a lot of money and a lot of other suppliers impacted. >> Dave: So this is a data problem isn't it? >> Yeah, it definitely is. And it's an interesting point, 'cause, you talk about sequencing. Veeam has their own sequence about how customers use the product and they start with backup, everything starts with backup, and then they move further to the right so that you get, ideally, to fully automated data protection. So, what are you actually using Veeam for today? And where do you see yourself going with Veeam? >> So, right now, we're using Veeam primarily as backup and recovery. It's how we started with it. We came from another product that was, great conceptually, but in the real world it had terrible reliability and its performance was very poor as time went on and so, when Veeam came on the scene it was a breath of fresh air because we got to the place where we knew that what we had was dependable, it was reliable. We got to understand how the product worked and to improve the way that we'd implemented it. And so, one of the key features in Veeam that really actually excited us, especially in those sequencing environments are these instant recovery options, right? So, we were used to the idea of having to write down a VM out of snapshot storage. And then being put in a position where it might take an hour, two hours, three hours before you could get that thing back online now, or again, to be able to launch that right out of snapshot storage was a blessing in the industry we're in. >> Yeah, did you see the tech demo yesterday where they were showing off how you could do an instant recovery directly from cloud storage? >> Yes, yeah. >> Did that get you excited? >> Yes. That is exciting. >> Are you using cloud at the moment or is this something that you're looking to move towards? >> Cloud is something we're sort of investigating but it's not something that we're actively utilizing right now. >> So this instance recovery, you guys obviously make a big deal out of that, I was talking to Danny Allan yesterday offline about it. He claims it's unique in the industry. And I asked him a question, I said specifically, if you lose the catalog, can I actually get the data back? And he said yes. And I'm like, that sounds like magic. So, so I guess my question to maybe both of you is, instant, how instant? And how does it actually work? (he laughs) >> It just works, isn't that? >> It just works! >> It's just magic, new tagline? >> I guess we don't have to get into the weeds but when you say, when I hear instant recovery, we're talking like, (fingers clicking) instantaneous recovery with, very short RTOs? >> To us what that means is that in practice, we can expect to have a VM from snapshot data back into production in about a five minute window. >> Dave: Five minutes? Okay. >> And that is sufficient for our needs in any environment. >> Okay, so now we're talking RTO, right? And then, what about, so we said 64 sites across the world, 24,000 associates, is Veeam your enterprise wide data protection strategy or are you rolling it out now? Where are you at? >> Yes, no. Veeam, we started with it in a handful of key sites. And we were using it to specifically back up SharePoint and a few other platforms. But once we understood what the product was capable of, and we were sort of reaching the end of our rope with this former product, yeah, we began an active roll out and we've now had Veeam in our facilities for five, six years. >> So you swept the floor of that previous product. And how complicated was it for you to move from the legacy product to Veeam? >> It was a challenge just rethinking the way that we do things, the previous product, one thing that it really had going for it, if this could be considered a positive, I guess, is that it was very very simple to set up. So, you could take an entry level IT administrator and they just next, next, next, next, next. And it would do all the things that they needed it to do. But the problem was that in the real world, that was sort of the Achilles' Heel, because, it meant that it wasn't very well customized and it meant also that, the way that they've developed that product, it became performance, it had poor performance. >> So the reason I ask that question is because, so many times customers are stuck. And it's like they don't want to move, because it's a pain. But the longer they go, the more costly it is, down the road. So I'm always looking to IT practitioners like, advice that you would give in terms of others, things that you might do differently if you had a mulligan, I don't know, maybe you would've started sooner, or maybe there were some things that you'd do differently. What would you advise? >> Yeah, I mean, if we'd understood, the whole context of what was happening with that other product, we would've moved sooner. And the one thing that I will say about Veeam is, it's not click and point. It does involve a little more setup. But the Veeam team is excellent when it comes to support. So there's nothing to fear in that category because they stand behind their product and it's very easy to get qualified technicians to help you out. >> Is that by design? >> I don't know if it's. Well, the being great to work with, yes, that's by design. >> Yeah, but I mean. >> I was talking to Danny yesterday and asked about the interface thing. Because there is always that tension between making it really really simple to use but then it doesn't have any knobs to change when you need to. >> That's what I'm asking. >> But it can't be too complex either. >> Our gap actually comes a little bit later in the process, right? So, you asked earlier about, in what ways do you use Veeam? And we think about Veeam as a progression, right? So, everybody if they're using Veeam at all, they're using it for Veeam backup and replication and because foundationally, until you can protect your stuff, right? Until you can reliably do that, all the other stuff that you'd like to do around data management is aspirational and unattainable at best, right? So, we think the journey comes in at yeah, it is pretty easy, to go next, next, next, finish. Just a few tweaks, right? To get backup going. But then when you go beyond that, now there's a whole range of other things you can do, right? So Danny, I'm sure, talked about DataLabs yesterday. The orchestration engine, those are not, next, next, next, finish. But anything that's worthwhile takes a little bit of effort, right? So as we pivot from, now that you've solved backup, then you can do those other things and that's where we really start going back into something which is really more expertise driven. >> Well, and it's early days too and as you get more data and more experience you can begin to automate things. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Justin was asking, Nathan, where the direction is. Today it's really backup. You've seen the stages where, talking about full automation. Is that something that, is on the horizon, it is sort of near term, midterm, longterm? >> I mean, coming to the conference, our experience with backup, or Veeam, is primarily backup and recovery operations but, I've seen a lot of things in the last few days that have piqued my interest. Particularly when it comes to the cloud integration. That's being actively baked into the product now. And, some of the automated, API stuff, that's being built into the product. Any place where I can get to where we simplify our procedures for recovery, that's a plus. So I'm really excited about the idea of the virtual labs, being able to actively test backup on a regular basis without human intervention and have reporting out of that. Those are things that I don't see in any other product that's out there. >> You know, there's another piece of the innovation that we should think through, and, so we've talked about the sequencing side which is where we focus on RTO, how fast can you get back and running again? And when you and I talked earlier, the example that we worked on was think of a zipper, right? You've got the bumpers coming in to a line of cars and if either side slows down, everything breaks, and at the end, by the way, is the truck, right? And everything has to come at the same time at the same rate, if there's downtime on either side of the source, you're done. But that's an RTO problem. The engineering side, for high tech, is an RPO problem, right? You have unique stuff coming out of somebody's brain into a PC and it'll never come out that way again. And so, when we look at backup and replication, that should be the next pieces to go on. And then as you mentioned, DataLabs becomes really interesting and orchestration, so. >> Well speaking of human brains, and you kind of touched on it, Nathan, that you came here to learn some things and you've learned things from different sessions. So, what is it about coming to VeeamON that is worth the time for IT practitioners like yourself? >> I think it's all those, I mean we were talking about Veeam, doing backup and recovery operations, fairly straightforwardly, in terms of getting in, but once you see some of this stuff here at a conference like this, you get a better sense of all the more, elaborate aspects of the product. And, you wouldn't get that >> See the possibilities. >> I think, if you were just sitting in front of it using it conventionally, this is a good place to really learn the depth and the level that you can go with it. >> And you're like most of your peers here, is that right, highly virtualized, is that right? Lot of Microsoft apps. And, they say, mid-sized global organization, actually kind of bumping up into big. >> Nathan: Sure. >> Yeah, cool. I asked about the data problem before, it sounds like the zipper's coming together, that's some funky math that you got to figure out to make sure everything's there. So, talk about the data angle. How important data is to your organization, we know much data's growing, data's the new oil, all those promides but, what about your organization specifically as it relates to a digital strategy? It's a buzzword that we hear a lot but, does it have meaning for you, and what does it mean? >> Data is vital in any organization. I mean, we were referencing earlier, how you've got low tech in manufacturing, or at least people think of it as lower tech. And then high tech in R and D, and how those things merge together in a single company. But the reality is all of that is data driven, right? Even when you go to the shop floor, all your scheduling, all your automation equipment, all this stuff is talking and it's all laying down data. You're putting rivets in the parts, you're probably taking pictures of that now with imagers when you're in manufacturing. And you do that so that if you get 300 bad ones you can see exactly when that started and what happened at the machine level, right? So, >> That's a good one. >> We're just constantly collecting massive volumes of new data, and being able to store that reliably is everything. >> Well, and the reason I'm asking is you guys have been around for a while and your a highly distributed organization so, in the old days, even still today, you'd build, you'd get a server for an application, you'd harden that application, you'd secure that box and the application running on it, you'd lock the data inside and, my question is, can, the backup approach, the data protection approach, the data management, or whatever we want to call it, can it help solve that data silo problem? Is that part of the strategy or is it just too early for that? >> I'm, sorry, I'm going to get you to repeat that question in a slightly different way. >> Yeah so, am I correct that you've got data in silos from all the years and years and years of building up applications and-- >> I mean, we have-- >> And can you use something like Veeam to help unify that data model? >> Draw that all together? Yeah. I think a lot of that has, it's more on the hosting side, right? So it depends on how those systems were rolled out originally and all that kind of thing. But yeah, as we've moved towards Veeam, we've necessarily rebuilt some of those systems in such a way that they are more aggregated and that Veeam can pick them up in an integrated kind of way. >> You see that as a common theme? Veeam as one of the levers of the fulcrum to new data architecture? >> We're getting there, so here's the trick. So, first you got to solve for basic protection, right? But the next thing along the way to really get towards data management is you got to know what you got, right? You got to know what's actually in those zeros and ones. And so, some of the things that you've already seen from us are around what we do around GDPR compliance, some of the things we do around sanitization of data for DevOps scenarios and reuse scenarios. All of that opens up a box of, okay, now that the data is curated. Now that it's ingested into our system, what else can you do with it? You know, when I talk to C-level execs, what I tell them is, data protection, no matter who it comes from, including Veeam, is really expensive if the only thing you do is put that data in a box and wait for bad things to happen, right? Now the good news is, bad things are going to happen, so you're going to get ROI. But better is don't just leave your data in a box, right? Do other stuff with that data, unlock the value of it and some of that value comes in, now that I'm more aware of it, let's reduce some of the copies, let's reduce some of the compliance mandates. Let's only put data that has sovereignty requirements where it goes, but to do all of that, you got to know what you got. >> Go ahead, please. >> There was some impressive demo yesterday about exactly that, so, we have the data. You can use the API to script it and you can do all kinds of, basically, you're limited by your imagination. So it's going to be fascinating to see what customers do with it once they've put it in place, they've got their data protected. And then they start playing with things, come to a conference like this and learn, ooh, I might just give that a try on my data when I get back home. >> That's right. >> We'll give the customer the last word, Nathan. Impressions of VeeamON 2019? >> It's been great. And like I say, if you're a company that's been using Veeam even for a while, and you have your entry level setup for backup and recovery and I think there's a lot of, probably, companies out there that use Veeam in that kind of way, this is a great place to have a better understanding of all that's available to you in that product. And there's a lot more than just meets the eye. >> And it's fun, good food, fun people. Thanks you guys for coming on, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante, Justin Warren, and Peter Burris is also here. VeeamON 2019, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Ciscolive! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our first day of three days of coverage for Cisco live for Europe. Lynn Lucas is here, she's the chief marketing officer for Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent so, another first. >> Yeah, another first. >> So pleased to be in the US with you guys at multiple shows, and now we're here in Barcelona. >> So it's a great venue. We've actually done you know, a number of shows here and again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys in Cisco? You got some news? Let's talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> As you know, we don't stop innovating, continuous innovation at Cohesity, and a number of new things. So, last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with HyperFlex, and Cohesity integrating for Snapshot. Integration for backup, and of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure and we're calling it HyperSquared. So you get full hyperconvergence for your primary and of course, your backup and other secondary applications. >> And those guys this morning talked about HyperFlex anywhere Stu so, it's like infinitive hype and infinity HyperFlex. >> HyperSquared. >> So, HyperSquared, love it. So you guys will, how's that work? Obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider for multi-cloud. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you do that? You'll plug into whatever framework the customer wants, presumably a lot of customers want the Cisco framework, how does that all- >> No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously one of the most respected IT leaders in the world. Tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm a Cisco Alum, love being back here at the old stomping grounds. And Cisco's been an investor in Cohesity now since our Series C, so they really saw the promise and the benefit of what Cohesity offers with hyperconverge solutions for modern backup, recovery, and two year point to the cloud. You know Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud here and Cohesity with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on, or those applications on HyperFlex. And then instantly move them to a cloud of choice and then as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that they're a very strong go to market partner with us. When customers want to buy a solution, they can get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesity. >> Yeah Lynn, glad we have you on. >> Because connecting the dots between something like hyperconverge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now and how that fits into multi-cloud is, it's a little clunky sometimes because like, when I've got my data center am I just doing backup to the cloud? Cause what we know is customers at Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de-centered. It's no longer in the data center, it's all over the place. Companies like Cohesity can give you that centralized data protection no matter where your environment is. Walk us through what you're hearing from your customers, how they look at their data center versus the multicloud environment and data production. >> Yeah so, I think it's you know, customers are now understanding that its not either or, right? There was a time when people thought "wow I'm going to move everything to the cloud" and I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud first world, what do I want to put there and then what am I going to keep on premises. So that's one of the things that Cohesity innovated; our core technology, a distributed webscale file system, spanning file system which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers are really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need to. Tiering and then most importantly, disaster recovery you know, in the event of something man made or natural. Many many organizations moving to the cloud for their second site and with Cohesity, it's very easy to make that transfer happen in a very seamless way with our capabilities set. So I think what we're seeing is this real maturing of how customers look at it as a real holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered, but we call this mass data fragmentation and then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now. >> Yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. >> I know its something that's in your product, there was a ransomware announcement that you made last week. Tell us how security fits into this world. >> Yeah well I think that we all hate to say it, but that old phrase the new normal, unfortunately ransomware and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. Here in Europe we had that awful situation with the NHS and the UK last year, and it's happening everywhere. So one element that these attackers are taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy, that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what Cohesity has introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's detect, prevent, and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right? And then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification. And then if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration, the spanning file system doing this instantly, and allowing an organization to basically say "sorry, not today attackers", we don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit if we could. The detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that? You're observing the behavior of the backup corpus, is that right? Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there. >> That's correct. >> So, last year we introduced Helios, which is our global sass space management system. It has machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the IT team. >> And then the recovery piece as well like you said, its got to be fast. You got to have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system is that what I'm hearing or the architecture? >> That's correct. >> That's one of the differences of our modern backup. Solution versus some of the non-hyperconverge architectures is the distributed web file system which our CEO, Mohit Aron, he was formerly at Google, helped with developing their file system, has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one VM. At Vmware a couple years ago we demonstrated thousands of VMs at a time and the reason for that is this web scale file system, which is really unique to Cohesity. And that's what allows an IT organization to not be held hostage because they can not have to potentially spend not just hours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate, you know, these backups. If they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ransomware may have been introduced not say yesterday, but it might have been several months ago. And that's one of the key advantages of this instant mass restore. >> I mean, this is super important right Stu? Cause we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up, dial down, you can tune it by application. A high value application, you can have much greater granularity. Some of the craplications, maybe not as important. So the flexibility is key there. How about customers? Any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. >> So one of the ones since we're here at Ciscolive! So Cisco along with Cohesity, we've been working with one of the largest global manufactures of semiconductors and other electronic equipment. Tokyo Electron based in Tokyo, but also here in the UK on the continent. They had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with the time it was taking them to backup, the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesity, running on Cisco UCS because we're a software defined platform. We offer our software on our customers choice of certified solutions and of Cisco UCS. So they've started with backup but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape, and to disaster recovery ultimately. So, super excited that together with Cisco, we can help this customer modernize their data center and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys are also protecting the Cisco live network here? Tell us about that. >> Yeah so you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here I mean, you've seen the operation center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things can go wrong potentially. And so, we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of the Ciscolive! Attendees here so should something happen, which I'm sure won't, Cohesity will be used to instantly recover and bring back up critical services like DNS and other areas that they're depending on to serve all of the thousands of show goers here. >> So, super hot space, we talked about this at VMworld. Actually last couple of years just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing and I wonder if you could comment. It used to be backup when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection, data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To us storage folks its pretty specific but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space, cloud clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind, and it requires you guys to respond as an industry. And Cohesity specifically as a company. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and how you're leading. >> Yeah. Yeah I think, you know, folks have been a little bit surprised like wait a minute, what's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean our own Series D funding, middle of last year 250 million dollars, Softbank banked along with Sequoia of course. But really the trend is being talked about here at Ciscolive! Is data is, I don't want to say the new oil, but its the water of the world right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business these days. Other than your talent, it's your most important business asset and the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CIO in turn to be agile, to do more with that data, to know what you have, because here we are in Europe, GDPR increasing regulations, is super important. And so, you know, this has really brought forth the need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility to all of that data. And it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation, and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most peoples minds, you know. You think about your primary applications in data that's really only 20% and the other 80% in testev and analytics and backup, has been pretty fragmented and siloed and it hasn't yet had that vision of how can we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mohit Aron you know, founded Cohesity and applied those same hyperconverge techniques that he did at Nutanix. So I think this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protect it, and then ultimately do more with it. Gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that. >> One is you know, we always joke about data is the new oil, its even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places, you can only put oil in your car once. And so, companies are beginning to realize that. How valuable it is, trying to understand that value, how to protect that, and then GDPR. It's interesting, its really the fines went into effect in Europe last May. But its become a template, a framework globally. People, you know, US companies are saying alright we got to prepare for GDPR, and then local jurisdictions are now saying well that's a decent starting point. And so its not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is. >> You brought up the cloud before, and you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility in talking to a large CIO of Fortune 100, a large organization, he actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of testev, and that is creating more stress I would say in the system, and need for solutions to both provide and enhance that agility, move data to the cloud easily, move it out when you need to, but also with regulation be able to identify and delete as you know, with GDPR if needed, the information that your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah well, I love this conversation. >> I love following Cohesity because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now and the problem with data protection is there's always been a bolt on. And companies like Cohesity, both with the funding, your vision, you're really forcing the industry to kind of rethink data protection. Not as a bolt on but as a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategies. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you've got more to go. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and its always a pleasure to see you. >> Always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante from Ciscolive! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE! Covering, CloudNOW's 7th Annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at Facebook headquarters. We're here for the 7th Annual CloudNOW Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Our third time covering this event, and we're excited to welcome to theCube, one of tonight's winners, Masha Sedova, the co-founder of Elevate Security. Masha, welcome to theCUBE! >> Lisa, thank you so much for having me, it's really great to be here. >> And congratulations on the award. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So you are a security expert, you studied, you were a STEM kid back in school, but you had this really interesting experience when you were at Salesforce a few years ago, related to security, where you went, I think I see one of the things people have been missing where cyber security is concerned. Tell us about that aha moment. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, having grown up in the security field, there's this saying that, the human is the weakest link. And I personally never believed that, and I was like, there's got to be a way of turning this around and so, I stepped back and said, What it would look like if people wanted to do security instead of had to? What it would look like if people were champions for security, and not because we made them do it, but because each of us were invested in it? And so, I took a step back from my Computer science and computer security background, and dove into the field of behavioral science, positive psychology, and game design. And started exploring how people think, and how we make decisions, to see if I can start applying that to security. And, would you know it, there's some really amazing findings that I came across in that space. >> So you were saying, before we went on that, a pretty significant percentage of breaches are, unfortunately, caused by us humans. >> Yeah, something like 95% have a human error related to it. And if you think about cyber attacks, it's a human being attacking another human being with a bunch of technology in the middle. And if we keep solving it with just technology we're going to keep ending up making the same mistakes we have been making for decades. But if we look at the human element, and why we make mistakes, and how we let ourselves learn from them and make better mistakes and also better choices, we can actually move the needle in a really significant way. >> So, Elevate Security co-founded just a couple of years ago. Really impressive with your board. Tell us about your leadership team and the board before we get into the significance of the name. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, it's co-founded by myself and my co-founder Robert Fly. So, we have a diverse founding team. And from the very beginning we believed that embracing our diversity, in our hires would be of significant differentiator and not just the way we hire, but also the way we build our product. Because we're building products for employees of a whole bunch of companies all over the world and so it was really important to us. And so, to date we're 50% women including our engineering team and we have an all outside female board, board of directors which is a fact I'm really excited to announce today. >> Excited and proud. So when you had this idea, (clears throat) excuse me, and clearly all of the data show that, like you said if we keep throwing technology at the problem with security we're not going to solve it. >> Yeah >> What were the conversations like as a female co-founder, going in and trying to get funding for this idea in something as, hot of a topic and sensitive as cyber security? >> Yeah, you know, it was challenging. Fundraising, I think if you ask any founder you'd say, it would be challenging. I would recommend anybody going into this know your stuff, and stand up behind it, know that you have experience and an idea or a brand, that brings you to the table, brings something to the table and that you have that behind you. So, just because several VCs might say no it doesn't mean that your idea's not worth fighting for or coming to life. And so, it took us a while but we found a fantastic set of venture partners to back us who had very similar philosophies in the way they both raise money and supported entrepreneurship and it's really exciting, exciting time to be have partnered with them. >> So, one of the things you mentioned before went on was the card that your mom gave you. >> Yeah. >> I think that's so inspiring and share that with our audience for those who might have a great idea like you did but say, I keep being told no. >> Yeah, just 'cause it's hard, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. If I, were to have gotten to the end of my life and I didn't try starting a company, I knew that I was always regret it. And, that is something I definitely couldn't live with. And, the card that my mom sent me, it was in late in 2016 it said, "A ship is safe in the harbor "but that is not what ships are built for." And I realized, I had to do this. I absolutely had to start this company, I had to see where it goes and I have a unique perspective and a unique set of experiences in the world. And ideas about how this really hard problem can be solved and I want to see it come to life. And I have had the opportunity to gather an amazing team around me to help me make that vision come to life and I'm really excited to see where it goes. >> So in terms of where it's going, humans are sensitive people. >> (chuckles) Yeah. >> When you're talking with companies, >> Yeah. >> Whether they're born in the cloud companies or legacy enterprise companies and you're saying, Hey, guys it's your people, we're all human. >> Yeah. >> From a cultural response. >> Yeah. >> What's that conversation like do they understand it? And how do you help them go from those really, like we were talking about boring-- >> Yeah. >> Videos and training tutorials to actually, impacting behavior? >> Mm hmm Yeah, so there's two schools of thought in security field. It's the people who believe that human element can't be solved, that humans will always make mistakes, so we need to throw as much technology at it as possible. We've been doing that for three decades and it hasn't worked. And honestly I'm waiting for that generation to move on until we get a new set of ideas in. And what I'm seeing is the up and coming, set of security leadership coming in saying, You know what? Let's try something new, let's try something different. And, you know, I have invested in technology and it hasn't solved it. What if we try a different approach? And, the thing is, security people aren't known for our human expertise. We're good at a lot of other things, but not human expertise, and so bringing in things like behavioral science which is known for understanding how and why we make decisions is a perfect combination to solve this problem that, to date has been unsolvable. Because we really haven't been bringing in expertise outside of our field which on the topic of diversity, is exactly what we need. >> Exactly. So what are you looking forward to as we are just about in the finishing the first month of 2019? >> Oh yeah so, we'll be at RSA at the end of February, early March speaking about our brand new product Snapshot. But I'm also really excited to continue hiring out our team. We are hiring tons of engineers, so if anyone is looking please-- >> Where can they go? >> Elevatesecurity.com. >> Elevatesecurity.com. >> Mm Hmm, yeah, and so continuing to build out our team in San Francisco and in Montreal. >> Well Masha, congratulations on the award, on this really innovative idea bringing in, behavior to security. We appreciate your time and look forward to seeing more of what you guys are about to do. >> Thank you so much. >> Congratulations. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook. See you next time. 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(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Ciscolive! Europe brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our first day of three days of coverage for Cisco live for Europe. Lynn Lucas is here, she's the chief marketing officer for Cohesity. Lynn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you here in Europe. >> We were just saying it's the first time that we've done this on the continent so, another first. >> Yeah, another first. >> So pleased to be in the US with you guys at multiple shows, and now we're here in Barcelona. >> So it's a great venue. >> We've actually done you know, a number of shows here and again, it's a pleasure having you on. Let's see, let's get right to it. What's going on with you guys in Cisco? You got some news? Let's talk about it. >> Absolutely. >> As you know, we don't stop innovating, continuous innovation at Cohesity, and a number of new things. So, last week we announced a new Cisco validated design with HyperFlex, and Cohesity integrating for Snapshot. Integration for backup, and of course, instant recovery of that critical data center infrastructure and we're calling it HyperSquared. So you get full hyperconvergence for your primary and of course, your backup and other secondary applications. >> And those guys this morning talked about HyperFlex anywhere Stu so, it's like infinitive hype and infinity HyperFlex. >> HyperSquared. >> So, HyperSquared, love it. So you guys will, how's that work? Obviously you want to be the provider of data protection provider for multi-cloud. That's a huge opportunity for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So how do you do that? You'll plug into whatever framework the customer wants, presumably a lot of customers want the Cisco framework, how does that all- >> No, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, Cisco, obviously one of the most respected IT leaders in the world. Tens of thousands of customers globally depend on them. I'm a Cisco Alum, love being back here at the old stomping grounds. And Cisco's been an investor in Cohesity now since our Series C, so they really saw the promise and the benefit of what Cohesity offers with hyperconverge solutions for modern backup, recovery, and two year point to the cloud. You know Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud here and Cohesity with our native cloud integration helps customers protect those backups on, or those applications on HyperFlex. And then instantly move them to a cloud of choice and then as you've mentioned, Cisco has so many fantastic relationships that they're a very strong go to market partner with us. When customers want to buy a solution, they can get the whole solution from Cisco, including Cohesity. >> Yeah Lynn, glad we have you on. >> Because connecting the dots between something like hyperconverge, which we've been talking about for a number of years now and how that fits into multi-cloud is, it's a little clunky sometimes because like, when I've got my data center am I just doing backup to the cloud? Cause what we know is customers at Cisco says their data is, you know, kind of de-centered. It's no longer in the data center, it's all over the place. Companies like Cohesity can give you that centralized data protection no matter where your environment is. Walk us through what you're hearing from your customers, how they look at their data center versus the multicloud environment and data production. >> Yeah so, I think it's you know, customers are now understanding that its not either or, right? There was a time when people thought "wow I'm going to move everything to the cloud" and I really think there's a maturing of an understanding of what's going to work well for me in this cloud first world, what do I want to put there and then what am I going to keep on premises. So that's one of the things that Cohesity innovated; our core technology, a distributed webscale file system, spanning file system which spans the data center and the cloud world seamlessly. And what we're seeing is customers are really using the cloud for archiving, getting off of tape because then they get that search capability very easy when they need to. Tiering and then most importantly, disaster recovery you know, in the event of something man made or natural. Many many organizations moving to the cloud for their second site and with Cohesity, it's very easy to make that transfer happen in a very seamless way with our capabilities set. So I think what we're seeing is this real maturing of how customers look at it as a real holistic environment. And so Cisco calling it data centered, but we call this mass data fragmentation and then with our spanning file system being able to really consolidate that now. >> Yeah, another thing that needs that kind of holistic view is security. >> I know its something that's in your product, there was a ransomware announcement that you made last week. Tell us how security fits into this world. >> Yeah well I think that we all hate to say it, but that old phrase the new normal, unfortunately ransomware and malware has become the new normal for organizations of all sizes. Here in Europe we had that awful situation with the NHS and the UK last year, and it's happening everywhere. So one element that these attackers are taking is looking at how to disable backups. And so this is really important that as a part of a holistic security strategy, that organizations take a look at that attack vector. So what Cohesity has introduced is really unique. It's three steps. It's detect, prevent, and then recover. So detect in terms of capabilities to see if there are nefarious changes being happened to the file system right? And then prevent with Helios automatically detecting and with our smart assistant providing that notification. And then if need be, recover with our instant mass restore capability going back to any point in time with no performance issue. This is not taking time for the rehydration, the spanning file system doing this instantly, and allowing an organization to basically say "sorry, not today attackers", we don't need to pay you because we can instantly restore back to a safe point in time. >> So let's unpack those a little bit if we could. The detect piece, I presume there's an analytics component to that? You're observing the behavior of the backup corpus, is that right? Which is a logical place because it's got all the corporate data in there. >> That's correct. >> So, last year we introduced Helios, which is our global sass space management system. It has machine learning capability in it. And that's providing that machine learning based monitoring to see what kinds of anomalies may be happening that is then proactively alerted to the IT team. >> And then the recovery piece as well like you said, its got to be fast. You got to have high performance, high performance data movement, and that's fundamental to your file system is that what I'm hearing or the architecture? >> That's correct. >> That's one of the differences of our modern backup. Solution versus some of the non-hyperconverge architectures is the distributed web file system which our CEO, Mohit Aron, he was formerly at Google, helped with developing their file system, has what's called instant ability to go back into any point in time and recover not just one VM. At Vmware a couple years ago we demonstrated thousands of VMs at a time and the reason for that is this web scale file system, which is really unique to Cohesity. And that's what allows an IT organization to not be held hostage because they can not have to potentially spend not just hours, but even days with the old legacy systems trying to rehydrate, you know, these backups. If they have to go back potentially many months in time because you don't know that that ransomware may have been introduced not say yesterday, but it might have been several months ago. And that's one of the key advantages of this instant mass restore. >> I mean, this is super important right Stu? Cause we're talking about very granular levels of being able to dial up, dial down, you can tune it by application. A high value application, you can have much greater granularity. Some of the craplications, maybe not as important. So the flexibility is key there. How about customers? Any new customers that you can talk about? >> Absolutely. >> So one of the ones since we're here at Ciscolive! So Cisco along with Cohesity, we've been working with one of the largest global manufactures of semiconductors and other electronic equipment. Tokyo Electron based in Tokyo, but also here in the UK on the continent. They had one of those older backup solutions and were challenged with the time it was taking them to backup, the restores not being predictable. So they've gone with Cohesity, running on Cisco UCS because we're a software defined platform. We offer our software on our customers choice of certified solutions and of Cisco UCS. So they've started with backup but they're now moving very quickly into archiving to the cloud, helping reduce their costs and get off of tape, and to disaster recovery ultimately. So, super excited that together with Cisco, we can help this customer modernize their data center and accelerate their hybrid cloud strategy at the same time. >> Awesome. And then you guys are also protecting the Cisco live network here? Tell us about that. >> Yeah so you know, Cisco builds an amazing network here I mean, you've seen the operation center, a huge team of people. But as we all know, things can go wrong potentially. And so, we are protecting the critical services that Cisco's providing to all of the Ciscolive! Attendees here so should something happen, which I'm sure won't, Cohesity will be used to instantly recover and bring back up critical services like DNS and other areas that they're depending on to serve all of the thousands of show goers here. >> So, super hot space, we talked about this at VMworld. Actually last couple of years just how much activity and interest there is and the whole parlance is changing and I wonder if you could comment. It used to be backup when the world was tape. Now you're talking about data protection, data management, which could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To us storage folks its pretty specific but you're seeing a massive evolution of the space, cloud clearly is the underpinning of the tailwind, and it requires you guys to respond as an industry. And Cohesity specifically as a company. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those major trends and how you guys are responding and how you're leading. >> Yeah. Yeah I think, you know, folks have been a little bit surprised like wait a minute, what's this kind of sleepy industry? Why is it getting all this funding? I mean our own Series D funding, middle of last year 250 million dollars, Softbank banked along with Sequoia of course. But really the trend is being talked about here at Ciscolive! Is data is, I don't want to say the new oil, but its the water of the world right? I mean, it's absolutely crucial to any business these days. Other than your talent, it's your most important business asset and the pressure on the board and the CEO and the CIO in turn to be agile, to do more with that data, to know what you have, because here we are in Europe, GDPR increasing regulations, is super important. And so, you know, this has really brought forth the need to create holistic ways to organize and manage and have visibility to all of that data. And it's massively fragmented. We put out that research last year, massive data fragmentation, and most of that data has been kind of under the water line in most peoples minds, you know. You think about your primary applications in data that's really only 20% and the other 80% in testev and analytics and backup, has been pretty fragmented and siloed and it hasn't yet had that vision of how can we consolidate that and move it into a modern space until folks like Mohit Aron you know, founded Cohesity and applied those same hyperconverge techniques that he did at Nutanix. So I think this investment just further validates the fact that data is the most important business asset and people are really in need of new solutions to manage it, protect it, and then ultimately do more with it. Gain insights out of it. >> You know, just a couple comments on that. >> One is you know, we always joke about data is the new oil, its even more valuable because you can use data in multiple places, you can only put oil in your car once. And so, companies are beginning to realize that. How valuable it is, trying to understand that value, how to protect that, and then GDPR. It's interesting, its really the fines went into effect in Europe last May. But its become a template, a framework globally. People, you know, US companies are saying alright we got to prepare for GDPR, and then local jurisdictions are now saying well that's a decent starting point. And so its not just confined to Europe. It's really on everybody's mind. >> It is. >> You brought up the cloud before, and you know the cloud is a new way for people to be agile and they're getting a lot of value out of it. But it also continues to fragment their data and the visibility in talking to a large CIO of Fortune 100, a large organization, he actually has less visibility in many ways in the cloud because of the ease of proliferation of testev, and that is creating more stress I would say in the system, and need for solutions to both provide and enhance that agility, move data to the cloud easily, move it out when you need to, but also with regulation be able to identify and delete as you know, with GDPR if needed, the information that your customer may ask you to remove from your systems. >> Yeah well, I love this conversation. >> I love following Cohesity because you guys are up leveling the entire game. I've been following the data protection space for decades now and the problem with data protection is there's always been a bolt on. And companies like Cohesity, both with the funding, your vision, you're really forcing the industry to kind of rethink data protection. Not as a bolt on but as a fundamental component of digital strategies and data strategies. So it's fun watching you guys. Congratulations on all the growth. I know you've got more to go. So thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and its always a pleasure to see you. >> Always a pleasure to be here with you guys. Thanks very much. >> You're very welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante from Ciscolive! Barcelona. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(bright instrumental music) >> Hi everyone, I'm John Furrier. Here in the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, for a special Cube conversation on some big news from PureStorage. We're here with Chadd Kenney, who's the Vice President of Product and Solutions at PureStorage. Big Cloud news. A historic announcement from PureStorage. One of the fastest growing startups in the storage business. Went public, I've been following these guys since creation. Great success story in Silicon Valley and certainly innovative products. Now announcing a Cloud product. Cloud data services, now in market. Chadd, this is huge. >> It's exciting time. Thank you so much for having us. >> So you guys, obviously storage success story, but now the reality is changed. You know we've been saying in the Cube, nothing changes, you get storage computer networking, old way, new way in the Cloud. Game is still the same. Storage isn't going away. You got to store the data somewhere and the data tsunami is coming. Still coming with Edge and a bunch of other things. Cloud more important than ever. To get it right is super important. So, what is the announcement of Cloud Data Service. Explain what the product is, why you guys built it, why now. >> Awesome. So, a couple different innovations that are part of this launch to start with. We have Cloud Block Store which is taking Purity, which is our operating system found on-prem and actually moving it to AWS. And we spent a bunch of time optimizing these solutions to make it so that, we could actually take on tier one, mission critical applications. A key differentiator is that most folks were really chasing after test-dev and leveraging the Cloud for that type of use case. Whereas Cloud Block Storage, really kind of industry strength and ready for mission critical applications. We also took protection mechanisms from FlashArray on-premises and actually made it so that you could use CloudSnap and move and protect data into the public Cloud via portable snapshot technology. Which we can dig into a little bit later. And then the last part is, we thought it was really ripe to change data protection, just as a whole. Most people are doing kind of disc to disc, to tape, and then moving tape offsite. We believe the world has shifted. There's a big problem in data protection. Restoring data is not happening in the time frame that its needed, and SLAs aren't being met, and users are not happy with the overall solution as a whole. We believe that restorations from Flash are incredibly important to the business, but in order to get there you have to offset the economics. So what we're building is a Flash to Flash to Cloud solution which enables folks to be able to take the advantages of the economics of Cloud and be able to then have a caching mechanism of Flash on-premises. So that they can restore things relatively quickly for the predominant set of data that they have out there. >> And just so I get everything right here. You guys only been on-premises only, this is now a cloud solution. It's software. >> Correct. >> Why now? Why wait 'til now, is the timing right? What's the internal conversation? And why should customers know, is this the right time. >> So, the evolution of cloud has been pretty interesting as we've gone through it. Most customers went from kind of a 100% on-premises, the Cloud came out and said, hey, I'm going to move everything to the Cloud. They found that didn't work great for enterprise applications. And so they kind of moved back and realized that hybrid cloud was going to be a world with they wanted to leverage both. We're seeing a lot of other shifts in the market. VMware already having RDS in platform. Now it's true hybrid cloud kind of playing out there. Amazon running an AWS. It's a good mixture just to showcase where people really want to be able to leverage the capabilities of both. >> So it's a good time because the customers are re-architecting as well. >> It's all about- >> Hybrid applications are definitely what people want. >> 100% and the application stack, I think was the core focus that really shifted over time. Instead of just focusing on hybrid cloud infrastructure, it was really about how applications could leverage multiple types of clouds to be able to leverage the innovation and services that they could provide. >> You know, I've always been following the IT business for 30 years or so and it's always been an interesting trend. You buy something from a vendor and there's a trade-offs. And there's always the payback periods, but now I think with this announcement that's interesting is you got the product mix that allows customers to have choice and pick what they want. There's no more trade-offs. If they like cloud, they go to cloud. If they like on-premise, you go on-premises. >> It sounds like an easy concept, but the crazy part to this is the Cloud divide is real. They are very different environments. As we've talked to customers, they were very lost on how it was going to take and enterprise application and actually leverage the innovations within the Cloud. They wanted it, they needed it, but at the same time, they weren't able to deliver up on it. And so, we realized that the data layer, fundamentally was the area that could give them that bridge between those two environments. And we could add some core values to the Cloud for even the next generation developer who's developing in the Cloud to bring in, better overall resiliency. Management and all sorts of new features that they weren't able to take advantage of in traditional public cloud. >> You know Chugg wants to do minimal about the serviceless trend and how awesome that is. It's just, look at the resource pool as a serviceless pool of resource. So is this storageless? >> So it's still backed by storage, obviously. >> No, I was just making a joke. No wait, that you're looking at it as what serviceless is to the user. You guys are providing that same kind of storage pool, addressable through the application of, >> Correct >> as if it's storageless. And what's great about taking 100% software platform and moving it to the Cloud is, customer can spin this up in like minutes. And what's great about it is, they can spend many, many, many instances of these things for various different use cases that they have out there, and get true utility out of it. So they're getting the agility that they really want while not having to offset the values that they really come to love about PureStorage on-premises. Now they can actually get it all on the public cloud as well. >> I want to dig into the products a little bit. Before we get there, I want you to answer the question that's probably on people's minds. I know you've been at Pure, really from the beginning. So, you've seen the history. Most people look at you guys and say, well you're a hardware vendor. I have Pure boxes everywhere, you guys doing a great job. You've pioneered the Flash, speed game on storage. People want, kill latency as they say. You guys have done a great job. But wait a minute, this is software. Explain how you guys did this, why it's important. People might not know that this is a software solution. They might be know you for hardware. What's the difference? Is there a difference? Why should they care and what's the impact? >> So, great question. Since we sell hardware products, most people see us as a hardware company. But at the end of the day, the majority of vinge and dev is software. We're building software to make, originally, off the shelf components to be enterprise worthy. Over time we decided to optimize the hardware too, and that pairing between the software and hardware gets them inherently great values. And this is why we didn't just take our software and just kind of throw it into every cloud and say have it, to customers. Like a lot of folks did. We spent a lot of time, just like we did on our hardware platform, optimizing for AWS to start with. So that we could truly be able to leverage the inherent technologies that they have, but build software to make it even better. >> It's interesting, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim at VMworld, and he's a chairman of Arista. He's called, Les Peckgesem calls him the Rembrandt of motherboards. And he goes, "John, we're in the software business." And he goes, "Let me tell ya, hardware's easy. Software's hard." >> I agree. >> So everyone's pretty much in the software business. This is not a change for Pure. >> No, this is the same game we've been in. >> Great. Alright, let's get into the products. The first one is Cloud Block Store for AWS. Which is the way Amazon does the branch. So it's on Amazon, or for Amazon as they say. They use different words. So this is Pure software in the Cloud. Your company, technically Pure software. >> Yup. >> In the Cloud as software, no hardware. >> Yup. >> A 100% storage, API support, always encrypted, seamless management and orchestration, DR backup migration between clouds. >> Yup. >> That's kind of the core premise. So what does the product do, what's the purpose of the product. On the Amazon piece, if I'm a customer of Pure or a prospect for Pure, what does the product give me? What's the capabilities? >> Great. I would say that the biggest thing that customers get is just leverage for their application stack to be able to utilize the Cloud. And let me give you a couple of examples 'cause they're kind of fun. So first off, Cloud Block Storage is just software that sits in the Cloud that has many of the same utilities that run on-premises. Any by doing so, you get the ability to be able to do stuff like I want to replicate, as a DR target. So maybe I don't have a secondary site out there, and I want to have a DR target that spin up in the event of a disaster. You can easily set up bi-directional replication to the instance that you have running in the Cloud. It's the exact same experience. The exact same APIs and you get our cloud data management with Pure1 to be able to see both sites. One single pane of glass, and make sure everything is up and running and doing well. You could also though, leverage a test-dev environment. So let's saying I'm running production on-premises, I can then go ahead and replicate to the Cloud, spin up an instance for test-dev, and running reporting, run analytics. Run anything else that I wanted on top of that. And spin up compute relatively quickly. Maybe I don't have it on-prem. Next, we could focus on replicating for protection. Let's say for compliance, I want to have many instances to be able to restore back in the event of a disaster or in the event that I just want to look back during a period of time. The last part is, not just on-prem to the Cloud, but leveraging the Cloud for even better resiliency to take enterprise applications and actually move them without having to do massive re-architecture. If you look at what happens, Amazon recommends typically, that you have data in two different availability zones. So that when you put an application on top of it, it can be resilient to any sort of failures within an AZ. What we've done is we've taken our active cluster technology which is active-active replication between two instances, and made it so that you can actually replicate between two availability zones. And your application now doesn't need to be re-architected whatsoever. >> So you basically, if I get this right, you had core software that made all that Flash, on the box which is on-premise, which is a hardware solution. Which sounds like it was commodity boxes so this, components. >> Just like the Cloud. >> You take it to the Cloud as an amazing amount of boxes out there. They have tons of data centers. So you treat the Cloud as if it's a virtual device, so to speak. >> Correct. I mean the Cloud functionally is just compute and storage, and networking on the back end has been abstracted by some sort of layer in front of it. We're leveraging compute resources for our controllers and we're leveraging persistent storage media for our storage. But what we've done in software is optimize a bunch of things. An example just as one is, in the Cloud when you, procure storage, you pay for all of it, whether you leverage it or not. We incorporate de-dupe, compression, thin provisioning, AES 256 encryption on all data arrest. These are data services that are just embedded in that aren't traditionally found in a traditional cloud. >> This makes so much sense. If you're an application developer, you focus on building the app. Not worrying about where the storage is and how it's all managed. 'Cause you want persistent data and uni-managed state, and all this stuff going on. And I just need a dashboard, I just need to know where the storage is. Is it available and bring it to the table. >> And make it easy with the same APIs that you were potentially running on, on-premises. And that last part that I would say is that, the layered services that are built into Purity, like our snapshot technology and being able to refresh test-dev environments or create 10 sandboxes for 10 developers in the Cloud and add compute instances to them, is not only instantaneous, but it's space saving as you actually do it. Where as in the normal cloud offerings, you're paying for each one of those instances. >> And the agility is off the charts, it's amazing. Okay, final question on this one is, how much is it's going to cost? How does a customer consume it? Is it in the marketplace? Do I just click a button, spin up things? How's the interface? What's the customer interaction and engagement with the product? How they buy it, how much it costs? Can you share the interaction with the customer? >> So we're just jumping into beta, so a lot of this is still being worked out. But what I will tell you is it's the exact same experience that customers have come to love with Pure. You can go download the Cloud formation template into your catalog with an AWS. So you can spin up instances. The same kind of consumption models that we've built on-prem will be applied to cloud. So it will be a very similar consumption model, which has been super consumer friendly that customers have loved from us over the years. And it will be available in the mid part of next year, and so people will be able to beta it today, test it out, see how it works, and then put it into full production in mid part of next year. >> And operationally, in the work flows, the customers don't skip a beat. It's the same kind of format, languages and the words, the word flow. It feels like Pure all the way through. >> Correct. And not only are we a 100% built on a rest API, but all of the things we've built in with, Python libraries that automate this for developers, to PowerShell toolkits, to Ansible playbooks. All the stuff we've built on codeupyourstorage.com are all applicable to both sites and you get Pure1, our Cloud based management system to be able to see all of it in one single pane of glass. >> Okay, let's move on. So the next piece I think is interesting. I'll get your thoughts on this is that the whole protection piece. On-premises, really kind of held back from the Cloud, mainly to protect the data. So you guys got CloudSnap for AWS, what does this product do? Is this the protection piece? How does this work? What is the product? What's the features and what's the value? >> So, StorReduce was a recent acquisition that we did that enables de-duplication on top of an S3 target. And so it allows you to store an S3 de-duplicated into a smaller form factor and we're pairing that with both an on-premises addition which will have a flash plate behind it for super fast restores. So think of that as a caching tier for your backups, but then also be able to replicate that out to the public cloud and leverage store reduce natively in the public cloud as well. >> So that's the store reduce product. So store reduce on it is that piece. As an object store? >> It is, yes. And we pair that with CloudSnap which is natively integrated within FlashArray, so you can also do snapshots to a FlashBlade for fast restores for both NFS, and you can send it also to S3 in the public cloud. And so you get the inherent abilities to even do, VM level granularity or volume level granularity as well from a FlashArray directly, without needing to have any additional hardware. >> Okay so the data services are the; Block Storage, Store Reduce and CloudSnap on a four AWS. >> Correct. >> How would you encapsulate this from a product and solution standpoint? How would you describe that to a customer in an elevator or just a quick value statement? What's in it for them? >> Sure. So Pure's been seen by customers as innovation engine that optimized applications and allowed them to do, I would say, amazing things into the enterprise. What we're doing now, is we're evolving that solution out of just an on-premises solution and making it available in a very agile Cloud world. We know this world is evolving dramatically. We know people really want to be able to take advantage of the innovations within the Cloud, and so what we're doing is we're finally bridging the gap between on-premises and the Cloud. Giving them the same user experience that they've come to love with Pure and all of the Clouds that they potentially need to develop in. >> Okay so from the announcement standpoint, you guys got Cloud Block Storage limited public beta, right out of the gate. GA in mid 2019. CloudSnap is GA at announcement and Store Reduce is going into beta, first half of 2019. >> Correct, we're excited about it. >> So for the skeptics out there who are- Hey you know, Chadd, I got to tell ya. I love the Cloud, but I'm a little bit nervous. How do I test and get a feeling for- this is going to be simple, if I'm going to jump in and look at this. What should I look at first? What sequence, should I try this? Do you guys have a playbook, for them to either kick the tires or how should they explore to get proficient in the new solution. >> Good question. Right, so for one if you're a FlashArray customer, CloudSnap gives you the ability to be able to take this new entity, called a portable Snapshot. Which is data paired with metadata, and allow you to be able to move data off of a FlashArray. You can put it to an NFS target or you can send it to the Cloud. And so that's the most logical one that folks will probably leverage first because it's super exciting for them to be able to leverage the Cloud and spin up instances, if they'd like to. Or protect back to their own prem. Also, Cloud Block Storage, great because you can spin it up relatively quickly and test out applications between the two. One area that I think customers are going to be really excited about is you could run an analytics environment in the Cloud and spin up a bunch of compute from your production instance by just replicating it up into the Cloud. The last part is, I think backup is not super sexy. Nobody like to talk about it, but it's a significant pain point that's out there, and I think we can make some major in-roads in helping businesses get better SLAs. We're very, very interested to see the great solutions people bring with- >> So, I'm going to put you on the spot here and ask you, there's always the, love the cliche, is it a vitamin or is it an Asprin. Is there a pain point? So obviously backup, I would agree. Backup and recovery, certainly with the disaster, you see the wildfires going on here in California. You can't stop thinking about what the, disaster recovery plan and then you got top line growth with application developers. The kind of the vitamin, if you will. What are the use cases, low hanging fruit for someone to like test this out from a pain point standpoint. Is it backup and what's the growth angle? I wanted to test out this new solution, what should I look at first? What would you recommend? >> It's a very tough question. So, CloudSnap is obviously the easy one. I'd say Cloud Block Store is one that I think, people will. I look at my biggest, customers biggest challenges out there it's how do I get application portable. So I think Cloud Block Store really gives you the application portability. So I think it's finally achieving that whole, hybrid cloud world. But at the end of the day, backup is really big pain point that the enterprise deals with, like right this second. So there's areas where we believe we can add inherent values to them with being able to do fast restores from Flash. That meets SLA's very quickly and is an easy fix. >> And you guys feel good about the data protection aspect of this? >> Yes, very much so. >> Awesome. I want to get your personal take on this. You were early on in Pure. What's the vibe inside the company? This is Cloud and people love Cloud. There's benefits for Cloud, as well as on-premises. What's the mood like inside PureStorage? You've seen from the beginning, now you're a public company and growing up really, really fast. What's the vibe like inside PureStorage? >> It's funny, it hasn't really changed all that much, in the cultural side of the thing, of the business. I love where I work because of the people. The people bring so much fun to the business, so much innovation and we have a mindset that's heavily focused on customer first. And that's one of the things. I always tell this kind of story is, when we first started, we sat in a room on a whiteboard and wrote up, what is everything that sucks about storage. And instead of trying to figure out how we make a 2.0 version of some storage array, we actually figured out what are all the customer pain points that we needed to satisfy and then we built innovations to go do that. Not go chase the competition, but actually go alleviate customer challenges. And we just continue to kind of focus on customer first and so the whole company kind of, rallies around that. And I think you see a very different motion that what you do in most companies because we love hearing about customer results of our products. Engineering just will rally around when a customer shows up just to hear exactly their experience associated to it. And so with this, I think what they see is a continued evolution of the things we've been doing and they love seeing and providing customer solutions in areas that they were challenged to deal with in the past. >> What was some of the customer feedback when you guys started going, hey, you've got a new product, you're doing all of that early work. And you got to go talk to some people and knock on the, hey, what do you think, would you like the Cloud, a little bit of the Cloud. How would you like the Cloud to be implemented? What was some of the things you heard from customers? >> A lot of them said, if you can take your core tenets, which was simplicity, efficiency, reliability, and customer focus around consumption, and if you could give that to me in the Cloud, that would be the Nirvana. So, when we looked at this model, that's exactly what we did. We said, let's take what people love about us on-prem, and give 'em the exact same experience in the Cloud. >> That's great and that's what you guys have done. Congratulations. >> Thanks so much. >> Great to hear the Cloud story here Chadd Kenney, Vice President of Products and Solutions at PureStorage. Taking the formula of success on-premises with Flash and the success there, and bringing it to the Cloud. That's the big deal in this announcement. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VM World 2018. Brought to you by VMware and Adziko System partners. >> Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay everybody in Las Vegas. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with David Floyer. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. We've got two sets here in the VM Village. 94 guests this week. It's a record for the CUBE. Thanks so much for watching. I've been in this business as long as Pat Gelsinger and ever since I've been in this business people have said, "oh infrastructure's dying", and you know what, storage is the gift that keeps on giving. And I just, we love the conversations. Guys from Infinidat are here. Jacob Broido is the Chief Product Officer and Neville Yates is the Senior Director of Data Protection Solutions at Infinidat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Happy VMworld 2018. >> Thank you >> Thank you >> All right Jacob, I'm going to start with you. >> Okay. >> So we have seen Infinidat come in. You're basically competing with all flash arrays, you're faster than Flash, and that's your sort of tag line. So you have this system designed for primary storage and then all of a sudden, you know last summer, around last summer, maybe it was the fall. We see you guys entering the data protection market with essentially the same architecture. How is it that you can take a system that's designed for primary storage faster than Flash, and then point it at data protection. Help us understand. >> That's a great question. So, it all starts with the fact that we designed our system to work with mixed workloads. And primary storage being our first keypoint, but the design and architecture supposed to work with any type of workload. And what we started seeing in the field is that our customers first displaced a lot of incumbent primary storage on us. And then we started seeing them putting backup workloads as well, and data protection workloads on our systems as well, and coming back and saying that this works amazingly led to more of that. This basically led us to a point of expanding on that strategy and introducing additional products and services. The key point for us in this was that it was remarkably easy for us to introduce additional capabilities because of the solid technical and architectural foundation. We're very fast. Our financial model enables us to do and go after the data protection market efficiently, and we're seeing this in the field. >> So Neville help us, paint a picture for us. You've got a long history in the data protection market. You were involved in disrupting tape, you've been a consultant in this space working with customers. What's the market sort of look like, the sort of available market for you guys? >> So when Jacob refers to the expansion into data protection, we took this technology as Jacob describes the InfiniBox, and we didn't just expand in one direction. We expanded in two directions, multi-direct, with the introduction of of InfiniSync, which is a means by which critical applications can enable a recovery point of zero, Jacob will go into more details on that. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we deliver a deploying InfiniGuard. Based on the same technology that Jacob described as the core, we're now able to be the target of factual re-enter, the typical grandfather/father/son, every 24-hours you do a backup, you do an incremental. And with deduplication as a front end to the core storage, now we've got a coverage across a data protection spectrum that nobody else can match. Recovery point of zero, leveraging replication technologies that Jacob will expand upon in a minute, Snap technology internal to InfiniBox, integrated with backup applications such as the dash-board management is all consistent, and then further down the spectrum, the InfiniGuard itself, dealing with the traditional kind of data protection schemes. A complete spectrum coverage. Nobody else can deliver it. Built on that technology core to the InfinityBox storage itself. >> So you got the full pyramid covered with the same fundamental architecture. But Jacob, you can't just throw the Box at data protection, you have to bring in other features, you got to be best of breed. So maybe you can talk a little bit about, double-click on some of those. >> Sure. So it all starts with kind of base foundation for our data protection that is InfiniSnaps. It's our snapshot core engine which from day one, we designed to work at multi-petabyte scale, and for us what that means is that you need to support hundred-thousands of snapshots and up to multiple millions. That's by design how we designed the system. But not only that, you have to have zero impact on performance. If you look at our systems in the field, our customers are doing thousands of snapshots per day. Some are doing tens of thousands or more per day with no performance impact, that's not even measurable on any of their performance graphs. This is the foundational technology on which we have built our forward looking additional data protection technologies. So, if we look upper in the pyramid of overall solutions for data protection, after that we introduce our asynchronous replication which is based on that snapshot technology for us. The reason we had such an efficient and groundbreaking snapshot technology, enables us to do the lowest RPO protection for async replication when comparing to any storage product on the market. We're talking about four seconds RPO, and this is something that no other vendor was able to do, because snapshots break at that pace. It's very hard to create and delete snapshots at scale at a such a short interval. >> Without performance degradation. >> Exactly, exactly. We were able to do this. And this is kind of one example of how our early days architectural planning and investment in our product architecture pays off year after year with every new feature. That's why it seems easy for now when we release features quickly, because we have such a solid technical foundation. >> One of the things that I was really fascinated by, was your purchase of Axxana. And how have you been able to use that to get this RTO zero, that you're claiming on that? I mean if you look at the marketplace at the moment, it seems to be that the storage vendors in general are owning this whole space of RTO, lower-RTO's, et cetera. >> That's a great question, but before we get into details about that I want to cover a kind of foundational technology for that, that enabled us to do this. And that is our synchronous replication within InfiniBox already. Which is also built on top of our async, which in turn, built on top of our snapshots. With our synchronous replication within InfiniBox, we're delivering the lowest possible latency for sync replication today. Just to give you an example of how low and how efficient that is, systems that are running synchronous replication on top of InfiniBox are having lower latency than a single all-flash array writing locally. Just imagine what it means. We're able to do the round trip right to another array, and complete the whole work faster than you'll have an all-flash array, a typical all-flash array doing. Now that foundational technology also is a key part of our InfiniSync implementation. Because what we did, we took a great product which comes from Axxana, which is the hardened black box, capable of withstanding any type of disaster, fire, floods, earthquake, whatever. And we essentially integrated it very closely with InfiniBox sync replication, where we're writing this very efficient low-latency sync operations to our InfiniSync appliance, and essentially enabling RPO zero over in the distance. So if you look at it from the heart things perspective which is the data path, we had existing capability, which is our sync replication within the array. We just had to integrate it with another great product, Axxana, and that essentially was more than anything an integration work rather than from scratch development. Because again, this is part of our philosophy, we plan ahead as far a our product, road map, and strategy, and when you lay out the foundation early on, you get to the point where some things look easy, because they were pre-made and prepared early on. >> So that's the tip of the pyramid. For those mission critical applications where you need RPO zero, you've now enabled customers to do that for much lower cost than let's say for instance, the three site data center. >> Yep. >> What about the sort of fat middle, Neville, of data protection, I think you guys call it InfiniGuard. Right? That's kind of your solution there. >> So InfiniGuard simply is InfiniBox storage, with all of it's resiliency and performance, and algorithms that outperform typical arrays, and in front of that we've integrated deduplication engines. These deduplication engines present themselves as targets to the traditional backup ecosystem, receive data, de-duplicate it, and use the resources of InfiniBox storage integrated into the InfiniGuard. And, it's been received well, because its ability to deliver aggressive recovery time objectives, because of its performance in terms of resource speeds. The traditional systems that have been designed ten or fifteen years ago were okay at doing backups, they were purposely built for backup processes. They suffer greatly as a byproduct of the process of deduplication, and the IO profile that that generates. InfiniGuard breaks through that, because of its performance in the underlying storage, in order to drive RTO's, for the recovery of those files that are under the 24-hour sort of data protection cycle. And the customers are receiving it well. They are amazed at the performance, the reliability, and the simplicity within which that fits into the existing ecosystem. So it completes. InfiniSync, InfiniGuard, with InfiniBox at the core in the middle. >> And so you partner with the backup software vendors. >> Of course. >> You're not writing your own backup software, right? >> No no no. So integration, Veeam, the ConVals, the Veritas OST's, et cetera. A little further integration when it comes to InfiniBox Snap technology. That is integrated into backup applications such as ConVal or Veeam. Specifically, you can use their dashboard and their scheduling scheme to trigger the snap that then is taken care of in InfiniBox. So, it's quite a comprehensive deliverable against the whole data protection paradigm. >> And have you made a cloud of that now? With your new service? >> Not yet, but as Jacob said, there's the vision, we are always building strategically, slightly ahead of the curve. So you can imagine that that's not lost on the radar screen. >> Right. >> I see this as a return on asset play. In other words, I've got the architecture, I've got my processes and procedures in place, I don't have to go out and buy a purpose built appliance for data protection now, I can use the asset that's on my floor, that people are trained on, what are your thoughts? >> Absolutely, it seems to me that you have, uh simplified tremendously, all of those previous steps, that took one to another to another, and put them all in the same box, and used the same technologies, to achieve much better end to end results. I think it's excellent. >> You're absolutely correct, and it's deliverable in a timely fashion, because the foundation is so strong. The investment that we made from day one, to make sure that that storage architecture was able to deliver the storage services at the right cost point, at the right resiliency, at the right performance levels, is the means by which we're able to accomplish that. No one else can do it. >> And there's another arc to this story. That we're constantly, we're continually investing into that foundation. Every, our customers, the one unique thing that they experience with us, is that their systems get better every time, every release that we have, every month they get better. Not only on performance, which is obvious, in that our systems are improving all the time. >> As opposed to the normal expectation is that >> Yes. >> as you fill it up it gets worse. >> Yeah. We are actually delivering the opposite. Our customers that are buying the system today, know that, the ones that experienced InfiniBox, know that it will become better over time. And that expands the whole spectrum. It's performance, it's reliability, but it also futures it. All of the things that we discussed here, were delivered free of charge through our software upgrade to our existing InfiniBox customers. And, without disclosing something specific looking forward, there are many more things in that area coming up pretty soon from us. >> Very innovative. You guys always solve problems differently, cutting against the conventional wisdom. You see, VMworld, a lot of glam. A lot of big market. And you guys, I was at your customer dinner the other night. A lot of happy customers. A very intimate event. And a lot of good belly to belly conversations. So congratulations. Final thoughts from each of you on VMworld 2018, the future of Infinidat, anything you want to share with us? Go ahead, Neville. >> Good show, the clients, the prospects that I've spoken to here, they get to open their minds in terms of our solution-offering, and it's generated a lot of interest, and it's going to be a good remainder of the year and a good 2019. >> Great, Jacob, final words from you. >> I agree as well. And we're, I'm seeing customers that are actually reaching out to new prospects for us, and telling the story of Infinidat, and that's catching on. And it's great to see that. >> Jacob, Neville, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Bringing you all the action from VMworld 2018, I'm Dave Vellante, for David Floyer. You're watching theCUBE, and we'll be right back after this short break. (light electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, It's theCube. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is day three of three days live wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. This is theCube, I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host this morning is Justin Warren. How about I welcome back to our program two Cube Alum's from the VMVare storage and availity business unit. Yanbing Li, second time in The Cube this week, is the senior vice president >> Yes. >> and general manager of the group. And Christos Karamanolis, is the fellow and CTO, thank you both for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so first of all, congratulations. A lot of news this week, a lot of excitement around it. And we're talking off cameras, there's so much there that people don't understand some of the work that went into this. And some highlights as to things that I know VMWare thinks will be very game changing over the next couple of years. So, we're excited to dig into this. Yanbing, why don't you start us off with a little bit of an overview from your group as to the news this week. >> Yeah, happy to do that. I think, so, we are seeing a lot of customer energy around what we're doing in storage and availability. You know, there's huge momentum behind product like vSan and our customers are truly embracing HCI in very mainstream use cases, and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in, meaning they're taking HCI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. So, very exciting time. But what's more interesting is their expanded view on what HCI is about. Certainly, we started with virtualizing computer and storage together on servers. But we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been a believer that HCI is foundationally a software lab architecture. I think know, there's more recognition in that. And it's also going from just computers and storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center. It's expanding into the cloud, as you've seen from VMCI WS. It's expanding to the edge, expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know, we've announced beta for vSan to become the storage platform for Kubernetes' Navisphere environment. So, a lot of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI. And if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC, the boundary around these three is not very very clear. I think they're all converging to work, something that's very common. >> Yeah, Christos? I want you to help unpack this a little bit for us. I remember speaking to you a couple of years ago, and your team. We know how many years of effort went into, set the ground work for vSan. with the underlying things that arrived with the API's, and development with your partner ecosystem. Taking vSan as a foundation... Oh, it's going to work with Kubernetes and cloud and everything. It's not a simple port, like, you know, no offense to the hardware people, but putting it on a new platform? Alright, you need to test it, integrate it, make it a couple tweaks, but. The software level, there's a lot of things that go on here. Talk about what the team's been working on, some of the big architectural things that've been happening. >> Oh, yes, absolutely. There are some fundamental changes. We never stop, we never declare that we have finished what we are doing. Obviously, the world is changing around us. Not only the hardware, as you know. There are many important changes there, with NVMe becoming now very prevalent, and renewed aero-technologies appearing, like persistent memory. But, for us, a focal point the last year or so has been, how do we move our entire software stack data on being outlined earlier, into any type of environment, including public clouds? So, you see now, with a few more clouds in AWS, the customers can run applications there without having to re-platform them. It's the exact same environment. So, a keystone of that environment is the storage. How do you virtualize storage? How do you deal with any type of infrastructure? So, vSan was developed for physical devices, SS disc and magnetic disc, more recently NVMe. Now, what we want to give is the option to our customers to use the cost efficiencies of cloud storage. Without the those sacrificing the semantics, the properties the vSphere stack. So, we did a lot of engineering to make vSan work on top of EBS. So, it may sound simple when you announce it at the keynote of VMWorld, but it took lot of hard engineering to adapt a platform. vSphere and vSan was designed for physical hardware, do not work on virtual storage volume. So, that is just one example, there are more examples. For cloud-native use cases, as you said. >> Yeah, I don't think people quite understand the implications of that. The fact that you can use things in the same way in multiple different locations, the whole idea behind multi-cloud-- If you can operate it in the same way as you can on site as you can in whichever cloud you choose. For enterprises who are used to doing things one way, and have made big investments in VMWare, this just opens up an entire universe of opportunity for them. >> Absolutely, and you get the best of both worlds, right? You have the same operational model, the same characteristics I can run now on Amazon applications that use vSphere, ETSI, or the motion pictures that require cell storage. On the cloud, you do not have cell storage. EBS volumes can be accessed by one host at a time, and like stores that need the networks, and vSan brings those stores their networks and semantics, all in software of course, on the cloud. So, I can run my traditional applications, as well as some new generation applications. And for us, strategically, what we've done with EBS? If you think about that is one step into a much bolder vision where vSan becomes this common storage platform that virtualize any type of storage. Physical, or cloud, or virtual, so we expose the same operational model, and the same store semantics to all those who run these three platforms. And this is, you know, just one step. >> And it's not how you-- there is the common operation model that's very appealing to all the enterprise customers. But we are truly marrying the strength and the capabilities of vSan and vSphere and the VMR platform was what EBS uniquely provide. That's elasticity, scalability, but you know, we have a much richer set of data services that we've already viewed into the whole VMR stack. >> Yeah, Yanbing, you bring up some really interesting points. When we put our critical analysis hat on, when the partnership was announced. It was like, "Well, Amazon's got access to 500,000 "VMWare customers, we're going to start "getting customers comfortable with Amazon. Great, they can start moving over." The thing that really caught a lot our attention is, it's some of the Amazon services that are now coming to the VMWare customers. So, EBS is a really good one. When you talk about, you know, the database capabilities that Amazon has, that now I can do on premises, this is a partnership, a two-way street. Its not, you know, just a one way. Maybe speak a little bit about that maturation, and, you know, definitely want to get from Christos, also. There's questions about some of the technical ways of how that works. >> Yeah, what I'm excited is exactly what you described. This is not a one way street, it's really bi-directional. And the levels of collaboration is not just superficial. It's deep levels of integration and leveraging each other to strength, in terms of both technology as well as customer reach. I think that what make the partnership is, you know, people can see that is taking to whole new level. And Christos has been very deeply involved with the various solution architects, and when we examine how we take RDS back on Prime to a VMR environment, I think he can tell a lot more stories behind that. >> For us, actually, it was a great learning experience, I must admit. Because, obviously, we see strongly the desire for our classroom is to start moving from managing the low level, nitty gritty details of the physical IT infrastructure, which we were, you know, traditionally helping them to do, to moving up the starter. Many of them now, they want to have their own users, their own customers, internal customers, to run all those applications. And what are the most critical components of business critical applications? They are the databases, right? So, how can we make the life of our customers easier, how can we provide them the tools to offer data, databases, as a service to their own users? So, this has been our high level objective, and of course, our partnership with AWS helps us deliver some of those properties. >> Christos, I want you to go one level deeper for us. Because some people it's like, >> I'd be happy to. "Wait, RDS, that's, you know, the cool new databases "in Amazon. Wait, I can do something on--" Is that an extension, am I putting things back and forth? Those of us that lived through the virtualization were getting databases just virtualized took years and a lot of hard work. And, I can't just have a database spanning between these, and moving back and forth. This isn't, you know, -- We haven't broken the laws of physics. >> We have not, because here-- >> Help us explain >> What is and isn't possible today. >> Absolutely. First of all, let me highlight what are the main pain points of customers. It's one thing to set up your application and install it and run it. But then there are all the day two operations, right? How do you patch the software, the operating system, the database? How do you scale it, up or down? How do you, even more to the performance, how do you do data protection, backup, disaster recovery? Those are really painful, difficult tasks, that involve a lot of work from expert database administrators that they'd rather be doing some of the important things that address the business earnings, right? So, our objective is to address this. Now, to your point, how do we, you know? What about those laws of physics? How can we have services on the cloud and service on a premise? What we announce here, this RDS, Relational Database Services, on VMWare, it is a fully stand alone service that runs on VMWare environment on premises. There are no dependencies on the public cloud, you have your data sets on your own data centers, and this is actually a major requirement of customers. Whether it's for compliance reasons, or security, or company policy, we insure that your data stays in your data center, while you still get all the benefits of a managed database that you don't need to do all those, you know, little tedious operational tasks I mentioned earlier. Moreover, we support data protection using, actually, underlying vSphere features. Like ETSI and clustering, or even data protection by creating copies of your database in another available domain within your data center. And this is a lot of work that VMWare did to make this happen, as you can imagine. So, that's a lot of infrastructural work, but we support the full range of features that you get on AWS, without having to go over the wire and, you know, break those laws of physics. >> I don't think people have quite understood how profound that is. We're here at a VMWare show, I've spent a lot of time with developers, and the developers are going to love this. Because, now they can use exactly the same way that they operate in public cloud, which they've loved for many years. Being able to do that on site? The way application development is going to happen inside enterprises, where they want to keep it on site, they want to keep it under they're own control, they want their data secured inside their own data centers. The ability for them to do that, and still develop applications in the same way that they could as cloud-native? Cloud-native now means that it runs on site. This is going to be amazing. >> Absolutely. Our customers explicitly tell us that they want to consume, not storage, but data. Those abstractions that matter to the application. So much so, that they have been asking us already, "Hmmm, what is next?", right? "Can you offer us some of this new generation databases?", you know, "the Mongoose or the Cassandra's of the world? "Can we have some similar experience with those "because they're very painful to deploy "and manage in the data centers." So, I cannot make any commitment, of course, but this is an indication of how much interest there is in this type of services. >> Yeah, it really does show you, I think, some of the strategic intent from VMWare. And this is a very clear move for what is going to be possible for customers to actually be able to do on site, it's really quite exciting. >> And for us, you know. Our role providing all the storage related capability, and we've been strongly expanding our application footprint to cover the Hadoop, the Cassandra, the Mango DV type of application as well as containerize the applications. And, you know, we have introduced a lot of new capability or solution that address exactly like that. >> Containerize the applications, for example, against the announcement, I think, didn't receive the attention, that in my opinion, it deserved is supporting natively in vSphere, and with vSan, specifically, cloud-native use cases. Actually, we're introducing a controlled playing, and expanding our store's controlled playing, to manage natively, container volumes. So, now, the same way today, our customers can visit builders through the UI or API's, and have management workflows for virtual machines and virtual disc, VMDK's. Now, they can also manage volumes of containers. And, as you've heard also, we are working with Kubernetes being our main focal point and with PKS to support natively Kubernetes on vSphere, down the road. >> Yeah, great point. I wonder, since we're talking about storage here, you've talked about Kubernetes, we talked about what's in the cloud and on premises. Give us the updated view how VMWare views and how you're helping customers with-- Data can't-- I can't just move, you know, data anywhere, so. While it's good to have similar frameworks, and different-- similar tools there, but still, where data lives, what I move, how I move it, do I move it, how that whole, kind of, data locality is seen today? >> The answer, we have been very keen in defining what we doing in the broader category of data management. From data mobility to protection to analytics, and to life cycle management, the whole slew of that. And we've been starting by building a lot of-- First of all, our job is to make vSan a storage platform that can enable these different demands of data. So, we've expanded vSan's roll from purely from delivering block storage now to offer file, and down the road, object. Cuz a lot of the new data will be consumed in an object like format. And we've also been painting our roadmap for the broader data management, so. >> Yes, exactly. On one hand, we'll provide the platform for primary storage that serves all the needs of the applications, block, file, object, we may even consider a native file interface, actually, for zero data copies, since you were asking about the technical details. I'm very excited about that, you know. We'll see, some of these things will come in the future. But, then, given that you have the platform, what you are building on top of that is data mobility and data protection workflows that are driven by policies. The very first step in that direction is our disaster recovery as a service we offer for hybrid clouds. There, the new model is that, even how you manage your data is as a service. Not a traditional model of installing software and a hundred different bits and pieces that have to integrate with each other and operate. Very simple, you go to a portal, and you manage your data, in this case, starting with disaster recovery use cases. You specify policies, like recovery point objectives. Down the road you may also give the options for recover time objectives. And, also, specify, by policies, what of your data want to be archived and stay on your data center, what of the data can go to the public cloud through your, you know, the hybrid models of cloud model we offer. So, our goal down the road is quite ambitious in offering comprehensive, uniform data management across clouds, that goes all the way from the edge, your Motofy's, your oil rig, all the way to the enterprise, the Cassandra's, to the hybrid clouds. And data mobility there is, you know, using our data transport, our archival capabilities that are coming with vSan Native Snapshot that we also announced at this VMWorld. These will give you the ability to manage your data across all those environments. >> Alright, so, last thing I just want to say. It's interesting to watch this space because we say there's a lot happening under the scenes that people don't understand. I was seeing some research lately saying where AWS lives in the storage ecosystem. I've written an article, couple a years ago. They were the quiet, billion dollar, you know, storage company. And one analyst firm said,"Oh, they're number 3, "and they'll be number 1 in storage." Wikibon actually published a report this month talking about what we call true private cloud. And in our support where we look at the software ecosystem, Yanbing, do you remember who we had number 1 on the list there when you picked >> Ah, yeah... software plus the ecosystem around there for -- >> I remember it clearly, you said it's VMWare. >> Yeah, so, you know, it surprises some people when you look it there, but I'm sure it's no surprise to you and your team, I'm sure. >> So, you know what we've started with vSan is quickly becoming a big way of how all of vSphere customers consume storage. And certainly, that has been our initial focus. But what we are doing for the cloud, what we are doing for the next generation applications. I think we are re-imagining a lot of the things. And it's great to have people like Christos, who started this journey many many years ago, and continue to expand our horizon. Yeah, this is an exciting time for our business unit, and certainly for VMWare, and our customers. >> Christos, in the end, really appreciate us being able to geek out, dig into some of the really important innovations happening in this space. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, still a full third day live coverage here from VMWorld 2018, thanks for watching theCube.

(Music) >> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium, in San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Storage accelerate, 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin sporting Prince today, with Dave Vellante sporting The Who. And I'm sandwiched, most importantly, between two Celtics fans. And the Warriors are across the bay. We'll save that for after the conversation. So we want to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Ken Ringdahl the VP of Global alliance Architecture. From Veeam, welcome. >> Great. Thank you, Lisa. >> Dave: Well the truth be told, we're afraid of the warriors, okay. We really don't want to play the Warriors. >> Oh really, alright. >> And we're not afraid of many people in Boston, but I don't know, they look pretty good. >> Well, I appreciate the honesty, that's pretty cool. >> Well... Though they lost last night. Right? We're going to start the sports talk now. >> Yep. >> Iguodala was out, they showed some foulability. So, anyway. >> We digress to- >> We'll be back to it later on in this segment stay tuned. >> Alright, so you're just fresh off Veeam On, last week. We're impressed that you still have a voice, you've recovered from that. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that are new with Veeam and Pure. So just a month ago, in April, new intergradation between VM availability platform, and Pure Storage flash a way to deliver business continuity, agility, intelligence for the Cloud era. Expand a little bit upon that. >> Yeah, sure, I mean really this integration with Pure Storage, in the VM backup and replication product, end of last year we introduced this new functionality called Universal Storage API. And what this really is, is a way for us to enable our partners to take control of their destiny a little bit more. It's a program we invite our partners into, you know Pure is one of the first that we integrated with, and invited into the program very early. We announced this last year, and we've now finished the integration, as you've mentioned, we announced it last month. It's now been out there, and I think the number I heard earlier today is that we've already had a couple hundred downloads and deployments. So that's just great adoption, and just shows the pent up demand for that. But what we've integrated is the ability for our partners, our storage partners in particular to integrate with our storage snapshot technology to really off load the snapshot from the VMware side, and really put more of it on the storage side, and take it really off the production environment. And so it's a better together story where you know we take the feature that we've introduced into the backup and replication, and Pure built this plug-in, and they integrate with their own APIs and we jointly test and develop, and release that plug-in. And they can install it with VM backup and replication, and it really takes the mention, it takes that load off the production environment. So that snapshot without this integration, it's a VMware snapshot, that snapshot stays open as long as the backup is. Which can be minutes, and you know tens of minutes potentially for a large system. But now we shrink that down literally to just seconds. So we take a VMware snapshot, we take the Pure snapshot, we close the VMware snapshot. And typically it's like 10-12 seconds long where as opposed to the minutes, and even tens of minutes from before. So, really it's really offloading a lot of that back up impact, and we're able to do it in a very secure quiesce fashion from the production environment. >> Lets roll back and understand that a little bit better. >> Ken, if you could explain it to us and our audience. In the 2008, seven, eight, nine timeframe. Virtualization Gem of VMware in particular started to take hold. And you ended up replacing a bunch of physical servers with virtual servers, which was awesome, because all those physical servers were underutilized, except for one major workload, which was backup. So when you did want to do the backup, you didn't have enough resources. Veeam's ascendancy coincided with that trend, so there was a simplicity component, but it seems like what you're describing now is another instantiation of offloading that bottle neck. So what was the journey to Veeam's efficiency in a virtualization environment? >> Ken: Yeah if you look at that journey, and Veeam really grew up in the virtualization age, right. So backup prior to VM, or virtualization was all agent based, it was physical. So everything was over the wire, and Veeam went and said, hey look you know we see VMware really sort of growing, and we see that trend towards virtualization, right, and at this point, what's the world 95 percent virtualized, at this point the only workloads that aren't virtualized are really legacy work loads. And so we made a significant leap forward in a data protection stance, by integrating with the hyper visors. So instead of off loading that into the individual guests, right. The Windows guest, the Linux guest. We said, okay we're going to go the hyper visor. Right? And we're going to do this in an agent less fashion, so that you don't have to go an visit every little, every system that you're looking to backup. That was sort of the first step, right. Now what we're saying is we can do even better. And we can off load the hyper visor, and off load that to the storage system. So we can have a very small impact on the hyper visor, really minimize that. And now really put that workload on the storage system which has a lot of extra cycles and availability, and we can go straight to the backup environment. And not through the VM, or through the hypervisor to get there. >> Dave: So VMware admins, they don't like snapshots because it's overhead intensive, it clogs up their system if you will. This capability makes that transparent, or irrelevant to them? >> It does, it minimizes them to such a small degree that it's a blip. You know it's a little blip on the radar, as opposed to when you snapshot a VM you're essentially quiescing that VM, so everything sort of slows down for a very short period of time. And what happens is that it spawns another virtual disc. So while that snapshot is open this other virtual disc is being written to. And then when you close that snapshot, and you remove that snapshot, that disc gets merged back in, right. This is generally how VMware snapshots work. And what we're saying is we're going to minimize as much as we possibly can. The data that goes in there, so if you think of a running virtual machine, if you're merging back in a Gigabyte disc versus a disc that has 10 Megabytes, you know that's going to be really, really quick, as opposed to, you know if you keep that snapshot open for a long period of time that merge operation, and it just slows things down, and we're trying to minimize that impact on the system. >> Lisa: So business benefits; I get the performance improvements that this integration with Pure facilitates, if we think of this in the context of digital business transformation, where companies that are doing well, have the ability to really glean actionable insights from their data to be able to drive, you know, new products and get products to market faster. Is this actually going to facilitate a company being able to get new products to market faster? >> Absolutely, so there a feature inside of VM backup and replication we call data labs. And what data labs is, is the ability to take a production snapshot, in this case, we're talking about a pure snapshot, and be able to stand that up in a sandbox environment. And you can run DEV tests, you can apply your Windows' patches in an environment that literally matches production. And it's a key differentiator. It's a key differentiator for Veeam, and it's enabled by the Pure Snapshot integration that you have this environment, and even if you have an infected system, you go put it over in data labs, it's sandboxed, so you can put in a private network so it doesn't have any connectivity. Say if you have a worm, or some other ransom ware, you can run analytics, you can run diagnosis on any of that, and not worry about it infecting any other environment, nor does it put work load on your production environment. So you get patched Tuesday, right, and we all know that Windows' patches don't always go as they seem, right? So data labs, let's take that Pure snapshot, let's stand up a virtual environment, which exactly matches production, let's test that patch, right. And we have confidence there, so when we go to production, we have confidence because we've already done it. We've already run that in production. So there's a lot of value in that capability. >> So we were at Veeam On last week fresh off the Kool-Aid injection. It's all orange here, it was all green at Veeam in Chicago. The messaging there was all about multi-cloud and hyper availability in this multi-cloud world. We're hearing a lot about cloud like function here, but of on prem activity. Of course multi-cloud includes on prem, so I wonder if you could dove tail your messaging last week, what you're seeing in the field, and what you're seeing with the partnership with companies like Pure. >> Yeah no question. I mean the Veeam platform, and really you saw it last week at Veeam On we talked kind of about sort of private cloud, and public cloud and our ability to orchestrate, and really stretch across all those environments, and we know that customer all the way from SMB all the way up to enterprise, right. They have remote offices, branch offices some of them use the cloud, some of them use multiple data centers, and really they need their data protection to be able to stretch across those environments. They don't want point solutions in each of those locations. They want a platform that they can trust, and have visibility, right. That's one of the five stages that we talked about about hyper availability, like last week. Is visibility, they want visibility across those clouds. Phase two is aggregation, they want to be able to aggregate all these different places. And that's what we provide our customers with the platform is backup, visibility, aggregation, orchestration, automation. And we provide them on different stages of that journey for our customers. We have different products, services and integration actions with our partners, that really help our customers along that journey. >> We know from our research, the crew at Wiki Bond does some great work on this. We know that data protection, and orchestration are moving up on the list of CXO priorities. At the same time, for a lot of IT practitioners who are under real budget constraints it's like trying to sell more insurance to a 24 year old. So those are kind of two countervailing trends, what are you seeing in the market place? >> What we're seeing is customers, you know down time is really is gone. I mean, I think last week we heard in one of our keynotes, you know you roll back a couple of years, you were talking about availability in terms of five-nines, right? Now it's zero. I mean people don't talk about down time because down time can't exist, and customers need that sense of security and availability. You know, it will happen, lets face it even Amazon, the best data centers in the world, go down, right, there's been some notable S3 outages, but it's about how fast can you recover. And you're talking about low RPOs, and one of the things that this week at Pure Accelerate we're hearing a lot about rapid recovery, flash blade, and the ability and you take rapid recovery and flash blade, and you combine that with the Veeam platform and our instant recovery, and you can get to near zero time recovery, in your environments. To really provide that security, and lets face it, time is money for a lot of our customers, right? So they longer they're down, the more time their losing money, they need availability, and the RPOs are near zero these days. = [Dave] The other thing, if I may just follow up, just one follow up. The other thing our research shows is the average Fortune 1000 company, over a three or four year period is leaving, literally, a billion plus dollars on the table because of poorly architected backup, or inadequate backup. So that's a huge opportunity for you and others, obviously. There's a lot of opportunity right now for vendor turn. That's the other thing our research shows, is that people aren't wed to their backup and recovery vendor. So, does that resonate with customers, are they because of digital, for example, are you seeing that tipping point, that critical mass occur, and then if you could tie that in to sort of your partnership with Pure, I'd be interested in that. >> Sure, yeah, no doubt about it. We're seeing customers, you know, they want that flexibility and that portability. One of the things we do with out platform, it's one of our unique selling features is is that it is agnostic, right. And I'll tie it back to Pure in a moment, but you know when we back up, we back up in a storage agnostic fashion. So any Veeam backup that lands on a disc on the tape anywhere, can be reconstituted, can be re imported, so even if you have a full disaster scenario, we can go stand that back up some where else, and fully consume that backup and restore it, and we have direct restore capabilities. We can port those backups and direct restore them. For example, a direct restore Azure, for example. So that flexibility, and portability is extremely valuable. Now, bring that back to Pure, some of the things we're doing around rapid recovery around the snapshot integration, we talked about is we're really enabling customers to have high performing primary storage environments. High performing secondary storage environments. And really bring that together in a way that works. We talked about multi cloud, right, you know, remote data centers and work across, and aggregate and give visibility. That's really where the Veeam Pure story together, becomes really strong because you've got an incredibly high performing primary and secondary with a highly flexible, portable secondary data protection environment. And you get the capability to get to the cloud. You know DL, a lot of customers looking to the cloud for DR, because they don't have to stand up infrastructure there. When they need it, they can spin it up, and then they can bring it back. And there's a lot of value there. >> I hear a lot of harmony, but I actually read recently, online, that a different analyst firm called the Pure Veeam relationship a match of opposites. Now they say opposites attract, and you've done a great job of talking about the integration, do you agree that it's a good blending of opposites, and if so what's that kind of symbiotic benefit that those bring to each other? >> Yeah, I don't know that I saw that report, but what I would say you know, there's a lot of synergy, we're growing at a very rapid rate, I think. When I looked at Pure, and I look at Veeam we grew 36 percent last year, I think Pure is growing at like 50 percent year over year. We have NPS scores, our NPS score is 73, we're really proud of that. The Pure NPS score, I think I saw- >> 83. >> Ken: 83. >> Dave: I didn't think it could be higher than 73. >> It's incredible. It is incredible, and I think there is a lot of synergy, the size of the organizations, I think the age of our organizations, the aggressiveness that we have, we have joint competitors in the market, so I think there's a lot of synergies between where we are as an organization, as Veeam, and where Pure is. I wish I read the article in terms of the opposites, because I'd love to understand. >> Personally, as a long time analyst, I would say the similarities are greater than the differences. >> Sure sounds like it. >> You're both about a billion dollars, you're both growing at lets call it 35-40 percent a year. You're both pursuing platforms, your both really aggressive, you're insanely passionate about your customers and winning. And you like colors, you like green, they like orange. Alright, we got to talk a little sports here. >> Lisa: Speaking of green. >> I'm going to start somewhere else though because I asked this question of a number of folks at Veeam On. If you were, Ken, if you were Robert Kraft would you have traded Tom Brady? >> {Ken] No. >> Elaborate. >> I think when you look at a, the guy was the MVP of the league last year, so that by itself stands on it's own, but you have to look and the Patriots have always been about, sort of you know, trading or moving on a year or two early, versus a year or two late. So you could make that case with Tom Brady, but I think there's always exceptions, and when you look at, I mean he is basically like an adopted son of Robert Kraft and the organization. He's brought five Superbowls, he's basically, he built Patriot place, you know. Robert Kraft built Patriot place on the backs of Tom Brady and Bill Belichik to that extent. But how do you move on from someone who's brought you so much success, that has been under market. You know, get paid under market so that they can go and do other things, and have flexibility with the gap. I just don't know how you could move on from that. >> So, that's consistent now, I think it's four for four of people we've asked, Boston fans. So appreciate that feed back. Let's talk a little hoops, you know Celtics we were feeling pretty good, up two zip, now it's tied two-two. Houston, Golden state, tied two-two. Those two teams have proven they could win on the road, Celtics haven't proven that yet. What are your thoughts on that series? >> Yeah so certainly Cleveland came storming back, I think the stories of the down fall of the Cavs were clearly over exaggerated. They came back in a big way. I think they Celtics started to figure out the Cavs in quarters two, three, and four. They got themselves in a big hole in the first quarter in the last game. I feel good, the Celtics are nine and O at home this year in the post season. You know, it's basically the best of three, and they have two of them at home, so. The Cavs will have to break serve if they want to win the series. >> Dave: If they're lucky enough to get through to the finals, which would be unbelievable, do they have any shot against the Warriors? >> So, I think to say they have no shot is probably going a little too far, but- >> Dave: Got to play the game. >> You know you got to play the games, and the Celtics have, traditionally, matched up well against the Warriors. I mean least year, the Celtic actually came into Oracle, and broke, I don't know, what was it, like a 50 game home winning streak or something. So, you know, and that was a team that didn't have Kyrie, or Gordon Haywood, and I know they're still out so the future looks bright for the Celtics. But in the context of this years finals, certainly, if I were a betting man, I'd be putting my money behind the Warriors, but I don't doubt that Brad Stevens could come up with a scheme that could steal a couple of games, and make people in the Bay area feel a little uneasy. >> Would love to see a non Lebron Final, you know. >> Yeah I think as the words would like the Celts >> Sorry Brandon, sorry buddy. >> A little diversity, you know three years in a row we've had the same things, so I'll extend my support to the Celtics in honor of both of you guys. >> Alright, and we can talk, if they get to the finals then we can take it from there. >> I can't imagine what the day after the Superbowl was like for both of you. We won't go there. >> I still haven't recovered, so. >> (laughs) Awesome, well Ken, thanks so much for stopping by. Congrats on being a CUBE alumni, now. We look forward to seeing you Veeam World in just a few months time. >> Yes, great. Thank you. We'll be there for sure. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, Dave and I will be back with a wrap in just a moment. (music)

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Welcome back, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads, that's 92 and 101 in the Bay Area if you've been through it, you've had time to take a minute and look at all the buildings, 'cause traffic's usually not so great around here. But there's a lot of great software companies that come through here. It's interesting, I always think back to the Siebel Building that went up and now that's Rakuten, who we all know from the Warrior jerseys, the very popular Japanese retailer. But that's not why we're here. We're here to talk to SnapLogic. They're doing a lot of really interesting things, and they have been in data, and now they're doing a lot of interesting things in integration. And we're excited to have a many time CUBE alum. He's Greg Benson, let me get that title right, chief scientist at SnapLogic and of course a professor at University of San Francisco. Greg great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> So I think the last time we see you was at Fleet Forward. Interesting open-source project, data, ad moves. The open-source technologies and the technologies available for you guys to use just continue to evolve at a crazy breakneck speed. >> Yeah, it is. Open source in general, as you know, has really revolutionized all of computing, starting with Linux and what that's done for the world. And, you know, in one sense it's a boon, but it introduces a challenge, because how do you choose? And then even when you do choose, do you have the expertise to harness it? You know, the early social companies really leveraged off of Hadoop and Hadoop technology to drive their business and their objectives. And now we've seen a lot of that technology be commercialized and have a lot of service around it. And SnapLogic is doing that as well. We help reduce the complexity and make a lot of this open-source technology available to our customers. >> So, I want to talk about a lot of different things. One of the things is Iris. So Iris is your guys' leverage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make integration easier. Did I get that right? >> That's correct, yeah. Iris is the umbrella terms for everything that we do with machine learning and how we use it to enhance the user experience. And one way to think about it is when you're interacting with our product, we've made the SnapLogic designer a web-based UI, drag-and-drop interface to construct these integration pipelines. We connect these things called Snaps. It's like building with Legos to build out these transformations on your data. And when you're doing that, when you're interacting with the designer, we would like to believe that we've made it one of the simplest interfaces to do this type of work, but even with that, there are many times we have to make decisions, like what type of transformation do you do next? How do you configure that transformation if you're talking to an Oracle database? How do you configure it? What's your credentials if you talk to SalesForce? If I'm doing a transformation on data, which fields do I need? What kind of operations do I need to apply to those fields? So as you can imagine, there's lots of situations as you're building out these data integration pipelines to make decisions. And one way to think about Iris is Iris is there to help reduce the complexity, help reduce what kind of decision you have to make at any point in time. So it's contextually aware of what you're doing at that moment in time, based on mining our thousands of existing pipelines and scenarios in which SnapLogic has been used. We leverage that to train models to help make recommendations so that you can speed through whatever task you're trying to do as quickly as possible. >> It's such an important piece of information, because if I'm doing an integration project using the tool, I don't have the experience of the vast thousands and thousands, and actually you're doing now, what, a trillion document moves last month? I just don't have that expertise. You guys have the expertise, and truth be told, as unique as I think I am, and as unique as I think my business processes are, probably, a lot of them are pretty much the same as a lot of other people that are hooking up to SalesForce to Oracle or hooking up Marketta to their CRM. So you guys have really taken advantage of that using the AI and ML to help guide me along, which is probably a pretty high-probability prediction of what my next move's going to be. >> Yeah, absolutely, and you know, back in the day, we used to consider, like, wizards or these sorts of things that would walk you through it. And really that was, it seemed intelligent, but it wasn't really intelligence or machine learning. It was really just hard-coded facts or heuristics that hopefully would be right for certain situations. The difference today is we're using real data, gigabytes of metadata that we can use to train our models. The nice thing about that it's not hard-coded it's adaptive. It's adaptive both for new customers but also for existing customers. We have customers that have hundreds of people that just use SnapLogic to get their business objectives done. And as they're building new pipelines, as they are putting in new expressions, we are learning that for them within their organization. So like their coworkers, the next day, they can come in and then they get the advantages of all the intellectual work that was done to figure something out will be learned and then will be made available through Iris. >> Right. I love this idea of operationalizing machine learning and the augmented intelligence. So how do you apply it? Don't just talk about it, don't give it a name of some dead smart person, but actually apply it to an application where you can start to see the benefit. And that's really what Iris is all about. So what's changed the most in the last year since you launched it? >> You know, one thing I'll say: The most interesting thing that we discovered when we first launched Iris, and I should say one of the first Iris technologies that we introduced was something called the integration assistant. And this was an assistant that would make, make recommendations of the next Snap as you're building out your pipeline, so the next transformation or the next connector, and before we launched it, we did lots of experimentation with different machine learning models. We did different training to get the best accuracy possible. And what we really thought was that this was going to be most useful for the new user, somebody who hasn't really used the product and it turns out, when we looked at our data, and we looked at how it got used, it turns out that yes, new users did use it, but existing or very skilled users were using it just as much if not more, 'cause it turned out that it was so good at making recommendations that it was like a shortcut. Like, even if they knew the product really well, it's still actually a little more work to go through our catalog of 400 plus Snaps and pick something out when if it's just sitting right there and saying, "Hey, the next thing you need to do," you don't even have to think. You just have to click, and it's right there. Then it just speeds up the expert user as well. That was an interesting sort of revelation about machine learning and our application of it. In terms of what's changed over the last year, we've done a number of things. Probably the operationalizing it so that instead of training off of SnapShot, we're now training on a continuous basis so that we get that adaptive learning that I was talking about earlier. The other thing that we have done, and this is kind of getting into the weeds, we were using a decision tree model, which is a type of machine learning algorithm, and we switched to neural nets now, so now we use neural nets to achieve higher accuracy, and also a more adaptive learning experience. The neural net allowed us to bring in sort of like this organizational information so that your recommendations would be more tailored to your specific organization. The other thing we're just on the cusp of releasing is, in the integration assistant, we're working on sort of a, sort of, from beginning-to-end type recommendation, where you were kind of working forward. But what we found is, in talking to people in the field, and our customers who use the product, is there's all kinds of different ways that people interact with a product. They might know know where they want the data to go, and then they might want to work backwards. Or they might know that the most important thing I need this to do is to join some data. So like when you're solving a puzzle with the family, you either work on the edges or you put some clumps in the middle and work to get to. And that puzzle solving metaphor is where we're moving integration assistance so that you can fill in the pieces that you know, and then we help you work in any direction to make the puzzle complete. That's something that we've been adding to. We recently started recommending, based on your context, the most common sources and destinations you might need, but we're also about to introduce this idea of working backwards and then also working from the inside out. >> We just had Gaurav on, and he's talking about the next iteration of the vision is to get to autonomous, to get to where the thing not only can guess what you want to do, has a pretty good idea, but it actually starts to basically do it for you, and I guess it would flag you if there's some strange thing or it needs an assistant, and really almost full autonomy in this integration effort. It's a good vision. >> I'm the one who has to make that vision a reality. The way I like to explain is that customers or users have a concept of what they want to achieve. And that concept is as a thought in their head, and the goal is how to get that concept or thought into something that is machine executable. What's the pathway to achieve that? Or if somebody's using SnapLogic for a lot of their organizational operations or for their data integration, we can start looking at what you're doing and make recommendations about other things you should or might be doing. So it's kind of like this two-way thing where we can give you some suggestions but people also know what they want to do conceptually but how do we make that realizable as something that's executable. So I'm working on a number of research projects that is getting us closer to that vision. And one that I've been very excited about is we're working a lot with NLP, Natural Language Processing, like many companies and other products are investigating. For our use in particular is in a couple of different ways. To be sort of concrete, we've been working on a research project in which, rather than, you know, having to know the name of a Snap. 'Cause right now, you get this thing called a Snap catalog, and like I said, 400 plus Snaps. To go through the whole list, it's pretty long. You can start to type a name, and yeah, it'll limit it, but you still have to know exactly what that Snap is called. What we're doing is we're applying machine learning in order to allow you to either speak or type what the intention is of what you're looking for. I want to parse a CSV file. Now, we have a file reader, and we have a CSV parser, but if you just typed, parse a CSV file, it may not find what you're looking for. But we're trying to take the human description and then connect that with the actual Snaps that you might need to complete your task. That's one thing we're working on. I have two more. The second one is a little bit more ambitious, but we have some preliminary work that demonstrates this idea of actually saying or typing what you want an entire pipeline to do. I might say I want to read data from SalesForce, I want to filter out only records from the last week, and then I want to put those records into Redshift. And if you were to just say or type what I just said, we would give you a pipeline that maybe isn't entirely complete, but working and allows you to evolve it from there. So you didn't have to go through all the steps of finding each individual Snap and connecting them together. So this is still very early on, but we have some exciting results. And then the last thing we're working on with NLP is, in SnapLogic, we have a nice view eye, and it's really good. A lot of the heavy lifting in building these pipelines, though, is in the actual manipulation of the data. And to actually manipulate the data, you need to construct expressions. And expressions in SnapLogic, we have a JavaScript expression language, so you have to write these expressions to do operations, right. One of our next goals is to use natural language to help you describe what you want those expressions to do and then generate those expressions for you. To get at that vision, we have to chisel. We have to break down the barriers on each one of these and then collectively, this will get us closer to that vision of truly autonomous integration. >> What's so cool about it, and again, you say autonomous and I can't help but think autonomous vehicles. We had a great interview, he said, if you have an accident in your car, you learn, the person you had an accident learns a little bit, and maybe the insurance adjuster learns a little bit. But when you have an accident in an autonomous vehicle, everybody learns, the whole system learns. That learning is shared orders of magnitude greater, to greater benefit of the whole. And that's really where you guys are sitting in this cloud situation. You've got all this integration going on with customers, you have all this translation and movement of data. Everybody benefits from the learning that's gained by everybody's participation. That's what is so exciting, and why it's such a great accelerator to how things used to be done before by yourself, in your little company, coding away trying to solve your problems. Very very different kind of paradigm, to leverage all that information of actual use cases, what's actually happening with the platform. So it puts you guys in a pretty good situation. >> I completely agree. Another analogy is, look, we're not going to get rid of programmers anytime soon. However, programming's a complex, human endeavor. However, the Snap pipelines are kind of like programs, and what we're doing in our domain, our space, is trying to achieve automated programming so that, you're right, as you said, learning from the experience of others, learning from the crowd, learning from mistakes and capturing that knowledge in a way that when somebody is presented with a new task, we can either make it very quick for them to achieve that or actually provide them with exactly what they need. So yeah, it's very exciting. >> So we're running out of time. Before I let you go, I wanted to tie it back to your professor job. How do you leverage that? How does that benefit what's going on here at SnapLogic? 'Cause you've obviously been doing that for a long time, it's important to you. Bill Schmarzo, great fan of theCUBE, I deemed him the dean of big data a couple of years ago, he's now starting to teach. So there's a lot of benefits to being involved in academe, so what are you doing there in academe, and how does it tie back to what you're doing here in SnapLogic? >> So yeah, I've been a professor for 20 years at the University of San Francisco. I've long done research in operating systems and distributed systems, parallel computing programming languages, and I had the opportunity to start working with SnapLogic in 2010. And it was this great experience of, okay, I've done all this academic research, I've built systems, I've written research papers, and SnapLogic provided me with an opportunity to actually put a lot of this stuff in practice and work with real-world data. I think a lot of people on both sides of the industry academia fence will tell you that a lot of the real interesting stuff in computer science happens in industry because a lot of what we do with computer science is practical. And so I started off bringing in my expertise in working on innovation and doing research projects, which I continue to do today. And at USF, we happened to have a vehicle already set up. All of our students, both undergraduates and graduates, have to do a capstone senior project or master's project in which we pair up the students with industry sponsors to work on a project. And this is a time in their careers where they don't have a lot of professional experience, but they have a lot of knowledge. And so we bring the students in, and we carve out a project idea. And the students under my mentorship and working with the engineering team work toward whatever project we set up. Those projects have resulted in numerous innovations now that are in the product. The most recent big one is Iris came out of one of these research projects. >> Oh, it did? >> It was a machine learning project about, started around three years ago. We continuously have lots of other projects in the works. On the flip side, my experience with SnapLogic has allowed me to bring sort of this industry experience back to the classroom, both in terms of explaining to students and understanding what their expectations will be when they get out into industry, but also being able to make the examples more real and relevant in the classroom. For me, it's been a great relationship that's benefited both those roles. >> Well, it's such a big and important driver to what goes on in the Bay Area. USF doesn't get enough credit. Clearly Stanford and Cal get a lot, they bring in a lot of smart people every year. They don't leave, they love the weather. It is really a significant driver. Not to mention all the innovation that happens and cool startups that come out. Well, Greg thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day to sit down with us. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Greg, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Welcome back, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Crossroads, that's 92 and 101 in the Bay Area if you've been through it, you've had time to take a minute and look at all the buildings, 'cause traffic's usually not so great around here. But there's a lot of great software companies that come through here. It's interesting, I always think back to the Siebel Building that went up and now that's Rakuten, who we all know from the Warrior jerseys, the very popular Japanese retailer. But that's not why we're here. We're here to talk to SnapLogic. They're doing a lot of really interesting things, and they have been in data, and now they're doing a lot of interesting things in integration. And we're excited to have a many time Cube alum. He's Greg Benson, let me get that title right, chief scientist at SnapLogic and of course a professor at University of San Francisco. Greg great to see you. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> So I think the last time we see you was at Fleet Forward. Interesting open-source project, data, ad moves. The open-source technologies and the technologies available for you guys to use just continue to evolve at a crazy breakneck speed. >> Yeah, it is. Open source in general, as you know, has really revolutionized all of computing, starting with Linux and what that's done for the world. And, you know, in one sense it's a boon, but it introduces a challenge, because how do you choose? And then even when you do choose, do you have the expertise to harness it? You know, the early social companies really leveraged off of Hadoop and Hadoop technology to drive their business and their objectives. And now we've seen a lot of that technology be commercialized and have a lot of service around it. And SnapLogic is doing that as well. We help reduce the complexity and make a lot of this open-source technology available to our customers. >> So, I want to talk about a lot of different things. One of the things is Iris. So Iris is your guys' leverage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make integration easier. Did I get that right? >> That's correct, yeah. Iris is the umbrella terms for everything that we do with machine learning and how we use it to enhance the user experience. And one way to think about it is when you're interacting with our product, we've made the SnapLogic designer a web-based UI, drag-and-drop interface to construct these integration pipelines. We connect these things called Snaps. It's like building with Legos to build out these transformations on your data. And when you're doing that, when you're interacting with the designer, we would like to believe that we've made it one of the simplest interfaces to do this type of work, but even with that, there are many times we have to make decisions, like what type of transformation do you do next? How do you configure that transformation if you're talking to an Oracle database? How do you configure it? What's your credentials if you talk to SalesForce? If I'm doing a transformation on data, which fields do I need? What kind of operations do I need to apply to those fields? So as you can imagine, there's lots of situations as you're building out these data integration pipelines to make decisions. And one way to think about Iris is Iris is there to help reduce the complexity, help reduce what kind of decision you have to make at any point in time. So it's contextually aware of what you're doing at that moment in time, based on mining our thousands of existing pipelines and scenarios in which SnapLogic has been used. We leverage that to train models to help make recommendations so that you can speed through whatever task you're trying to do as quickly as possible. >> It's such an important piece of information, because if I'm doing an integration project using the tool, I don't have the experience of the vast thousands and thousands, and actually you're doing now, what, a trillion document moves last month? I just don't have that expertise. You guys have the expertise, and truth be told, as unique as I think I am, and as unique as I think my business processes are, probably, a lot of them are pretty much the same as a lot of other people that are hooking up to SalesForce to Oracle or hooking up Marketta to their CRM. So you guys have really taken advantage of that using the AI and ML to help guide me along, which is probably a pretty high-probability prediction of what my next move's going to be. >> Yeah, absolutely, and you know, back in the day, we used to consider, like, wizards or these sorts of things that would walk you through it. And really that was, it seemed intelligent, but it wasn't really intelligence or machine learning. It was really just hard-coded facts or heuristics that hopefully would be right for certain situations. The difference today is we're using real data, gigabytes of metadata that we can use to train our models. The nice thing about that it's not hard-coded it's adaptive. It's adaptive both for new customers but also for existing customers. We have customers that have hundreds of people that just use SnapLogic to get their business objectives done. And as they're building new pipelines, as they are putting in new expressions, we are learning that for them within their organization. So like their coworkers, the next day, they can come in and then they get the advantages of all the intellectual work that was done to figure something out will be learned and then will be made available through Iris. >> Right. I love this idea of operationalizing machine learning and the augmented intelligence. So how do you apply it? Don't just talk about it, don't give it a name of some dead smart person, but actually apply it to an application where you can start to see the benefit. And that's really what Iris is all about. So what's changed the most in the last year since you launched it? >> You know, one thing I'll say: The most interesting thing that we discovered when we first launched Iris, and I should say one of the first Iris technologies that we introduced was something called the integration assistant. And this was an assistant that would make, make recommendations of the next Snap as you're building out your pipeline, so the next transformation or the next connector, and before we launched it, we did lots of experimentation with different machine learning models. We did different training to get the best accuracy possible. And what we really thought was that this was going to be most useful for the new user, somebody who hasn't really used the product and it turns out, when we looked at our data, and we looked at how it got used, it turns out that yes, new users did use it, but existing or very skilled users were using it just as much if not more, 'cause it turned out that it was so good at making recommendations that it was like a shortcut. Like, even if they knew the product really well, it's still actually a little more work to go through our catalog of 400 plus Snaps and pick something out when if it's just sitting right there and saying, "Hey, the next thing you need to do," you don't even have to think. You just have to click, and it's right there. Then it just speeds up the expert user as well. That was an interesting sort of revelation about machine learning and our application of it. In terms of what's changed over the last year, we've done a number of things. Probably the operationalizing it so that instead of training off of SnapShot, we're now training on a continuous basis so that we get that adaptive learning that I was talking about earlier. The other thing that we have done, and this is kind of getting into the weeds, we were using a decision tree model, which is a type of machine learning algorithm, and we switched to neural nets now, so now we use neural nets to achieve higher accuracy, and also a more adaptive learning experience. The neural net allowed us to bring in sort of like this organizational information so that your recommendations would be more tailored to your specific organization. The other thing we're just on the cusp of releasing is, in the integration assistant, we're working on sort of a, sort of, from beginning-to-end type recommendation, where you were kind of working forward. But what we found is, in talking to people in the field, and our customers who use the product, is there's all kinds of different ways that people interact with a product. They might know know where they want the data to go, and then they might want to work backwards. Or they might know that the most important thing I need this to do is to join some data. So like when you're solving a puzzle with the family, you either work on the edges or you put some clumps in the middle and work to get to. And that puzzle solving metaphor is where we're moving integration assistance so that you can fill in the pieces that you know, and then we help you work in any direction to make the puzzle complete. That's something that we've been adding to. We recently started recommending, based on your context, the most common sources and destinations you might need, but we're also about to introduce this idea of working backwards and then also working from the inside out. >> We just had Gaurav on, and he's talking about the next iteration of the vision is to get to autonomous, to get to where the thing not only can guess what you want to do, has a pretty good idea, but it actually starts to basically do it for you, and I guess it would flag you if there's some strange thing or it needs an assistant, and really almost full autonomy in this integration effort. It's a good vision. >> I'm the one who has to make that vision a reality. The way I like to explain is that customers or users have a concept of what they want to achieve. And that concept is as a thought in their head, and the goal is how to get that concept or thought into something that is machine executable. What's the pathway to achieve that? Or if somebody's using SnapLogic for a lot of their organizational operations or for their data integration, we can start looking at what you're doing and make recommendations about other things you should or might be doing. So it's kind of like this two-way thing where we can give you some suggestions but people also know what they want to do conceptually but how do we make that realizable as something that's executable. So I'm working on a number of research projects that is getting us closer to that vision. And one that I've been very excited about is we're working a lot with NLP, Natural Language Processing, like many companies and other products are investigating. For our use in particular is in a couple of different ways. To be sort of concrete, we've been working on a research project in which, rather than, you know, having to know the name of a Snap. 'Cause right now, you get this thing called a Snap catalog, and like I said, 400 plus Snaps. To go through the whole list, it's pretty long. You can start to type a name, and yeah, it'll limit it, but you still have to know exactly what that Snap is called. What we're doing is we're applying machine learning in order to allow you to either speak or type what the intention is of what you're looking for. I want to parse a CSV file. Now, we have a file reader, and we have a CSV parser, but if you just typed, parse a CSV file, it may not find what you're looking for. But we're trying to take the human description and then connect that with the actual Snaps that you might need to complete your task. That's one thing we're working on. I have two more. The second one is a little bit more ambitious, but we have some preliminary work that demonstrates this idea of actually saying or typing what you want an entire pipeline to do. I might say I want to read data from SalesForce, I want to filter out only records from the last week, and then I want to put those records into Redshift. And if you were to just say or type what I just said, we would give you a pipeline that maybe isn't entirely complete, but working and allows you to evolve it from there. So you didn't have to go through all the steps of finding each individual Snap and connecting them together. So this is still very early on, but we have some exciting results. And then the last thing we're working on with NLP is, in SnapLogic, we have a nice view eye, and it's really good. A lot of the heavy lifting in building these pipelines, though, is in the actual manipulation of the data. And to actually manipulate the data, you need to construct expressions. And expressions in SnapLogic, we have a JavaScript expression language, so you have to write these expressions to do operations, right. One of our next goals is to use natural language to help you describe what you want those expressions to do and then generate those expressions for you. To get at that vision, we have to chisel. We have to break down the barriers on each one of these and then collectively, this will get us closer to that vision of truly autonomous integration. >> What's so cool about it, and again, you say autonomous and I can't help but think autonomous vehicles. We had a great interview, he said, if you have an accident in your car, you learn, the person you had an accident learns a little bit, and maybe the insurance adjuster learns a little bit. But when you have an accident in an autonomous vehicle, everybody learns, the whole system learns. That learning is shared orders of magnitude greater, to greater benefit of the whole. And that's really where you guys are sitting in this cloud situation. You've got all this integration going on with customers, you have all this translation and movement of data. Everybody benefits from the learning that's gained by everybody's participation. That's what is so exciting, and why it's such a great accelerator to how things used to be done before by yourself, in your little company, coding away trying to solve your problems. Very very different kind of paradigm, to leverage all that information of actual use cases, what's actually happening with the platform. So it puts you guys in a pretty good situation. >> I completely agree. Another analogy is, look, we're not going to get rid of programmers anytime soon. However, programming's a complex, human endeavor. However, the Snap pipelines are kind of like programs, and what we're doing in our domain, our space, is trying to achieve automated programming so that, you're right, as you said, learning from the experience of others, learning from the crowd, learning from mistakes and capturing that knowledge in a way that when somebody is presented with a new task, we can either make it very quick for them to achieve that or actually provide them with exactly what they need. So yeah, it's very exciting. >> So we're running out of time. Before I let you go, I wanted to tie it back to your professor job. How do you leverage that? How does that benefit what's going on here at SnapLogic? 'Cause you've obviously been doing that for a long time, it's important to you. Bill Schmarzo, great fan of theCUBE, I deemed him the dean of big data a couple of years ago, he's now starting to teach. So there's a lot of benefits to being involved in academe, so what are you doing there in academe, and how does it tie back to what you're doing here in SnapLogic? >> So yeah, I've been a professor for 20 years at the University of San Francisco. I've long done research in operating systems and distributed systems, parallel computing programming languages, and I had the opportunity to start working with SnapLogic in 2010. And it was this great experience of, okay, I've done all this academic research, I've built systems, I've written research papers, and SnapLogic provided me with an opportunity to actually put a lot of this stuff in practice and work with real-world data. I think a lot of people on both sides of the industry academia fence will tell you that a lot of the real interesting stuff in computer science happens in industry because a lot of what we do with computer science is practical. And so I started off bringing in my expertise in working on innovation and doing research projects, which I continue to do today. And at USF, we happened to have a vehicle already set up. All of our students, both undergraduates and graduates, have to do a capstone senior project or master's project in which we pair up the students with industry sponsors to work on a project. And this is a time in their careers where they don't have a lot of professional experience, but they have a lot of knowledge. And so we bring the students in, and we carve out a project idea. And the students under my mentorship and working with the engineering team work toward whatever project we set up. Those projects have resulted in numerous innovations now that are in the product. The most recent big one is Iris came out of one of these research projects. >> Oh, it did? >> It was a machine learning project about, started around three years ago. We continuously have lots of other projects in the works. On the flip side, my experience with SnapLogic has allowed me to bring sort of this industry experience back to the classroom, both in terms of explaining to students and understanding what their expectations will be when they get out into industry, but also being able to make the examples more real and relevant in the classroom. For me, it's been a great relationship that's benefited both those roles. >> Well, it's such a big and important driver to what goes on in the Bay Area. USF doesn't get enough credit. Clearly Stanford and Cal get a lot, they bring in a lot of smart people every year. They don't leave, they love the weather. It is really a significant driver. Not to mention all the innovation that happens and cool startups that come out. Well, Greg thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day to sit down with us. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Greg, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching.

>> Voiceover: Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Summit here in San Francisco. Happy to welcome back to the program Jagane Sundar, who is the CTO of WANdisco. Jagane, great to see you, how have you been? >> Well, been great Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right so, every show we go to now, data really is at the center of it, you know. I'm an infrastructure guy, you know, data is so much of the discussion here, here in the cloud in the keynotes, they were talking about it. IOT of course, data is so much involved in it. We've watched WANdisco from the days that we were talking about big data. Now it's you know, there's AI, there's ML. Data's involved, but tell us what is WANdisco's position in the marketplace today, and the updated role on data? >> So, we have this notion, this brand new industry segment called live data. Now this is more than just itty-bitty data or big data, in fact this is cloud-scale data located in multiple regions around the world and changing all the time. So you have East Coast data centers with data, West Coast data centers with data, European data centers with data, all of this is changing at the same time. Yet, your need for analytics and business intelligence based on that is across the board. You want your analytics to be consistent with the data from all these locations. That, in a sense, is the live data problem. >> Okay, I think I understand it but, you know, we're not talking about like, in the storage world there was like hot data, what's hot and cold data. And we talked about real-time data for streaming data and everything like that. But how do you compare and contrast, you know, you said global in scope, talked about multi-region, really talking distributed. From an architectural standpoint, what's enabling that to be kind of the discussion today? Is it the likes of Amazon and their global reach? And where does WANdisco fit into the picture? >> So Amazon's clearly a factor in this. The fact that you can start up a virtual machine in any part of the world in a matter of minutes and have data accessible to that VM in an instant changes the business of globally accessible data. You're not simply talking about a primary data center and a disaster recovery data center anymore. You have multiple data centers, the data's changing in all those places, and you want analytics on all of the data, not part of the data, not on the primary data center, how do you accomplish that, that's the challenge. >> Yeah, so drill into it a little bit for us. Is this a replication technology? Is this just a service that I can spin up? When you say live, can I turn it off? How do those kind of, when I think about all the cloud dynamics and levers? >> So it is indeed based on active-active replication, using a mathematically strong algorithm called Paxos. In a minute, I'll contrast that with other replication technologies, but the essence of this is that by using this replication technology as a service, so if you are going up to Amazon's web services and you're purchasing some analytics engine, be it Hive or Redshift or any analytics engine, and you want to have that be accessible from multiple data centers, be available in the face of data center or entire region failure, and the data should be accessible, then you go with our live data platform. >> Yeah so, we want you to compare and contrast. What I think about, you know, I hear active-active, speed of light's always a challenge. You know globally, you have inconsistency it's challenging, there's things like Google Spanner out there to look at those. You know, how does this fit compared to the way we've thought of things like replication and globally distributed systems in the past? >> Interesting question. So, ours great for analytics applications, but something like Google Spanner is more like a MySQL database replacement that runs into multiple data centers. We don't cater to that and database-transaction type of applications. We cater to analytics applications of batch, very fast streaming applications, enterprise data warehouse-type analytics applications, for all of those. Now if you take a look inside and see what kind of replication technology will be used, you'll find that we're better than the other two different types. There are two different types of existing replication technologies. One is log shipping. The traditional Oracle, GoldenGate-type, ship the log, once the change is made to the primary. The second is, take a snapshot and copy differences between snapshots. Both have their deficiencies. Snapshot of course is time-based, and it happens once in a while. You'll be lucky if you can get one day RTO with those sorts of things. Also, there's an interesting anecdote that comes to mind when I say that because the Hadoop folks in their HTFS, implemented a version of snapshot and snapdiff. The unfortunate truth is that it was engineered such that, if you have a lot of changes happening, the snapshot and snapdiff code might consume too much memory and bring down your NameNode. That's undesirable, now your backup facility just brought down your main data capability. So snapshot has its deficiencies. Log shipping is always active/passive. Contrast that with our technology of live data, whereat you can have multiple data centers filled with data. You can write your data to any of these data centers. It makes for a much more capable system. >> Okay, can you explain, how does this fit with AWS and can it live in multi-clouds, what about on-premises, the whole you know, multi and hybrid cloud discussion? >> Interesting, so the answer is yes. It can live in multiple regions within the same cloud, multiple reasons within different clouds. It'll also bridge data that exists on your on-prem, Hadoop or other big data systems, or object store systems within Cloud, S3 or Azure, or any of the BLOB stores available in the cloud. And when I say this, I mean in a live data fashion. That means you can write to your on-prem storage, you can also write to your cloud buckets at the same time. We'll keep it consistent and replicated. >> Yeah, what are you hearing from customers when it comes to where their data lives? I know last time I interviewed David Richards, your CEO, he said the data lakes really used to be on premises, now there's a massive shift moving to the public clouds. Is that continuing, what's kind of the breakdown, what are you hearing from customers? >> So I cannot name a single customer of ours who is not thinking about the cloud. Every one of them has a presence on premise. They're looking to grow in the cloud. On-prem does not appear to be on a growth path for them. They're looking at growing in the cloud, they're looking at bursting into the cloud, and they're almost all looking at multi-cloud as well. That's been our experience. >> At the beginning of the conversation we talked about data. How are customers doing you know, exploiting and leveraging or making sure that they aren't having data become a liability for them? >> So there are so many interesting use cases I'd love to talk about, but the one that jumps out at me is a major auto manufacturer. Telematics data coming in from a huge number, hundreds of thousands, of cars on the road. They chose to use our technology because they can feed their West Coast car telematics into their West Coast data center, while simultaneously writing East Coast car data into the East Coast data center. We do the replication, we build the live data platform for them, they run their standard analytics applications, be it Hadoop-sourced or some other analytics applications, they get consistent answers. Whether you run the analytics application on the East Coast or the West Coast, you will get the same exact answer. That is very valuable because if you are doing things like fault detection, you really don't want spurious detection because the data on the West Coast was not quite consistent and your analytics application was led astray. That's a great example. We also have another example with a top three bank that has a regulatory concern where they need to operate out of their backup data centers, so-called backup data center, once every three months or so. Now with live data, there is no notion of active data center and backup data center. All data centers are active, so this particular regulatory requirement is extremely simple for them to implement. They just run their queries on one of the other data centers and prove to the regulators that their data is indeed live. I could go on and on about a number of these. We also have a top two retailer who has got such a volume data that they cannot manage it in one Hadoop cluster. They use our technology to create the live data data link. >> One of the challenges always, customers love the idea of global but governance, compliance, things like GDPR pop up. Does that play into your world? Or is that a bit outside of what WANdisco sees? >> It actually turns out to be an important consideration for us because if you think about it, when we replicate the data flows through us. So we can be very careful about not replicating data that is not supposed to be replicated. We can also be very careful about making sure that the data is available in multiple regions within the same country if that is the requirement. So GDPR does play a big role in the reason why many of our customers, particularly in the financial industry, end up purchasing our software. >> Okay, so this new term live data, are there any other partners of yours that are involved in this? As always, you want like a bit of an ecosystem to help build out a wave. >> So our most important partners are the cloud vendors. And they're multi-region by nature. There is no idea of a single data center or a single region cloud, so Microsoft, Amazon with AWS, these are all important partners of ours, and they're promoting our live data platform as part of their strategy of building huge hybrid data lakes. >> All right, Jagane give us a little view looking forward. What should we expect to see with live data and WANdisco through the rest of 2018? >> Looking forward, we expect to see our footprint grow in terms with dealing with a variety of applications, all the way from batch, pig scripts that used to run once a day to hive that's maybe once every 15 minutes to data warehouses that are almost instant and queryable by human beings, to streaming data that pours things into Kafka. We see the whole footprint of analytics databases growing. We see cross-capability meaning perhaps an Amazon Redshift to an Azure or SQL EDW replication. Those things are very interesting to us, to our customers, because some of them have strengths in certain areas and other have strengths in other areas. Customers want to exploit both of those. So we see us as being the glue for all world-scale analytics applications. >> All right well, Jagane, I appreciate you sharing with us everything that's happening at WANdisco. This new idea of live data, we look forward to catching up with you and the team in the future and hearing more about the customers and everything on there. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from AWS Summit here in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)