>>Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warda. Who's the director of information technology services at the Hotchkis school, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut. Hello, Kevin? >>Hello. It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. >>Yeah, you, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about the Hotchkis school and your role. >>Sure. The hacha school is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 K 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role is as the director of information technology services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >>Yeah. And you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens what's, what's the unique, you know, or not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you. >>I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of it, security it in general sometimes. So I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into, >>Because specifically you are potentially spread thin underfunded. You gotta, you, you got students, you got teachers. So there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >>Certainly because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center. So data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights Ferra, some of our students are under 18. So data privacy laws such as Copa apply HIPAA can apply. We have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition. So it's, it's a unique place to be. Again, we operate very much like a college would, right? We have all the trappings of a, of a private college in terms of all the operations we do. And that's what I love most about working education is that it's, it's all the industries combined in many ways. >>Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in, in drew to the conversation. So what are the, the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your, your data? >>Well, we take a defense and depth approach. So we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses. We also keep it simple. You know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching using multifactor authentication and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >>Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what, what, what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >>Yeah, I, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what, what he's doing going back to our prior conversation about zero trust, right? That defense in depth approach is beautifully aligned, right? With a zero trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and, and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right. They need to make sure that the data that they're keeping evidence right. Is secure and imutable right, because that's evidence, >>Well, Kevin paint a picture for us, if you would. So you were primarily on, Preem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and, and the kind of, I wanna get to the before and the, after wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >>Sure. Well, I came to the hatchet school about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal. So again, not a lot of funding for it in general security or infrastructure in general. So Nutanix was actually a solu, a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hodges and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system, that students would use financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SAS solutions coming in play. We had also taken some time to do some business continuity planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue. I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that. So as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud based, we didn't really need as much of the on premise compute and storage as, as we had. And it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a, a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well. And it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small it shops like ours. >>Yeah. AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor. And so you migrated off of VMware avoidance V the VTax avoidance. That's a common theme among Nu Nutanix customers. And now did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >>We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, WASA became across our, our desks. And it was such a low, low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month. And then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time. It wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network. Some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on, on the internet that they could be stored as well. >>So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast security wise. It has all the features of, of S3 compliance that works with, with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily. And then there was no egress fees. We can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing us any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs. We need to know what we're gonna spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for, for egres or, or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously. We need, we need that. We, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >>So Kevin, you, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed. Were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those, those concerns as an it practitioner? >>Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing. There's lots of companies with funny names. >>I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from and really looking into the technology, understanding that the value proposition, the ability to, to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology, in which it lays down data. So, so having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for it. It may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's, it's not cheap. It's not, you know, it's, it's reliable. And that was really our concern. So we, we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >>Yeah. Thank you for that. Drew explain the whole egres charge. We hear a lot about that. What do people need to know? >>First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, date, just like the cube. Let's be very clear about that. Second of all egres charges. So, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get every, put every list, everything okay. It's, it's part of their, their, you know, their, their process. It's part of how they make money. It's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services. We don't do that. And I think, you know, as, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond. What is the list price? In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then right. Their, their additional cost, the egres cost, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >>So you used the little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation. So I'm, here's what I'm imagining. Like I have a lot of stuff. Right. And, and I, I, I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly. I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff. That's kinda the same thing here. >>Oh, that's a great metaphor, right. That, that storage locker, right? Yeah. You know, can you imagine every time you wanna open the door to that locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >>No, no, that would be annoying. >>Or, or every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard. You have to pay a door opening fee. Right. And then if you wanna look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay and it's ridiculous. Yeah. It's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker. You've already paid the annual fee probably cuz that they gave you a discount on that. So why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what wasabi does. And I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody >>Else. Okay, good. That's helpful. It helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin. I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in, in, in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and, and ransomware protection? For example? >>Yes. Cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too. Right? This is, this is often the checking, the box kind of activity. Insurance companies require it, but we wanna make it something that people want to do and wanna engage with. So even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that. So it wasn't just about protecting our school data. It's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something you do in all aspects of your life. Especially now that the folks are working hybrid off of working from home with equipment from the school, this stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home. And so knowing how to protect that is important. And so we definitely run, run those programs in a way that, that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >>So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until of course we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can, you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples. Is that what you're talking about? About having fun? >>Yeah. I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories. You know, they, they, they, they stop as they run. So they're, they're, they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going. So you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic. Yeah. That's why I think is, is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun. It's not, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure, you know, the sender of, of the email. Now you you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not. So that's where I think the learning comes in. >>Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much. Appreciate your time. Kevin drew awesome. Having you in the cube. >>My pleasure. Thank you. >>Yeah. Great to be here. Thanks. Okay. In a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days. Cloud storage, immutability and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on, it has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is oftentimes data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats. This is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring but object storage historically was seen as this low cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard trade offs between cost and performance. That has changed. The ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parody with other storage formats. But cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues. First up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur, who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi. We'll then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi. And then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss, cool. Let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO, and co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company. David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. Nice to be here. >> Great to have you. So look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years. Why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder, Jeff Flowers, and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disc drive was probably 500 gigabytes. And now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even hundred terabyte drives coming down the road. And, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disc drives is going to run out of steam, because even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures of sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth, was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it. And they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab designing and testing this new storage architecture. And when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we could sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite, you know? When you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zettabytes or something like that. And if you look at that as, you know, the potential market size during that data we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions. And so I said, look, this is a great opportunity. If you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on prem. If you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud. We're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like VEEAM, Commvault, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups they're never going to pay a ransom. So once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well so that you can't do a full restore from your backups, and that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know? Write once read many. And those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud. And it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff. But, you know, the net result is, if you store your backups in immutable buckets in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time. So you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that. Once that date is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty, it's obviously a big deal. I mean, especially for companies with a presence overseas but what's really is any digital business these days? How should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws. And if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in country you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore and I've probably forgotten one or two. But the reason we do that is twofold. One is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in country, so you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in may of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws. And we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and it continues to evolve. We see judgements in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the US and the elimination of third party cookies. What does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of, even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things to this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the US. Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues. So it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world. And this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world. And we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia, and so forth. You know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base. And that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah. It's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David. Thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations. What does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud. And I think, storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth. And it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local. And there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential. You know, the most analysts think that the full all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range. Whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month. And so I think people are learning how to, are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow. That's like a six X more expensive and the clouds more than six X. >> Yeah. >> All right, thank you, David. Go ahead, please. >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>mhm. Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the senior director of product marketing at Wasabi. Hey, Drew. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming back in the Cube. >>They great to be here. Great to see you. >>All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew prior to the pandemic zero trust. Just like, kind of like a digital transformation. It was sort of a buzzword. And now it's become a real thing. Almost a mandate. What's what's Arby's take on zero trust? >>Uh, so absolutely right it was. It's been around a while, and now people are paying attention. Uh, sabes take is zero. Trust is is a good thing. Uh, you know, there are There are too many places right where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of zero. Trust is as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, takes some planning, but, you know, done properly and using the right technology is using the right vendors. The rewards are of course, tremendous. Right? You you you can put to rest the fears of of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >>Well, and we're going to talk about this. But there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design in your zero trust. And you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure. So we're gonna talk about that. There's a lot of discussion in the industry drew about a mutability and air gaps. I'd like you to share wasabi point of view on these topics. How do you approach it? And what makes wasabi different? >>Uh, so in terms of air gap and mutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time, is that it makes it that much easier. Right? To have a secure, immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and, uh, doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. Um, we're working with some of the best partners in the industry. Um, you know, we're working with folks like VM con vault Arc Marquis MSP 3. 60. Um, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data. You need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable. And we can We can talk a little bit about what a mutability is and what it really means. >>You know, I want I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about with subi solution, because sometimes people don't understand. You actually are a cloud you're not building on other people's public clouds. And storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that. Tell us a little bit more about those ABS approach and your solution. >>Yeah, I appreciate that. So there's there's definitely some misconception. We are our own cloud storage service. We don't run on top of anybody else, right? It's It's our systems. It's our software deployed globally, and we interoperate because we adhere to the S three standard. We interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right? We're talking about backup and recovery applications, and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, uh, just about everybody who's anybody in this business, protecting data has the ability now to, uh, access cloud storage. And so we've made it really simple. Uh, in many cases, you'll see wasabi, as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, uh, you know, put in your private keys. Make sure that your account is locked down properly using, uh, let's say multi factor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >>I mean, we just heard from David friend. I did my math, right? He was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, Maybe even a little better than that. How are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >>Yeah, So, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80% right, less expensive than the hyper scholars. And, you know, we talked about this at demon, right? There's there's some secret sauce there. Um, and, you know, we take a different approach to how we utilise the raw capacity to the effective capacity. And the fact is, we're also not having to run a few 100 other services, right? We do storage plain and simple all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, uh, you know, going to be a loss leader right. Um, customers love it, right? They see the fact that their data is growing 40 80% year over year. They know they need to have some place to keep it secure. And, uh, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves. In fact, we're We're seeing a tremendous amount of migration, actually, right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Assad because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyper scale or vendor. >>And the mutability is a feature of your product, right? What's the feature called? Can you dig? Double click on that a little bit? >>Yeah, Absolutely. Um So the determined s three is object lock. And what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period. Let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable. Untouchable cannot be altered in any way, shape or form. The application can't change it. The system administration can't change it with subi Can't change it. Okay, it is truly carved in stone, and this is something that it's been around for a while. But you're seeing a huge uptick in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors. And I named off a few earlier. Um, and the best part is that with the mutability comes some some sense of Well, it comes with not just a sense of security. It is security, right when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody. Um, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right? They can't take away the data. And that's a beautiful thing. A beautiful, beautiful thing. >>And you look like an s three bucket. Is that right? >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're fully compatible with the S three a p I. So if you're using S three a p I based applications today, um, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data. Beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right? That's probably the simplest application. Simple being a relative term as far as lift and shift right, because that just means for your next full right point that it was subi retain your other falls for whatever 30 60 90 days. And then once you've kind of made that transition from vine divine. You know you're off and running with wasabi. >>I talked to my open about the allure of object storage. Historically, you know the simplicity of the get put syntax. But what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance? That's that's comparable to other storage formats. >>Oh, yeah, Absolutely. And we've got the We've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up. But I forgot to answer something earlier, Right? You said that the mutability is a feature, and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature, but it's an API request. Okay, So when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effectively, percent less expensive. Um, you know that API call, right? It's typically something that the other folks charge for, right? And I think we use the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator. Uh, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? Uh, you can think of cloud storage as as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much copy as you want. And the coffee is always warm right, And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge. You want to pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there. No charge. And that's an important thing. Because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects and you want to get a list of those objects or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects anywhere else, it's going to cost you money to look at your data. We'll also be no additional charge, and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >>Excellent. Thank you for that. So you mentioned some partners before. How do partners fit into the wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up what you know, What do they bring? Can you give us maybe a paint a picture for us? Example or two? >>Sure. So again, we just do storage, right? That is our Our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customers' data. And so they're working with, uh, their application vendors. Whether it's, you know, active archive backup in recovery, uh, Iot surveillance, uh, media and entertainment workflows, right? Those systems already know how to manage the day to manage the metadata. They just need someplace to keep the data that is being worked on being stored and so forth. All right, so just like, uh, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right? You literally can plug in wasabi as long as your applications support the AP getting started. Incredibly easy, right. We offer a 30 day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their P O. C. Right. Um, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty. I'm guessing you talked to, uh, you know, Dave friend earlier about data sovereignty, right. We're global company. All right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world, someplace that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, um, as well as your compliance requirements. >>We did talk about sovereignty, Drew. This is really what's interesting to me. A bit of an industry historian. When I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, they CEOs would say, We're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out. And for instance, I No. One bought competitor of carbonite and then couldn't figure out what to do with it. They couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud, in part because they were afraid it was going to cannibalise their existing business. I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition. It brings innovation, and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems like, you know, uh, Ransomware, mutability and recovery. I'll give you the last word, Drew. >>Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the the on prem vendors. They're not going to go away anytime soon, right? There's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency high band with, you know, But, uh, you know, not all data is taught all the time. And by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot. Uh, you know, uh, you know, let's take, uh, you know real time, Uh, analytics for maybe facial recognition, right, That requires sub millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and, uh, you're gonna want to also tap back into it later. So, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like cold, glacial type of tiered storage. Don't believe the hype. You're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a wasabi like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We complement you know what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors in terms of the hardware vendors were beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that. I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear, if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >>All right, Drew, Thank you for that. We definitely We see the momentum in a moment. Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Referenda, who's the director of information technology services at the Hodgkiss School. Keep it right there. >>Mhm

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>We learned today, how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage imutability air gaps and solid operational processes. Let's not forget about that. Okay. People and processes are critical. And if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks, rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign in support of digital transformations. Now, if you wanna learn more about imutability and object lock, click on the wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/object lock. Thanks for watching secure storage, hot takes made possible by wasabi. This is Dave ante for the cube, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching theCUBE, on the ground, extremely excited for our segment here. Wasabi just launched last week on Wednesday. We have their co-founder and CEO with us here today on theCUBE. David, thank you for coming on today. >> Hey, nice to be here Sam. Thank you. >> So, unbelievably exciting. Can you tell the world about Wasabi? >> So if you know what Amazon S3 cloud storage is, you pretty much know what Wasabi is, except we're one-fifth the price and six-times as fast. (laughing) >> Incredible. So, you know, co-founder and CEO of Carbonite decided to start Wasabi. Tell us, why Wasabi? >> Why the name Wasabi? >> Well, the name as well. >> Cause it's hot. (laughing) My co-founder Jeff Flowers, who's one of the great technical geniuses I've ever met in my life, came to me about three years ago, with this paper design for a new storage architecture, and said, "I think we could do something that's going to be far faster and far more efficient in storage than what the cloud providers Google, Amazon and Microsoft are doing," and I said okay, "Well you should go check it out." So he left Carbonite, and we spent about a year doing design work, and eventually we ended up with this design that was so compelling to me that I decided it was time to jump on board, and join Jeff again, and this is this is the sixth company that we founded together since 1980. So we kind of know how to complete each other's sentences. It's been a winning combination, there's been quite a lot of successes there. >> So, I'd love to hear about the vision of Wasabi. >> My vision of Wasabi and cloud storage in general is that cloud storage ought to be like electricity or bandwidth, it should just be a commodity. Right now you have all these silly tiers, you have Coldline and Nearline and Standard and Glacier, and these artificial tiers that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have made to try to protect their high price spread. Wasabi is faster than the fastest of them and it's cheaper than the cheapest of them, so why do you need all these silly things in the middle? It's just like electricity, you go to plug your computer or your blender into the wall, you don't have three different plugs, one for great electricity, one for so-so electricity and one for crumby but cheap electricity, you know, you just have one. So one size fits almost all needs, and I think that's the way cloud storage is going to be as well. When we get to that, it'll be best man wins, right? The guy with the best performance and the lowest cost is going to win, and we feel we can compete in that environment. >> So a buzzword I've been hearing is 'immutable buckets', can you tell me about that? >> Yeah, so that's the one functional difference between Amazon S3 and Wasabi, otherwise Wasabi is completely 100% plug compatible with Amazon. You can unplug Amazon, plug in Wasabi and all your applications should work, and the other way around too. That's part of being a commodity, right? Your suppliers should be interchangeable. But, immutable buckets is something which really came from our Carbonite heritage. We know from Carbonite that most data loss is not due to failing disk drives and things like that today, it's stupid mistakes, you know people accidentally overwrite or delete a file? It's bugs in application software cause data to get overwritten or deleted. Then you get things like Wannacry, which come in, grabs all the data on your computer and encrypts it. So immutability means if you store data in an immutable bucket, it cannot be altered, and it cannot be deleted. It can't be deleted by you, it can't be deleted by us, and it certainly can't be deleted by a hacker or somebody breaking in from the outside. So, about 10 or 20 years ago, people invented something called the WORM tape, write-once-read-many, that was really one of the first forms of immutable digital storage. Once you put your data on there, that was it, when the tape is full, you take it off, put it in the drawer, and it's safe. That's not a very good system by today's standards, but we've built immutability into Wasabi, so that when you create a bucket in Wasabi, and for those people who don't know about object storage technology, a bucket is like a folder, and an object is like a file, when you create a bucket in Wasabi, you can flip a switch and you can say, "I want to make this bucket immutable for 10 years," let's say, and any time you go in and try to erase or alter any of the data that's been written, you just get an error message, which is what the wannabe virus would have gotten had it tried to encrypt that data. So the only downside of immutability is once you put something in there, you can't go in and clean it up. You're going to be stuck paying to store that data for a long time, but at our price of 0.39 cents per gigabyte per month, I don't think anybody would bother ever trying to clean it up anyway. You know, it's like when's a good time to go empty that U-Haul storage locker? Eh, I'll write another cheque for $40 and think about it next time. (laughing) >> So your tag-on is a hot storage? >> Hot storage, yeah. >> So you launched one week ago, on Wednesday. Tell us about that first week, how crazy was it? >> Well the only thing we did was some PR, so there were a number of articles that appeared about us, and we were expecting maybe 15, 20 companies would come sign up in the first week, do a free trial. But by 48 hours in, we were over 150, and by one more day we were at over 200. And we kind of had to shut down new sign-ups because it was just more than we could handle. We were just worried that we would get overwhelmed. Now we're trying to catch up, we just put more storage online in the last 24 hours, and now we're working through the stack of people. I don't know how many more have come in since then, but it's been a lot, so we're working through that now to give people their passcodes so that they can get on the system, hopefully by this time next week we'll be caught up. >> Well congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks! >> Any last words that you want to leave the people with about Wasabi? >> Well anytime you drop the price of anything by 80%, unexpected things are going to happen. When bandwidth suddenly got cheap, you got Netflix and movies over the internet and that kind of stuff, which people hadn't even dreamed about. I'll be really interested to see what people do with really cheap, fast storage. When you think about all these storage intensive apps like Pinterest, Instagram and things that involve videos and so forth, storage has got to be your biggest cost. And most of these apps are free, so the only revenue you're going to get is going to be advertising. I'll bet there are a lot of business models that just won't work at Amazon's prices, but drop those prices by 80%, and now suddenly you say, "Wow, this could be profitable." I'm not going to invent those apps, but I'm sure that some of the people who are signing up for Wasabi today are thinking about things that didn't work in the old regime, but with commodity cloud storage at these low prices, it starts to make sense. So we'll see, I think it's going to change the world. >> I hope so, and it's going to be exciting to watch. >> Yeah, it'll be fun. >> We'll need to catch up again soon and check back in on the growth. But David, thank you for coming on theCUBE tonight! >> You're welcome Sam, thank you. >> And CUBENation, thank you for watching. (Outro music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante over the past decade cloudflare has built a Global Network that has the potential to become the fourth us-based hyperscale class cloud in our view the company is building a durable Revenue model with hooks into many important markets these include the more mature DDOS protection space to other growth sectors such as zero trust a serverless platform for application development and an increasing number of services such as database and object storage and other network services in essence cloudflare could be thought of as a giant distributed supercomputer that can connect multiple clouds and act as a highly efficient scheduling engine at scale its disruptive DNA is increasingly attracting novel startups and established Global firms alike looking for Reliable secure high performance low latency and more cost-effective alternatives to AWS and Legacy infrastructure Solutions hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we initiate our deeper coverage of cloudflare we'll briefly explain our take on the company and its unique business model we'll then share some peer comparisons with both the financial snapshot and some fresh ETR survey data finally we'll share some examples of how we think cloudflare could be a disruptive force with a super cloud-like offering that in many respects is what multi-cloud should have been cloudflare has been on our peripheral radar Ben Thompson and many others have written about their disruptive business model and recently a breaking analysis follower who will remain anonymous emailed with some excellent insights on cloudflare that prompted us to initiate more detailed coverage let's first take a look at how cloudflare seize the world in terms of its view of a modern stack this is a graphic from cloudflare that shows a simple three-layer Stack comprising Storage and compute the lower level and application layer and the network and their key message is basically that the big four hyperscalers have replaced the on-prem leaders apps have been satisfied and that mess of network that you see and Security in the upper left can now be handled all by cloudflare and the stack can be rented via Opex versus requiring heavy capex investment so okay somewhat of a simplified view is those companies on the the left are you know not standing still and we're going to come back to that but cloudflare has done something quite amazing I mean it's been a while since we've invoked Russ hanneman of Silicon Valley Fame on breaking analysis but remember when he was in a meeting one of his first meetings if not the first with Richard Hendricks it was the whiz kid on the show Silicon Valley and hanneman said something like if you had a blank check and you could build anything in the world what would it be and Richard's answer was basically a new internet and that led to Pied Piper this peer-to-peer Network powered by decentralized devices and and iPhones and this amazing compression algorithm that enabled high-speed data movement and low latency uh up to no low latency access across the network well in a way that's what cloudflare has built its founding premise reimagined how the internet should be built with a consistent set of server infrastructure where each server had lots of cores lots of dram lots of cash fast ssds and plenty of network connectivity and bandwidth and well this picture makes it look like a bunch of dots and points of presence on a map which of course it is there's a software layer that enables cloudflare to efficiently allocate resources across this Global Network the company claims that it's Network utilization is in the 70 percent range and it has used its build out to enter the technology space from the bottoms up offering for example free tiers of services to users with multiple entry points on different services and selling then more services over time to a customer which of course drives up its average contract value and its lifetime value at the same time the company continues to innovate and add new services at a very rapid cloud-like Pace you can think of cloudflare's initial Market entry as like a lightweight Cisco as a service the company's CFO actually he uses that term he calls it that which really must tick off Cisco who of course has a massive portfolio and a dominant Market position now because it owns the network cloudflare is a marginal cost of adding new Services is very small and goes towards zero so it's able to get software like economics at scale despite all this infrastructure that's building out so it doesn't have to constantly face the increasing infrastructure tax snowflake for example doesn't own its own network infrastructure as it grows it relies on AWS or Azure gcp and and while it gives the company obvious advantages it doesn't have to build out its own network it also requires them to constantly pay the tax and negotiate with hyperscalers for better rental rates now as previously mentioned Cloud Fair cloudflare claims that its utilization is very high probably higher than the hyperscalers who can spin up servers that they can charge for underutilized customer capacity cloudflare also has excellent Network traffic data that it can use to its Advantage with its Analytics the company has been rapidly innovating Beyond its original Core Business adding as I said before serverless zero trust offerings it has announced a database it calls its database D1 that's pretty creative and it's announced an object store called R2 that is S3 minus one both from the alphabet and the numeric I.E minus the egress cost saying no egress cost that's their big claim to fame and they've made a lot of marketing noise around about that and of course they've promised in our a D2 database which of course is R2D2 RR they've launched a developer platform cloudflare can be thought of kind of like first of all a modern CDN they've got a simpler security model that's how they compete for example with z-scaler that brings uh they also bring VPN sd-wan and DDOS protection services that are that are part of the network and they're less expensive than AWS that's kind of their sort of go to market and messaging and value proposition and they're positioning themselves as a neutral Network that can connect across multiple clouds now to be clear unlike AWS in particular cloudflare is not well suited to lift and shift your traditional apps like for instance sap Hana you're not going to run that in on cloudflare's platform rather the company started by making websites more secure and faster and it flew under the radar and much in the same way that clay Christensen described the disruption in the steel industry if you've seen that where new entrants picked off the low margin rebar business then moved up the stack we've used that analogy in the semiconductor business with arm and and even China cloudflare is running a similar playbook in the cloud and in the network so in the early part of the last decade as aws's ascendancy was becoming more clear many of us started thinking about how and where firms could compete and add value as AWS is becoming so dominant so for instance take an industry Focus you could do things like data sharing with snowflake eventually you know uh popularized you could build on top of clouds again snowflake is doing that as are others you could build private clouds and of course connect to hybrid clouds but not many had the wherewithal and or the hutzpah to build out a Global Network that could serve as a connecting platform for cloud services cloudflare has traction in the market as it adds new services like zero trust and object store or database its Tam continues to grow here's a quick snapshot of cloudflare's financials relative to Z scalar which is both a competitor and a customer fastly which is a smaller CDN and Akamai a more mature CDN slash Edge platform cloudflare and fastly both reported earnings this past week Cloud Fair Cloud flare surpassed a billion dollar Revenue run rate but they gave tepid guidance and the stock got absolutely crushed today which is Friday but the company's business model is sound it's growing close to 50 annually it has sas-like gross margins in the mid to high 70s and it's it it's got a very strong balance sheet and a 13x revenue run rate multiple in fact it's Financial snapshot is quite close to that of z-scaler which is kind of interesting which zinc sailor of course doesn't own its own network that's a pure play software company fastly is much smaller and growing more slowly than cloudflare hence its lower multiple well Akamai as you can see is a more mature company but it's got a nice business now on its earnings call this week cloudflare announced that its head of sales was stepping down and the company has brought in a new leader to take the firm to five billion dollars in sales I think actually its current sales leader felt like hey you know my work is done here bring on somebody else to take it to the next level the company is promising to be free cash flow positive by the end of the year and is working hard toward its long-term financial model or so working towards sorry it's a long-term financial model with gross margin Targets in the mid 70s it's targeting 20 non-gaap operating margins so so solid you know very solid not like completely off the charts but you know very good and to our knowledge it has not committed to a long-term growth rate but at that sort of operating profit level you would like to see growth be consistently at least in the 20 range so they could at least be a rule of 40 company or perhaps even even five even higher if they're going to continue to command a premium valuation okay let's take a look at the ETR data ETR is very positive on cloudflare and has recently published a report on the company like many companies cloudflare is seeing an across the board slowdown in spending velocity we've reported on this quite extensively using the ETR data to quantify the degree to that Slowdown and on the data set with ETR we see that many customers they're shifting their spend to Flat spend you know plus or minus let's say you know single digits you know two three percent or even zero or in the market we're seeing a shift from paid to free tiers remember cloudflare offers a lot of free services as you're seeing customers maybe turn off the pay for a while and going with the freebie but we're also seeing some larger customers in the data and the fortune 1000 specifically they're actually spending more which was confirmed on cloudflare's earnings call they did say everything across the board was softer but they did also indicate that some of their larger customers are actually growing faster than their smaller customers and their churn is very very low here's a two-dimensional graphic we'd like to share this view a lot it's got Net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey on the horizontal axis and this cut isolates three segments in the etrs taxonomy that cloudflare plays in Cloud security and networking now the table inserted in that upper left there shows the raw data which informs the position of each company in the dots with Net score in the ends listed in that rightmost column the red dotted line indicates a highly elevated Net score and finally we posted the breakdown those colors in the bottom right of cloudflare's Net score the lime green that's new adoptions the forest green is we're spending more six percent or more the gray is flat plus or minus uh five percent and you can see that the majority of customers you can see that's the majority of the customers that gray area the pink is we're spending Less in other words down six percent or worse and the bright red is churn which is minimal one percent very good indicator for for cloudflare what you do to get etr's proprietary Net score and they've done this for many many quarters so we have that time series data you subtract the Reds from the greens and that's Net score cloudflare is at 39 just under that magic red line now note that cloudflare and zscaler are right on top of each other Cisco has a dominant position on the x-axis that cloudflare and others are eyeing AWS is also dominant but note that its Net score is well above the red dotted line it's incredible Palo Alto networks is also very impressive it's got both a strong presence on the horizontal axis and it's got a Net score that's pretty comparable to cloudflare and z-scaler to much smaller companies Akamai is actually well positioned for a reasonably mature company and you can see fastly ATT Juniper and F5 have far less spending momentum on their platforms than does cloudflare but at least they are in positive Net score territory so what's going to be really interesting to see is whether cloudflare can continue to hold this momentum or even accelerate it as we've seen with some other clouds as it scales its Network and keeps adding more and more services cloudflare has a couple of potential strategic vectors that we want to talk about and it'll be going to be interesting to see how that plays out Now One path is to compete more directly as a Cloud Player offering secure access Edge services like firewall as a service and zero Trust Services like data loss prevention email security from its area one acquisition and other zero trust offerings as well as Network Services like routing and network connectivity this is The Sweet Spot of the company load balancing many others and then add in things like Object Store and database Services more Edge services in the future it might be telecom like services such as Network switching for offices so that's one route and cloudflare is clearly on that path more services more cohorts at innovating and and growing the company and bringing in more Revenue increasing acvs and and increasing long-term value and keeping retention high now the other Vector is what we're just going to refer to as super cloud as an enabler of cross-cloud infrastructure this is new value uh relative to the former Vector that we were just talking about now the title of this episode is what multi-cloud should have been meaning cloudflare could be the control plane providing a consistent experience across clouds one that is fast and secure at global scale now to give you Insight on this let's take a look at some of the comments made by Matthew Prince the CEO and co-founder of cloudflare cloudflare put its R2 Object Store into public beta this past May and I believe it's storing around a petabyte of data today I think that's what they said in their call here's what Prince said about that quote we are talking to very large companies about moving more and more of their stored objects to where we can store that with R2 and one of the benefits is not only can we help them save money on the egress fees but it allows them to then use those object stores or objects across any of the different Cloud platforms they're that they're using so by being that neutral third party we can let people adopt a little bit of Amazon a little bit of Microsoft a little bit of Google a little bit of SAS vendors and share that data across all those different places so what's interesting about this in the super cloud context is it suggests that customers could take the best of each Cloud to power their digital businesses I might like AWS for in redshift for my analytic database or I love Google's machine learning Microsoft's collaboration and I'd like a consistent way to connect those resources but of course he's strongly hinting and has made many public statements that aws's egress fees are a blocker to that vision now at a recent investor event Matthew Prince added some color to this concept when he talked about one metric of success being how much R2 capacity was consumed and how much they sold but perhaps a more interesting Benchmark is highlighted by the following statement that he made he said a completely different measure of success for R2 is Andy jassy says I'm sick and tired of these guys meaning cloudflare taking our objects away we're dropping our egress fees to zero I would be so excited because we've then unlocked the ability to be the network that interconnects the cloud together now of course it would be Adam solipski who would be saying that or maybe Andy Jesse you know still watching over AWS and I think it's highly unlikely that that's going to happen anytime soon and that of course but but in theory gets us closer to the super cloud value proposition and to further drive that point home and we're paraphrasing a little bit his comments here he said something the effect of quote customers need one consistent control plane across clouds and we are the neutral Network that can be consistent no matter which Cloud you're using interesting right that Prince sees the world that's similar to if not nearly identical to the concepts that the cube Community has been putting forth around supercloud now this vision is a ways off let's be real Prince even suggested that his initial vision of an application running across multiple clouds you know that's like super cloud Nirvana isn't what customers are doing today that's that's really hard to do and perhaps you know it's never going to happen but there's a little doubt that cloudflare could be and is positioning itself as that cross-cloud control plane it has the network economics and the business model levers to pull it's got an edge up on the competition at the edge pun intended cloudflare is the definition of Edge and it's distributed platform it's decentralized platform is much better suited for Edge workloads than these giant data centers that are you know set up to to try and handle that today the the hyperscalers are building out you know their Edge networks things like outposts you know going out to the edge and other local zones Etc now cloudflare is increasingly competitive to the hyperscalers and those traditional Stacks that it depositioned on an earlier slide that we showed but you know the likes of AWS and Dell and hpe and Cisco and those others they're not sitting in their hands they have a huge huge customer install bases and they are definitely a moving Target they're investing and they're building out their own Super clouds with really robust stacks as well let's face it it's going to take a decade or more for Enterprises to adopt a developer platform or a new database Cloud plus cloudflare's capabilities when compared to incumbent stacks and the hyperscalers is much less robust in these areas and even in storage you know despite all the great conversation that R2 generated and the buzz you take a specialist like Wasabi they're more mature they're more functional and they're way cheaper even than cloudflare so you know it's not a fake a complete that cloudflare is going to win in those markets but we love the disruption and if cloudflare wants to be the fourth us-based hyperscaler or join the the big four as the as the fifth if we put Alibaba in the mix it's got a lot of work to do in the ecosystem by its own admission as much to learn and is part of the value by the way that it sees in its area one acquisition it's email security company that it bought but even in that case much of the emphasis has been on reseller channels compare that to the AWS ecosystem which is not only a channel play but is as much an innovation flywheel filling gaps where companies like snowflake Thrive side by side with aws's data stores as well all the on-prem stacks are building hybrid connections to AWS and other clouds as a means of providing consistent experiences across clouds indeed many of them see what they call cross-cloud services or what we call super cloud hyper cloud or whatever you know Mega Cloud you want to call it we use super cloud they are really eyeing that opportunity so very few companies frankly are not going after that space but we're going to close with this cloudflare is one of those companies that's in a position to wake up each morning and ask who can we disrupt today and very few companies are in a position to disrupt the hyperscalers to the degree that cloudflare is and that my friends is going to be fascinating to watch unfold all right let's call it a wrap I want to thank Alex Meyerson who's on production and manages the podcast as well as Ken schiffman who's our newest addition to the Boston Studio Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help us get the word out on social media and in our newsletters and Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at silicon angle thank you to all remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen all you're going to do is search breaking analysis podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or DM me at divalante if you comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai they got the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis

>>How y'all doing? My name's Savannah Peterson, coming to you from Detroit, Michigan, where the cube is excited to be at Cube Con. Our guest this afternoon is a wonderfully brilliant woman who's been leading in the space for over eight years. Please welcome Gar Kapur. Gar, thanks for being with us. >>Well, thank you for having me to, It's a pleasure. Good >>To see you. So, update what's going on here? Co saw you at VMware Explorer. Yes. Welcome back to the Cube. Yes. What's, what's going on for you guys here? What's the message? What's the story >>Soupcon like I always say, it's our event, it's our audience. So, you know, Minayo, I dunno if you've been keeping track, Mani ha did reach like a billion docker downloads recently. So >>Congratulations. >>This is your tribe right here. Yes, >>It is. It is. Our >>Tribe's native infrastructure. Come on. Yes. >>You know, this audience understands us. We understand them. You know, you were asking when did we start the company? So we started in 2014, and if you see, Kubernetes was born in 2015 in all sorts of ways. So we kind of literally grew up together along with the Kubernetes journey. So all the decisions that we took were just, you know, making sure that we addressed the Kubernetes and the cloud native audiences, the first class citizens when it comes to storage. So I think that has been very instrumental in leading us up to the point where we have reached a billion docker downloads and we are the most loved object storage out >>There. So, So do you like your younger brother Kubernetes? Or not? Is this is It's a family that gets along. >>It does get along. I think in, in Kubernetes space, what we are seeing from customer standpoint as well, right? They're warming up to Kubernetes and you know, they are using Kubernetes as a framework to deploy anything at scale. And especially when you're, you know, offering storage as a service to your, whether it is for your internal audience or to the external audience, Kubernetes becomes extremely instrumental because it makes Multitenancy extremely easy. It makes, you know, access control points extremely easy for different user sets and so on. Yeah. So Kubernetes is definitely the way to go. I think enterprises need to just have little bit more skill set when it comes to Kubernetes overall, because I think there are still little bit areas in which they need to invest in, but I think this is the right direction, This is the right way. If you, if you want multi-tenant, you need Kubernetes for compute, you need Kubernetes for storage. So >>You guys hit an interesting spot here with Kubernetes. You have a product that targets builders. Yes. But also it's a service that's consumed. >>Yes. Yes. >>How do you see those two lanes shaping out as the world starts to grow, the ecosystems growing, You've got products for builders and products for people who are developers consuming services. How do you see that shaking out? Is just, is there intersections there? There is. You seem to be hitting that. >>There is. There is definitely an intersection. And I think it's getting merged because a lot of these users are the ones who dictate what kind of stack they want as part of their application ecosystem overall, right? So that is where, when an application, for example, in the big data workloads, right? They tell their IT or their storage department, this is the S3 compatible storage that they want their applications to run on or sit on. So the bridges definitely like becoming very narrow in that way from builders versus the service consumers overall. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, people need to get their job done from application users perspective. They want to just get in and get out. They don't want to deal with the underlying complexity when it comes to storage or any of the framework, right? So I think what we enable is for the builders to make sure they have extremely easy, simple, high performance software service that they can offer it to their customers, which is as three compatible. So now they can take their applications wherever they need to go, whether it is edge, whether it is on-prem, whether it is any of the public cloud, wherever you need to be, go be with it. With >>Mei, I mean, I wanna get your thoughts on a really big trend that's happening now. That's right. In your area of expertise. That is people are realizing that, hey, I don't necessarily need AWS S3 for storage. I gotta do my own storage or build my own. So there's a cost slash value for commodity storage. Yes. When does a company just dive to what to do there? Do they do their own? You see, CloudFlare, you seeing Wasabi, other companies? Yes. Merging. You guys are here. Yeah, yeah. Common services then there's a differentiator in the cloud. What's the, what's this all about? >>Yeah, so there are a couple of things going on in this space, right? So firstly, I think cloud model is the way to go. And what, what we mean by cloud is not public cloud, it's the cloud operating model overall, right? You need to build the applications the correct way so that they can consume cloud native infrastructure correctly. So I think that is what is going on. And secondly, I think cloud is great for your burst workloads. It's all about productivity. It's all about getting your applications to the market as fast as you can. And that is where of course, MIN IO comes into play when you know you can develop your applications natively on something like mania. And when, when you take it to production, it's very easy no matter where you go. And thirdly, I think when it comes to the cost perspective, you know, what we offer to the customers is predictability of the cost and no surprise in the builds when it comes, which is extremely important to like a CFO of a company because everyone knows that cloud is not the cheapest place to run your sustainable workloads. And there is unpredictability element involved because, you know, people leave their buckets on, people leave their compute nodes on it, it happens all the time. So I think if you take that uncertainty out of it and have more predictability around it, I think that is, that is where the true value lies. >>You're really hitting on a theme that we've been hearing a lot on the cube today, which is standardization, predictability. Yes. We, everyone always wants to move fast, but I think we're actually stepping away from that Mark Zuckerberg parity, move fast and break things and let's move fast, but know how much it's gonna cost and also decrease the complexity. Drugs >>Don't things. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And try, you know, minimize the collateral damage when Yeah. I, I love that you're enabling folks like that. How is, I'm curious because I see that your background, you have a PhD in philosophy, so we don't always see philosophy and DevOps and Kubernetes in the same conversation. Yeah. So how does this translate into your leadership within your team and the, And Min i's culture, >>So it's PhD in financial management and financial economics. So that is where my specialization lies. And I think after that I came to Bay Area. So once you're in Bay Area, you cannot escape technology. It is >>To you, >>It is just the way things are. You cannot escape startups, you cannot escape technology overall. So that's how I got introduced to it. And yeah, that it has been a great journey so far. And from the culture standpoint of view, you know, I always tell like if I can learn technology, anyone can learn technology. So what we look for is the right attitude, the right kind of, you know, passion to learn is what is most important in this world if you want to succeed. And that's what I tell everyone who joins the, who joins win I, two months, three months, you'll be up and going. I, I'm not too worried about it. >>But pet pedigree doesn't always play into it because no, the changing technology you could level up. So for sure you get into those and be contributing. >>I think one of the reasons why we have been successful the way we have been successful with storage is because we've not hired storage experts. Because they come with their own legacy and mindset of how to build things. And we are like, and we always came from a point of view, we are not a storage company. We are a data company and we want to be close to the data. So when you come to that mindset, you build a product directly attacking data, not just like, you know, in traditional appliance world and so on, so forth. So I think those things have been very instrumental in terms of getting the right people on board, making sure that they're very aligned with how we do things and you know, the dnf, the company's, >>That's for passion and that's actually counterintuitive, but it's makes sense. Yes. In new markets it doesn't always seem to take the boiler plate. Yes. Skill set or person. No, we're doing journalism, but we don't hire journalists. No, >>I mean you gotta be, It's adventurers. It is. It's curious. >>Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I, yeah, I think also, you know, for you to disrupt any space, you cannot approach it from how they approach the problem. You need to completely turn the tables upside down as they say, right? You need to disrupt it and have the surprise element. And I think that is what always makes a technology very special. You cannot follow the path that others have followed. You need to come from a different space, different mindset altogether. So that is where it's important that you, like you said, adventurous are the people >>That that is for sure. Talk to us about the company. Are you growing scaling? How do people find out more? >>Oh yeah, for sure. So people can find out more by visiting our website. Min dot i, we are growing. We just closed last year, end of last year we closed our CDC round unicorn valuation and so on, so forth. So >>She says unicorn valuation, so casually, I just wanna point that out, that, that, that, that's funny. Like a true strong female leader. I love that. I >>Love that. Thank you. Yes. So in terms of, you know, in terms of growth and scalability, we are growing the team. We are, you know, onboarding more commercial customers to the platform. So yeah, it's growth all across growth from the community standpoint, growth from commercial number standpoint. So congratulations. Yeah, thank you. >>Yeah, that's very exciting. Grma, thank you so much for being, >>Being with us. Thank you for >>Having me. Always. Thanks for hanging out and to all of you, thank you so much for tuning into the Cube, especially for this exciting edition for all of us here in Detroit, Michigan, where we're coming to you from Cuban. See you back here in a little bit.

(calm music) >> Hi everybody. We're here at VeeamON 2022. This is day two of the CUBE's continuous coverage. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is Dave Nicholson. A ton of energy. The keynotes, day two keynotes are all about products at Veeam. Veeam, the color of green, same color as money. And so, and it flows in this ecosystem. I'll tell you right now, Michael Cade is here. He's the senior technologist for product strategy at Veeam. Michael, fresh off the keynotes. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Welcome. Danny Allen's keynote was fantastic. I mean, that story he told blew me away. I can't wait to have him back. Stay tuned for that one. But we're going to talk about protecting containers, Kasten. You guys got announcements of Kasten by Veeam, you call it K10 version five, I think? >> Yeah. So just rolled into 5.0 release this week. Now, it's a bit different to what we see from a VBR release cycle kind of thing, cause we're constantly working on a two week sprint cycle. So as much as 5.0's been launched and announced, we're going to see that trickling out over the next couple of months until we get round to Cube (indistinct) and we do all of this again, right? >> So let's back up. I first bumped into Kasten, gosh, it was several years ago at VeeamON. Like, wow this is a really interesting company. I had deep conversations with them. They had a sheer, sheer cat grin, like something was going on and okay finally you acquire them, but go back a little bit of history. Like why the need for this? Containers used to be ephemeral. You know, you didn't have to persist them. That changed, but you guys are way ahead of that trend. Talk a little bit more about the history there and then we'll get into current day. >> Yeah, I think the need for stateful workloads within Kubernetes is absolutely grown. I think we just saw 1.24 of Kubernetes get released last week or a couple of weeks ago now. And really the focus there, you can see, at least three of the big ticket items in that release are focused around storage and data. So it just encourages that the community is wanting to put these data services within that. But it's also common, right? It's great to think about a stateless... If you've got stateless application but even a web server's got some state, right? There's always going to be some data associated to an application. And if there isn't then like, great but that doesn't really work- >> You're right. Where'd they click, where'd they go? I mean little things like that, right? >> Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things that we are seeing from that is like obviously the requirement to back up and put in a lot of data services in there, and taking full like exposure of the Kubernetes ecosystem, HA, and very tiny containers versus these large like virtual machines that we've always had the story at Veeam around the portability and being able to move them left, right, here, there, and everywhere. But from a K10 point of view, the ability to not only protect them, but also move those applications or move that data wherever they need to be. >> Okay. So, and Kubernetes of course has evolved. I mean the early days of Kubernetes, they kept it simple, kind of like Veeam actually. Right? >> Yeah. >> And then, you know, even though Mesosphere and even Docker Swarm, they were trying to do more sophisticated cluster management. Kubernetes has now got projects getting much more complicated. So more complicated workloads mean more data, more critical data means more protection. Okay, so you acquire Kasten, we know that's a small part of your business today but it's going to be growing. We know this cause everybody's developing applications. So what's different about protecting containers? Danny talks about modern data protection. Okay, when I first heard that, I'm like, eh, nice tagline, but then he peel the onion. He explains how in virtualization, you went from agents to backing up of VMware instance, a virtual instance. What's different about containers? What constitutes modern data protection for containers? >> Yeah, so I think the story that Danny tells as well, is so when we had our physical agents and virtualization came along and a lot of... And this is really where Veeam was born, right, we went into the virtualization API, the VMware API, and we started leveraging that to be more storage efficient. The admin overhead around those agents weren't there then, we could just back up using the API. Whereas obviously a lot of our competition would use agents still and put that resource overhead on top of that. So that's where Veeam initially got the kickstart in that world. I think it's very similar to when it comes to Kubernetes because K10 is deployed within the Kubernetes cluster and it leverages the Kubernetes API to pull out that data in a more efficient way. You could use image based backups or traditional NAS based backups to protect some of the data, and backup's kind of the... It's only one of the ticks in the boxes, right? You have to be able to restore and know what that data is. >> But wait, your competitors aren't as fat, dumb and happy today as they were back then, right? So it can't... They use the same APIs and- >> Yeah. >> So what makes you guys different? >> So I think that's testament to the Kubernetes and the community behind that and things like the CSI driver, which enables the storage vendors to take that CSI abstraction layer and then integrate their storage components, their snapshot technologies, and other efficiency models in there, and be able to leverage that as part of a universal data protection API. So really that's one tick in the box and you're absolutely right, there's open source tools that can do exactly what we're doing to a degree on that backup and recovery. Where it gets really interesting is the mobility of data and how we're protecting that. Because as much as stateful workloads are seen within the Kubernetes environments now, they're also seen outside. So things like Amazon RDS, but the front end lives in Kubernetes going to that stateless point. But being able to protect the whole application and being very application aware means that we can capture everything and restore wherever we want that to go as well. Like, so the demo that I just did was actually a Postgres database in AWS, and us being able to clone or migrate that out into an EKS cluster as a staple set. So again, we're not leveraging RDS at that point, but it gives us the freedom of movement of that data. >> Yeah, I want to talk about that, what you actually demoed. One of the interesting things, we were talking earlier, I didn't see any CLI when you were going through the integration of K10 V5 and V12. >> Yeah. >> That was very interesting, but I'm more skeptical of this concept, of the single pane of glass and how useful that is. Who is this integration targeting? Are you targeting the sort of traditional Veeam user who is now adding as a responsibility, the management of protecting these Kubernetes environments? Or are you at the same time targeting the current owners of those environments? Cause I know you talk about shift left and- >> Yeah. >> You know, nobody needs Kubernetes if you only have one container and one thing you're doing. So at some point it's all about automation, it's about blueprints, it's about getting those things in early. So you get up, you talk about this integration, who cares about that kind of integration? >> Yeah, so I think it's a bit of both, right? So we're definitely focused around the DevOps focused engineer. Let's just call it that. And under an umbrella, the cloud engineer that's looking after Kubernetes, from an application delivery perspective. But I think more and more as we get further up the mountain, CIS admin, obviously who we speak to the tech decision makers, the solutions architects systems engineers, they're going to inherit and be that platform operator around the Kubernetes clusters. And they're probably going to land with the requirement around data management as well. So the specific VBR centralized management is very much for the backup admin, the infrastructure admin or the cloud based engineer that's looking after the Kubernetes cluster and the data within that. Still we speak to app developers who are conscious of what their database looks like, because that's an external data service. And the biggest question that we have or the biggest conversation we have with them is that the source code, the GitHub or the source repository, that's fine, that will get your... That'll get some of the way back up and running, but when it comes to a Postgres database or some sort of data service, oh, that's out of the CI/CD pipeline. So it's whether they're interested in that or whether that gets farmed out into another pre-operations, the traditional operations team. >> So I want to unpack your press release a little bit. It's full of all the acronyms, so maybe you can help us- >> Sure. >> Cipher. You got security everywhere enhance platform hardening, including KMS. That's key- >> Yeah, key management service, yeah. >> System, okay. With AWS, KMS and HashiCorp vault. Awesome, love to see HashiCorp company. >> Yeah. >> RBAC objects in UI dashboards, ransomware attacks, AWS S3. So anyway, security everywhere. What do you mean by that? >> So I think traditionally at Veeam, and continue that, right? From a security perspective, if you think about the failure scenario and ransomware's, the hot topic, right, when it comes to security, but we can think about security as, if we think about that as the bang, right, the bang is something bad's happen, fire, flood, blood, type stuff. And we tend to be that right hand side of that, we tend to be the remediation. We're definitely the one, the last line of defense to get stuff back when something really bad happens. And I think what we've done from a K10 point of view, is not only enhance that, so with the likes of being able to... We're not going to reinvent the wheel, let's use the services that HashiCorp have done from a HashiCorp vault point of view and integrate from a key management system. But then also things like S3 or ransomware prevention. So I want to know if something bad's happened and Kasten actually did something more generic from a Veeam ONE perspective, but one of the pieces that we've seen since we've then started to send our backups to an immutable object storage, is let's be more of that left as well and start looking at the preventative tasks that we can help with. Now, we're not going to be a security company, but you heard all the way through Danny's like keynote, and probably when he is been on here, is that it's always, we're always mindful of that security focus. >> On that point, what was being looked for? A spike in CPU utilization that would be associated with encryption? >> Yeah, exactly that. >> Is that what was being looked- >> That could be... Yeah, exactly that. So that could be from a virtual machine point of view but from a K10, and it specifically is that we're going to look at the S3 bucket or the object storage, we're going to see if there's a rate of change that's out of the normal. It's an abnormal rate. And then with that, we can say, okay, that doesn't look right, alert us through observability tools, again, around the cloud native ecosystem, Prometheus Grafana. And then we're going to get insight into that before the bang happens, hopefully before the bang. >> So that's an interesting when we talk about adjacencies and moving into this area of security- >> We're talking to Zeus about that too. >> Exactly. That's that sort of creep where you can actually add value. It's interesting. >> So, okay. So we talked about shift left, get that, and then expanded ecosystem, industry leading technologies. By the way, one of them is the Red Hat Marketplace. And I think, I heard Anton's... Anton was amazing. He is the head of product management at Veeam. Is been to every VeeamON. He's got family in Ukraine. He's based in Switzerland. >> Yeah. >> But he chose not to come here because he's obviously supporting, you know, the carnage that's going on in Ukraine. But anyway, I think he said the Red Hat team is actually in Ukraine developing, you know, while the bombs are dropping. That's amazing. But anyway, back to our interview here, expanded ecosystem, Red Hat, SUSE with Rancher, they've got some momentum. vSphere with Tanzu, they're in the game. Talk about that ecosystem and its importance. >> Yeah, and I think, and it goes back to your point around the CLI, right? Is that it feels like the next stage of Kubernetes is going to be very much focused towards the operator or the operations team. The CIS admin of today is going to have to look after that. And at the moment it's all very command line, it's all CLI driven. And I think the marketplace is OpenShift, being our biggest foothold around our customer base, is definitely around OpenShift. But things like, obviously we are a longstanding alliance partner with VMware as well. So their Tanzu operations actually there's support for TKGS, so vSphere Tanzu grid services is another part of the big release of 5.0. But all three of those and the common marketplace gives us a UI, gives us a way of being able to see and visualize that rather than having to go and hunt down the commands and get our information through some- >> Oh, some people are going to be unhappy about that. >> Yeah. >> But I contend the human eye has evolved to see in color for a very good reason. So I want to see things in red, yellow, and green at times. >> There you go, yeah. >> So when we hear a company like Veeam talk about, look we have no platform agenda, we don't care which cloud it's in. We don't care if it's on-prem or Google Azure, AWS. We had Wasabi on, we have... Great, they got an S3 compatible, you know, target, and others as well. When we hear them, companies like you, talk about that consistent experience, single pane of glass that you're skeptical of, maybe cause it's technically challenging, one of the things, we call it super cloud, right, that's come up. Danny and I were riffing on that the other day and we'll do that more this afternoon. But it brings up something that we were talking about with Zeus, Dave, which is the edge, right? And it seems like Kubernetes, and we think about OpenShift. >> Yeah. >> We were there last week at Red Hat Summit. It's like 50% of the conversation, if not more, was the edge. Right, and really true edge, worst cases, use cases. Two weeks ago we were at Dell Tech, there was a lot of edge talk, but it was retail stores, like Lowe's. Okay, that's kind of near edge, but the far edge, we're talking space, right? So seems like Kubernetes fits there and OpenShift, you know, particularly, as well as some of the others that we mentioned. What about edge? How much of what you're doing with container data protection do you see as informing you about the edge opportunity? Are you seeing any patterns there? Nobody's really talking about it in data protection yet. >> So yeah, large scale numbers of these very small clusters that are out there on farms or in wind turbines, and that is definitely something that is being spoken about. There's not much mention actually in this 5.0 release because we actually support things like K3s,(indistinct), that all came in 4.5, but I think, to your first point as well, David, is that, look, we don't really care what that Kubernetes distribution is. So you've got K3s lightweight Kubernetes distribution, we support it, because it uses the same native Kubernetes APIs, and we get deployed inside of that. I think where we've got these large scale and large numbers of edge deployments of Kubernetes and that you require potentially some data management down there, and they might want to send everything into a centralized location or a more centralized location than a farm shed out in the country. I think we're going to see a big number of that. But then we also have our multi cluster dashboard that gives us the ability to centralize all of the control plane. So we don't have to go into each individual K10 deployment to manage those policies. We can have one big centralized management multi cluster dashboard, and we can set global policies there. So if you're running a database and maybe it's the same one across all of your different edge locations, where you could just set one policy to say I want to protect that data on an hourly basis, a daily basis, whatever that needs to be, rather than having to go into each individual one. >> And then send it back to that central repository. So that's the model that you see, you don't see the opportunity, at least at this point in time, of actually persisting it at the edge? >> So I think it depends. I think we see both, but again, that's the footprint. And maybe like you mentioned about up in space having a Kubernetes cluster up there. You don't really want to be sending up a NAS device or a storage device, right, to have to sit alongside it. So it's probably, but then equally, what's the art of the possible to get that back down to our planet, like as part of a consistent copy of data? >> Or even a farm or other remote locations. The question is, I mean, EVs, you know, we believe there's going to be tons of data, we just don't.. You think about Tesla as a use case, they don't persist a ton of their data. Maybe if a deer runs across, you know, the front of the car, oh, persist that, send that back to the cloud. >> I don't want anyone knowing my Tesla data. I'll tell you that right now. (all laughing) >> Well, there you go, that one too. All right, well, that's future discussion, we're still trying to squint through those patterns. I got so many questions for you, Michael, but we got to go. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Always. >> Great job on the keynote today and good luck. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> All right, keep it right there. We got a ton of product talk today. As I said, Danny Allan's coming back, we got the ecosystem coming, a bunch of the cloud providers. We have, well, iland was up on stage. They were just recently acquired by 11:11 Systems. They were an example today of a cloud service provider. We're going to unpack it all here on theCUBE at VeeamON 2022 from Las Vegas at the Aria. Keep it right there. (calm music)

>>Welcome back to VMO 2022. We're in the home stretch. Now, Dave ante for Dave Nicholson, and we're excited to have drew Schlissel on he's the director of product marketing at wasabi, and he is joined by Dustin Albertson, the manager of cloud and application alliances, product, product management at Veeam software. Dustin, did I get that right? You got it right. All right. You're gonna explain all those little titles in a moment. So wasabi is a company cool name, but you may not know much about them drew. What does wasabi do? >>We do cloud storage, plain and simple. It is the one thing we do extremely well. It's S3 compatible, and it covers a broad range of use cases, right? Primarily we work with Veeam on backup and recovery, and >>We're gonna get into that. But when we, what there's a lot of people do cloud storage, a lot of people do object store. What makes you wasabi unique >>Simplicity, predictability performance security, right? Predictability. Let's talk about price, right? That's the thing that gets people's attention, right? Oh, sure. Okay. You can look at it. One of two ways. It's either one fit the price of all the hyperscalers, significant difference there, or right. For fundamentally the same price. You get five times more storage, which makes a huge difference, especially in the backup space. When you want to have a lot of backups, right. Folks would prefer to have months of backups as opposed to days or weeks. Right? >>How do you, how do you do that? Because, because there's, you know, maybe >>It sounds like magic, doesn't >>It? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, look at us, we've all been around the block quite a few times and we know that the bits and the bites and the bolts are all basically the same. What are you doing to get that level of? >>I can't tell you >>Secret's secret. It's secret. >>Look, it, it doesn't have to be that expensive. Okay. Now granted, there's some things obviously we do that are proprietary and different from, >>Well, like stealing electricity from your neighbor or something. I mean, what, >>You just run a cord over a >>Absolutely that's one way to cut down on price. But because we are so focused on just the storage, right. And our founders, you know, the gentleman who founded Carbonite, no a thing or two about storage. Sure. Right. We have a very highly optimized stack, very efficient. You know, you guys know what raw to usable story is. Right? You've gone through that TCO analysis before, and we're highly efficient in how we use the raw storage. And we pass that price on to our customers. Right. We believe that a low price cloud storage, right? One tier always hot, always available. It gives our customers the ability to spend their money in other places. Right. >>Well, and, and there's a price umbrella that the public cloud guys have is kind of a gift that they've given you. Hey, look at Amazon's operating profits last quarter. It was 35%. Those are like Oracle operating margins. Not that I, we don't know what your operating margins are, but I I've followed David friend's career for a long, long time. He's got good nose for business. But so Dustin, when you, when you hear drew talk about the ability to retain that much data, what does that mean for Veeam customers? >>So the primary thing for Veeam customers is the ease of use. I would say, you know, the, the performance and things like that are all nice, right? They're, they're important. But primarily what I see is people say how easy it is to use and how easy it is to price. Now, the objective, you know, the alternative is you go to another cloud provider and you say, well, how much will this cost me per month? You really have to underst yes, you really have to understand object storage, how Veeam works, how we're moving data, all the API calls, all of that to really kind of correlate out a guesstimate of what your price would be per month. You know, with LASA it's, it's a flat fee it's per terabyte. You know what it is gonna be? That's it? There's no API charges. There's no egres. So the customers really love that. Ease of use this become one of the most popular endpoints for object storage for our customers. >>Imagine this, right? You go to best buy and you buy a refrigerator and you bring it home and you stock it with all your favorite drinks and snacks. Okay. You on game day, you go and you open the fridge and you hear a sound Bing. And it's your phone and it's your credit card company telling you that you've been charged a door opening fee. Okay. And then you grab a beer out of that fridge, Bing, Bing, and you hear another ring and now you're getting a beer extraction fee. Okay. Now I want to be fair to, you know, all the sponsors here, but okay. With wasabi, you can open that door. You could stand there. You can air condition, the whole house. You can take a beer out and put a beer back or whatever your favorite beverage is. And you're not gonna hear that noise. Okay. Very straightforward. Like in, in geometry class, right? The slope of a line Y equals MX plus B B equals zero. Okay. Well, >>Whoa. Well, you had me at free beer. You didn't, >>You don't, but you understand why? >>Why would you, you don't need to go see >>To open your fridge and take out a beverage, take out a snack. Okay. That's the predictable part of wasabi. That's what's resonating so strongly with folks where everything else is in this world. Unpredictable. >>So ease, simplicity. Maybe the answer to that is, well, there's all this other stuff in the cloud. I can just, it's convenient for me. It's right there. So how do you address that convenience factor? All these other services, you know, that I can get streaming and machine learning and all that other great stuff. How do you address that? >>Sometimes all you need is storage. Okay. That no, it that's yet put, okay. That's beauty of wasabi. We're not trying to be everything to everyone. We're trying to be one thing executed very well for a, a specific set of users and use cases. >>I may be a little objective here, but I, I, you know, I've grown up with you guys, right? You, you, you were one of the first partners that I started working with and, and, you know, I've seen you kind of grow, but one of the things I think that you've done a real good job at is, is like you say, sticking to your, your lanes, you know, just going after use cases that just need data. Right. I don't need to get into the AI or the analytics or all of this. We just do this and do it well. And, and people have resonated with that. Right? Yeah. >>So big topic here of course is ransomware. Yeah. 3, 2 11, 0. What is that? What are the threes? The twos, the ones >>That's you, you gotta explain that one. Okay. >>So forever we had the 3, 2, 1 rule, right? Like three copies of data, two different, two different copies, two different media types. Yeah. One offsite. And then one is, is testing. And then zero now is, is validation. BA basically reuse that data. Make sure that you're testing it because if you're not, if you're following through two one, and you're not actually testing your data, is it really good? You don't know. You're just, you may have bad copies spread out all over the place. So one of the things where wasabi shines is is that they don't have these E risk charges. They don't have these API charges. So you can test that data. You can, after you send a backup up there, restore it somewhere else and validate that it works and then get rid of it. And it's still sitting up there in BAA. >>So you're not trying to balance your activities and your operational requirements with your, with your bill. Correct. You're not getting yelled at, by the, the controller at the end of the month. >>You're unconstrained. Yeah. Right. And I think also imutability comes into play. Correct. As well. >>Talk about >>That. Right. So, you know, we heard this morning in the keynote, right? That backup data sets are, you know, one of the main attack vectors, right. For cyber criminals. And it makes sense, right. They take down your primary systems and they control your backup systems. They've got you. You have no choice, but to pay that ransom. Okay. So mutability, that means that your backups are untouchable, your root user, your admins, the folks at wasabi, the folks at Veeam, nobody can alter that data period. End of story. Okay. That saves you from yourself that saves you from the hackers, right? I mean the most disturbing story I've read about cyber warfare right now is that people are getting bribe offers from these cyber gangs. And they're just, you know, for a couple of Bitcoin handing over the keys to the kingdom with imutability, you're actually safe from that scenario. >>So that's a service, correct? >>No, it's a feature. >>Okay. So can I turn it off? >>Yeah. You don't have to use it. >>No. Can I, after I've, after I've turned it on, can I turn it off? >>Oh, it's up to you. I mean, why don't you talk about >>That? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's an API. So if let's say you send some backups up there today and you set it for two weeks and you decide today. Oh, I made a mistake. I wanna turn it off. You can't turn it off. Yeah. >>Okay. So as long as you set that policy, it's, it's a big warning, right? You can't undo this. Correct. Okay. So even if I come, come to jump to the admin with a bunch of Bitcoin yep. He or she can't undo, right? >>Nope. That's right. And you can set it for two weeks, two months, two years. Right. You can use it to secure your backups. Yep. Right. You can also use that same feature in compliance situations. Right. Regulatory environments, where you've gotta retain customer data for, you know, 5, 7, 10 years. Right. By using that imutability feature, you guarantee the integrity of that data for whatever period you set. >>And it's a feature it's not a paid for service. Is that right? >>It is included as part of the service. >>Okay. So I don't >>Free beer and free meat. >>I think I'm correct that some, some competitors you're paying for that service. So if you turn it off, there's a, if you don't stop paying, there's a, there's a theory. They could turn it off on you. They will warn you. >>Sure. But >>That says to me that somebody could be tempted by a few Bitcoin. >>That's not a mutable. Well's >>Notable. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >>Well, and, and there is a charge to use it in other places because it's an API request. Right. It's an action. It's opening the fridge. >>It's like texting. Yes. Maybe a charge. >>Yeah. I remember. I remember those days. Was it 10 cents? A 10 cents a message or something Telegraph. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. You still get those messages. Right? Text, text fees may apply. I'm like really? Okay. So tell me more about, so you got me. I'm sold. Okay. I've I've David friends got good job. Got cred, got credibility. Okay. But I have some other questions. Like where's my data. You guys running your own data centers. What's your global footprint. How do you deal with data sovereignty? All that stuff. >>So right now, oh boy. Now I'm on the spot. I wanna say 11 locations around the world. It's our gear. We're running it in concert with folks who are helping us host that system. Right. But we have complete control of course, over our systems. We're everywhere. Right? Just open, let's see. Toronto Frankfurt, Paris, London, Sydney just spun up in the last week. We've got Singapore coming online. I think in the next two weeks. Two >>In Japan. >>Yep. Two in Japan, multiple locations in the United States. So in terms of sovereignty, right, as long as folks are keeping it within, you know, their, their physical boundaries, not a problem. And if folks want to use, you know, other locations in other countries, great. We can support that as well. >>So you got momentum as a business. I mean, that's pretty clear. Yeah. Just from the discussions I've had with, with folks like David, and obviously you you're excited about this, where's it coming from? Is it really that, that price factor that's driving people to you? Is it Dustin said simplicity. I mean, where are you seeing the momentum geographies? Where is it? Where's the action. >>I I'll say, you know, from my point of view, it's, it's been a combination of all that, right? It, it's simple. It's easy to use a, like a user can, any user who's not cloud friendly, right. Can log in and create one. It's a simple portal to create a bucket and then start sending stuff off site. But also they've, they've kind of, they reminded me of a younger Veeam, like when they first started, because they went after the channel and they went and started these partner programs and, and MSP programs and things like that that have been really successful as far as one of the key markets is MSPs. Right? Because they, you know, want a cheap place to put this data. They don't wanna have to buy appliances. They don't wanna have to go to AWS and things like that. So this has been really appealing to >>Them. You know, it's interesting. So I have a, we have a partnership with a data company down in New York called enterprise technology research. We write a breaking analysis every week and we use a lot of their data. One of the things that popped up recently, maybe a year ago, OpenStack I'm like OpenStack. So we dug in like where's OpenStack and what it was was MSPs didn't want pay the VTax. Right. So they were rolling their own with, with open source and open stack. It was red hat services, blah, blah, blah. But it sounds like a similar dynamic, especially with the MSPs. >>I, so I think we've, I, I hate to use the, the metaphor, but I will. Right. There's a perfect storm happening, right. Especially in the last, what, two years. All right. The cloud has been gaining traction, but we've been around long enough to see the pendulum swinging. Right. Some folks went crazy for the cloud and then they got their bill and then they went crazy to get back out of the cloud. But now, you know, with distributed workforces, with the, you know, the, the constant attacks on their, their on-prem systems, right. The growth in cloud across the board has been phenomenal. I know you're a market watcher. Right. I know you guys are keeping close eyes. I saw your recent analysis on the cybersecurity firms. Right. It continues to grow. There's no question about it. We're we're on that wave. Right. And I think we've, you know, we're not, we're, we're, I don't know if it's the long board or the short little snappy board. Yes. We actually identify and, and, and went after the opportunity to partner with Veeam very early on, because it's the perfect work case work, work load. >>How long can you sustain that? And still resist the temptation to come out with some new shiny object to distract people? >>I >>Mean, what, what, what does that, what does that look like in terms of, as you look out in this laser focused yeah. Addressable market that you're going after now. >>So, you know, the best part about being here this week is having great conversations and, and talking to folks about what they're seeing in the marketplace and the different verticals. I don't think we've even scratched the surface of any of the verticals that we are working in today. Right. First and foremost, when it comes to backup and recovery, there's so much more opportunity with Veeam, right? Whether it's healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, analytics, backup of IML, you know, analysis, I think it's almost limitless, right. Data's growing what, 40, 80% year, over year, depending on who you ask. Right. Then the other things that we do, which maybe folks don't even know about, we have a burgeoning business in video surveillance, right. We're working with all the top partners in that sector. And the takeup is phenomenal because they are tweaking their technology to maintain a relatively small cash, right. OnPrem or in the central office. And then they're just kind of, you know, tearing that off to the cloud to have essentially a bottomless backup or archive of that footage. And they can do it at 4k. Here's the best part, right. When AK comes out, guess what, you know, that data set doubles in size. >>Right. But that's right in your zone. That's not stepping out that that's not stepping after that's that's classic leveraging. Good >>Answer. In other words. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. >>I mean, if >>You're, if you're, if you're hitting singles and doubles all day long, right. Do you have to switch to be a power hitter and go for the fences and drop your batting average down, but hope that your slugging percentage goes up. I think you keep hitting singles doubles, you know, in triples, >>A lot of people on Sandhill road or, you know, at the bar at the Rosewood would disagree with you. Wow. And so I, I appreciate the discipline. >>Yeah. And it's true. And, and as we know, the industry is littered with a lot of those names that just didn't didn't make it >>Let's stay positive, you know? >>Okay. No he's saying yeah, no, no. A lot of guys at sand hill road would say, no, you gotta go for it. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta forget these singles. We want, >>Yeah. We need home runs gotta be >>Shiny. Well, I mean, look at Vema as a, as a, as an example right. Of a disciplined approach. Right. Exactly. To, to a space that they have steadily grown. I mean, congratulations. Right. You guys have been identified by IDC, right. Is essentially, you know, co number ones. And I expect that to be the number one in the market. Right. I think, you know, David friend clearly has provided excellent guidance, right. To steer the company that way. And I'm just really happy >>To be about that. Oh. And the Tam is data. Right. And you're, you're just another node on the data universe. Right. Which is, that's what you want. You want, you don't necessarily wanna move it around. Yeah. If you don't have to. >>It is interesting though. I mean, we, we are seeing more and more analysts identifying with Sabi as like the fourth player. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Right. And I also heard it from some good sources this week that let's say one of the hyperscalers has, you know, started to yeah. Have conversations about us. Let's just >>Leave it. That's good. It means you're bothering people. Yeah. Said, all right, guys, we gotta go. Thanks so much for coming on the queue. Thank you. Great to have you. That was easy. Thank you. Appreciate it. Very welcome. All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day one from VMO in 2022, right back.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBEConversation. >> Hi everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversation. We're in Palo Alto, California, at theCUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, co-host of the CUBE. We're here with Chris Yeh. He's the co-founder and general partner of Blitzscaling Ventures, author of the book Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a variety of other ventures, also a partner at Greylock Partners. Chris, great to see you. I've known you for years. Love the book, love Reid. You guys did a great job. So congratulations. But the big news is you're now a TV star as one of the original inaugural contestants on the Mental Samurai, just premiered on Fox, was it >> On Fox. >> On Fox, nine o'clock, on which days? >> So Mental Samurai is on Fox, Tuesdays at 9 p.m. right after Master Chef Junior. >> Alright. So big thing. So successful shows. Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. >> It's a new show, so it's got this kind of like Jeopardy vibe where they got to answer tough questions in what looks like a roller coaster kind of arm that moves you around from station to station, kind of jar you up. But it's a lot of pressure, time clock and hard questions. Tell us about the format. How you got that. Gives all the story. >> So the story behind Mental Samurai is it's from the producers of American Ninja Warrior, if you've ever seen that show. So American Ninja Warrior is a physical obstacle course and these incredible athletes go through and the key is to get through the obstacle course. If you miss any of the obstacles, you're out. So they took that and they translated it to the mental world and they said, okay, we're going to have a mental obstacle course where you going to have different kinds of questions. So they have memory questions, sequence questions, knowledge questions, all these things that are tapping different elements of intelligence. And in order to win at the game, you have to get 12 questions right in five minutes or less. And you can't get a single question wrong. You have to be perfect. >> And they do try to jar you up, to kind of scrabble your brain with those devices, it makes it suspenseful. In watching last night at your watch party in Palo Alto, it's fun to watch because yeah, I'm like, okay, it's going to be cool. I'll support Chris. I'll go there, be great and on TV, and oh my, that's pretty interesting. It was actually riveting. Intense. >> Yeah. You have that element of moving around from station to station and it's dramatic. It's kind of a theater presence. But what's it like in there? Give us some insight. You're coming on in April 30th so you're yet to come on. >> Yes. >> But the early contestants, none of them made it to the 100,000. Only one person passed the first threshold. >> Right >> Take us through the format. How many thresholds are there? What's the format? >> Perfect, so basically when a competitor gets strapped into the chair, they call it Ava, it's like a robot, and basically they got it from some company in Germany and it has the ability to move 360 degrees. It's like an industrial robot or something. It makes you feel like you're an astronaut or in one those centrifugal force things. And the idea is they're adding to the pressure. They're making it more of a challenge. Instead of just Jeopardy where you're sitting there, and answering questions and bantering with Alex Trebek, you're working against the clock and you're being thrown around by this robot. So what happens is first you try to answer 12 questions correctly in less than five minutes. If you do that, then you make it through to the next round, what they call the circle of samurai and you win $10,000. The circle of samurai, what happens is there are four questions and you get 90 seconds plus whatever you have left over from your first run, to answer those four questions. Answer all four questions correctly, you win $100,000 and the official title of Mental Samurai. >> So there's only two levels, circle of samurai but it gets harder. Now also I noticed that it's, their questions have certain puzzles and there's certain kinds of questions. What's the categories, if you will, what's the categories they offer? >> Yes, so the different categories are knowledge, which is just classic trivia, it's a kind of Jeopardy stuff. There's memory, where they have something on screen that you have to memorize, or maybe they play an audio track that you have to remember what happened. And then there's also sequence where you have to put things in order. So all these different things are represented by these different towers which are these gigantic television screens where they present the questions. And the idea is in order to be truly intelligent, you have to be able to handle all of these different things. You can't just have knowledge. You can't just have pop culture. You got to have everything. >> So on the candidates I saw some from Stanford. >> Yeah. >> I saw an athlete. It's a lot of diversity in candidates. How do they pick the candidates? How did you get involved? Did your phone ring up one day? Were you identified, they've read your blog. Obviously they've, you're smart. I've read your stuff on Facebook. How did you get in there? (laughs) >> Excellent question. So the whole process, there's a giant casting department that does all these things. And there's people who just cast people for game shows. And what happened with me is many years ago back in 2014, my sister worked in Hollywood when I was growing up. She worked for ER and Baywatch and other companies and she still keeps track of the entertainment industry. And she sent me an email saying, hey, here's a casting call for a new show for smart people and you should sign up. And so I replied to the email and said hey I'm Chris Yeh. I'm this author. I graduate from Stanford when I was 19, blah blah blah blah. I should be on your show. And they did a bunch of auditions with me over the phone. And they said we love you, the network loves you. We'll get in touch and then I never heard. Turns out that show never got the green light. And they never even shot that show. But that put me on a list with these various casting directors. And for this show it turns out that there was an executive producer of the show, the creator of the show, his niece was the casting director who interviewed me back in 2014. And she told her uncle, hey, there's this guy, Chris Yeh, in Palo Alto. I think would be great for this new show you're doing. Why don't you reach out to him. So they reached out to me. I did a bunch of Skype auditions. And eventually while I was on my book tour for Blitzscaling, I got the email saying, congratulations, you're part of the season one cast. >> And on the Skype interviews, was it they grilling you with questions, or was it doing a mock dry run? What was some of interview vetting questions? >> So they start off by just asking you about yourself and having you talk about who you are because the secret to these shows is none of the competitors are famous in advance, or at least very few of them are. There was a guy who was a major league baseball pitcher, there's a guy who's an astronaut, I mean, those guys are kind of famous already, but the whole point is, they want to build a story around the person like they do with the Olympics so that people care whether they succeed or not. And so they start off with biographical questions and then they proceed to basically use flash cards to simulate the game and see how well you do. >> Got it, so they want to basically get the whole story arc 'cause Chris, obviously Chris is smart, he passed the test. Graduate when he's 19. Okay, you're book smart. Can you handle the pressure? If you do get it, there's your story line. So they kind of look from the classic, kind of marketing segmentation, demographics is your storylines. What are some of the things that they said to you on the feedback? Was there any feedback, like you're perfect, we like this about you. Or is it more just cut and dry. >> Well I think they said, we love your energy. It's coming through very strongly to the screen. That's fantastic. We like your story. Probably the part I struggle the most with, was they said hey, you know, talk to us about adversity. Talk to us about the challenges that you've overcome. And I tell people, listen, I'm a very lucky guy. A lot of great things have happened to me in life. I don't know if there's that much adversity that I can really complain about. Other people who deal with these life threatening illnesses and all this stuff, I don't have that. And so that was probably the part I struggled the most with. >> Well you're certainly impressive. I've known you for years. You're a great investor, a great person. And a great part of Silicon Valley. So congratulations, good luck on the show. So it's Tuesdays. >> 9 p.m. >> 9 p.m. >> On fox. >> On Fox. Mental Samurai. Congratulations, great. Great to be at the launch party last night. The watch party, there'll be another one. Now your episode comes out on April 30th. >> Yes. So on April 30th we will have a big Bay area-wide watch party. I'm assuming that admission will be free, assuming I find the right sponsors. And so I'll come back to you. I'll let you know where it's going to be. Maybe we should even film the party. >> That's, well, I got one more question on the show. >> Yeah. >> You have not been yet on air so but you know the result. What was it like sitting in the chair, I mean, what was it personally like for you? I mean you've taken tests, you've been involved with the situation. You've made some investments. There's probably been some tough term sheets here and there, board meetings. And all that experience in your life, what was it compared to, what was it like? >> Well, it's a really huge adrenaline rush because if you think about there's so many different elements that already make it an adrenaline rush and they all combine together. First of all, you're in this giant studio which looks like something out of a space-age set with this giant robotic arm. There's hundreds of people around cheering. Then you're strapped into a robotic arm which basically makes you feel like an astronaut, like every run starts with you facing straight up, right? Lying back as if you're about to be launched on a rocket. And then you're answering these difficult questions with time pressure and then there's Rob Lowe there as well that you're having a conversation with. So all these things together, and your heart, at least for me, my heart was pounding. I was like trying very hard to stay calm because I knew it was important to stay clam, to be able to get through it. >> Get that recall, alright. Chris, great stuff. Okay, Blitzscaling. Blitzscaling Ventures. Very successful concept. I remember when you guys first started doing this at Stanford, you and Reid, were doing the lectures at Stanford Business School. And I'm like, I love this. It's on YouTube, kind of an open project initially, wasn't really, wasn't really meant to be a book. It was more of gift, paying it forward. Now it's a book. A lot of great praise. Some criticism from some folks but in general it's about scaling ventures, kind of the Silicon Valley way which is the rocket ship I call. The rocket ship ventures. There's still the other venture capitals. But great book. Feedback from the book and the original days at Stanford. Talk about the Blitzscaling journey. >> And one of the things that happened when we did the class at Stanford is we had all these amazing guests come in and speak. So people like Eric Schmidt. People like Diane Greene. People like Brian Chesky, who talked about their experiences. And all of those conversations really formed a key part of the raw material that went into the book. We began to see patterns emerge. Some pretty fascinating patterns. Things like, for example, a lot of companies, the ones that'd done the best job of maintaining their culture, have their founders involved in hiring for the first 500 employees. That was like a magic number that came up over and over again in the interviews. So all this content basically came forward and we said, okay, well how do we now take this and put it into a systematic framework. So the idea of the book was to compress down 40 hours of video content, incredible conversations, and put it in a framework that somebody could read in a couple of hours. >> It is also one of those things where you get lightning in a ball, the classic and so then I'd say go big or go home. But Blitzscaling is all about something new and something different. And I'm reading a book right now called Loonshots, which is a goof on moonshots. It's about the loonies who start the real companies and a lot of companies that are successful like Airbnb was passed over on and they call those loonies. Those aren't moonshots. Moonshots are well known, build-outs. This is where the blitzscaling kind of magic happens. Can you just share your thoughts on that because that's something that's not always talked about in the mainstream press, is that a lot of there blitzscaling companies, are the ones that don't look good on paper initially. >> Yes. >> Or ones that no one's talking about is not in a category or herd mentality of investors. It's really that outlier. >> Yes. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> Yeah, and one of the things that Reid likes to say is that the best possible companies usually sound like they're dumb ideas. And in fact the best investment he's been a part of as a venture capitalist, those are the ones where there's the greatest controversy around the table. It's not the companies that come in and everyone's like this is a no-brainer, let's do it. It's the companies where there's a big fight. Should we do this, should we not? And we think the reason is this. Blitzscaling is all about being able to be the first to scale and the winner take most or the winner take all market. Now if you're in a market where everyone's like, this is a great market, this is a great idea. You're going to have huge competition. You're going to have a lot of people going after it. It's very difficult to be the first to scale. If you are contrarian and right you believe something that other people don't believe, you have the space to build that early lead, that you can then use to leverage yourself into that enduring market leadership. >> And one of the things that I observed from the videos as well is that the other fact that kind of plays into, I want to get your reaction, this is that there has to be a market shift that goes on too because you have to have a tailwind or a wave to ride because if you can be contrarian if there's no wave, >> Right. >> right? so a lot of these companies that you guys highlight, have the wave behind them. It was mobile computing, SaaSification, cloud computing, all kind of coming together. Talk about that dynamic and your reaction 'cause that's something where people can get confused on blitzscaling. They read the book. Oh I'm going to disrupt the dry cleaning business. Well I mean, not really. I mean, unless there's something different >> Exactly. >> in market conditions. Talk about that. >> Yeah, so with blitzscaling you're really talking about a new market or a market that's transforming. So what is it that causes these things to transform? Almost always it's some new form of technological innovation, or perhaps a packaging of different technological innovations. Take mobile computing for example. Many of the components have been around for a while. But it took off when Apple was able to combine together capacitative touchscreens and the form factor and the processor strength being high enough finally. And all these things together created the technological innovation. The technological innovation then enables the business model innovation of building an app store and creating a whole new way of thinking about handheld computing. And then based on that business model innovation, you have the strategy innovation of blitzscaling to allow you to grow rapidly and keep from blowing up when you grow. >> And the spirit of kind of having, kind of a clean entrepreneurial segmentation here. Blitzscaling isn't for everybody. And I want you to talk about that because obviously the book's popular when this controversy, there's some controversy around the fact that you just can't apply blitzscaling to everything. We just talk about some of those factors. There are other entrepreneurialship models that makes sense but that might not be a fit for blitzscaling. Can you just unpack that and just explain, a minute to explain the difference between a company that's good for blitzscaling and one that isn't. >> Well, a key thing that you need for blitzscaling is one of these winner take most or winner take all markets that's just enormous and hugely valuable, alright? The whole thing about blitzscaling is it's very risky. It takes a lot of effort. It's very uncomfortable. So it's only worth doing when you have those market dynamics and when that market is really large. And so in the book we talk about there being many businesses that this doesn't apply to. And we use the example of two companies that were started at the same time. One company is Amazon, which is obviously a blitzscaling company and a dominant player and a great, great company. And the other is the French Laundry. In fact, Jeff Bezos started Amazon the same year that Thomas Keller started the French Laundry. And the French Laundry still serves just 60 people a day. But it's a great business. It's just a very different kind of business. >> It's a lifestyle or cash flow business and people call it a lifestyle business but mainly it's a cash flow or not a huge growing market. >> Yeah. >> Satisfies that need. What's the big learnings that you learned that was something different that you didn't know coming out of blitzscaling experience? Something that surprised you, something that might have shocked you, something that might have moved you. I mean you're well-read. You're smart. What was some learnings that you learned from the journey? >> Well, one of the things that was really interesting to me and I didn't really think about it. Reid and I come from the startup world, not the big company world. One of the things that surprised me is the receptivity of big companies to these ideas. And they explained it to me and they said, listen, you got to understand with a big company, you think it's just a big company growing at 10, 15% a year. But actually there's units that are growing at 100% a year. There's units that are declining at 50% a year. And figuring out how you can actually continue to grow new businesses quicker than your old businesses die is a huge thing for the big, established companies. So that was one of the things that really surprised me but I'm grateful that it appears that it's applicable. >> It's interesting. I had a lot of conversations with Michael Dell before, and before they went private and after they went private. He essentially was blitzscaling. >> Yeah. >> He said, I'm going to winner take most in the mature, somewhat declining massive IT enterprise spend against the HPs of the world, and he's doing it and VMware stock went to an all time high. So big companies can blitz scale. That's the learning. >> Exactly. And the key thing to remember there is one of the reasons why somebody like Michael Dell went private to do this is that blitzscaling is all about prioritizing speed over efficiency. Guess who doesn't like that? Wall street doesn't like because you're taking a hit to earnings as you invest in a new business. GM for example is investing heavily in autonomous vehicles and that investment is not yet delivering cash but it's something that's going to create a huge value for General Motors. And so it's really tough to do blitzscaling as a publicly traded company though there are examples. >> I know your partner in the book, Reid Hoffman as well as in the blitzscaling at Stanford was as visible in both LinkedIn and as the venture capitalist of Greylock. But also he was involved with some failed startups on the front end of LinkedIn. >> Yeah. >> So he had some scar tissue on social networking before it became big, I'll say on the knowledge graph that he's building, he built at LinkedIn. I'm sure he had some blitzscaling lessons. What did he bring to the table? Did he share anything in the classes or privately with you that you can share that might be helpful for people to know? >> Well, there's a huge number of lessons. Obviously we drew heavily on Reid's life for the book. But I think you touched on something that a lot of people don't know, which is that LinkedIn is not the first social network that Reid created. Actually during the dot-com boom Reid created a company called SocialNet that was one of the world's first social networks. And I actually was one of the few people in the world who signed up and was a member of SocialNet. I think I had the handle, net revolutionary on that if you can believe that. And one of the things that Reid learned from his SocialNet experience turned into one of his famous sayings, which is, if you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you've launched too late. With SocialNet they spent so much time refining the product and trying to get it perfectly right. And then when they launched it, they discovered what everyone always discovers when they launch, which is the market wants something totally different. We had no idea what people really wanted. And they'd wasted all this time trying to perfect something that they've theoretically thought was what the market wanted but wasn't actually what the market wanted. >> This is what I love about Silicon Valley. You have these kind of stories 'cause that's essentially agile before agile came out. They're kind of rearranging the deck chairs trying to get the perfect crafted product in a world that was moving to more agility, less craftsmanship and although now it's coming back. Also I talked to Paul Martino, been on theCUBE before. He's a tribe with Pincus. And it's been those founding fathers around these industries. It's interesting how these waves, they start off, they don't get off the ground, but that doesn't mean the category's dead. It's just a timing issue. That's important in a lot of ventures, the timing piece. Talk about that dynamic. >> Absolutely. When it comes to timing, you think about blitzscaling. If you start blitzscaling, you prioritize speed over efficiency. The main question is, is it the right time. So Webvan could be taken as an example of blitzscaling. They were spending money wildly inefficiently to build up grocery delivery. Guess what? 2000 was not the right time for it. Now we come around, we see Instacart succeeding. We see other delivery services delivering some value. It just turns out that you have to get the timing right. >> And market conditions are critical and that's why blitzscaling can work when the conditions are right. Our days back in the podcast, it was, we were right but timing was off. And this brings up the question of the team. >> Yeah. >> You got to have the right team that can handle the blitzscaling culture. And you need the right investors. You've been on both sides of the table. Talk about that dynamic because I think this is probably one of the most important features because saying you going to do blitzscaling and then getting buy off but not true commitment from the investors because the whole idea is to plow money into the system. You mentioned Amazon, one of Jeff Bezos' tricks was, he always poured money back into his business. So this is a capital strategy, as well financial strategy capital-wise as well as a business trait. Talk about the importance of having that stomach and the culture of blitzscaling. >> Absolutely. And I think you hit on something very important when you sort of talk about the importance of the investors. So Reid likes to refer to investors as financing partners. Or financing co-founders, because really they're coming on with you and committing to the same journey that you're going on. And one of the things I often tell entrepreneurs is you really have to dig deep and make sure you do more due diligence on your investors than you would on your employees. Because if you think about it, if you hire an employee, you can actually fire them. If you take money from an investor, there's no way you can ever get rid of them. So my advice to entrepreneurs is always, well, figure out if they're going to be a good partner for you. And the best way to do that is to go find some of the entrepreneurs they backed who failed and talked to those people. >> 'Cause that's where the truth will come out. >> Well, that's right. >> We stood by them in tough times. >> Exactly. >> I think that's classic, that's perfect but this notion of having the strategies of the elements of the business model in concert, the financial strategy, the capital strategy with the business strategy and the people strategy, all got to be pumping that can't be really any conflict on that. That's the key point. >> That's right, there has to be alignment because again, you're trying to go as quickly as possible and if you're running a race car and you have things that are loose and rattling around, you're not going to make it across the finish line. >> You're pulling for a pit stop and the guys aren't ready to change the tires, (snapping fingers) you know you're out of sync. >> Bingo. >> Chris, great stuff. Blitzscaling is a great book. Check it out. I recommend it, remember blitz scale is not for anyone, it's for the game changers. And again, picking your investors is critical on this. So if you picked the wrong investors, blitzscaling will blow up in a bad way. So don't, don't, pick properly on the visa and pick your team. Chris, so let's talk about you real quick to end the segment and the last talk track. Talk about your background 'cause I think you have a fascinating background. I didn't know that you graduated when you're 19, from Stanford was it? >> Yes. >> Stanford at 19, that's a great accomplishment. You've been an entrepreneur. Take us through your journey. Give us a quick highlight of your career. >> So the quick highlight is I grew up in Southern California and Santa Monica where I graduated from Santa Monica High School along with other luminaries such as Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr., and Sean Penn. I didn't go at the same time that they did. >> They didn't graduate when they were 17. >> They did not, (John laughing) and Charlie Sheen also attended Santa Monica High School but dropped out or was expelled. (laughing) Go figured. >> Okay. >> I came up to Stanford and I actually studied creative writing and product design. So I was really hitting both sides of the brain. You could see that really coming through in the rest of my career. And then at the time I graduated which was the mid-1990s that was when the internet was first opening up. I was convinced the internet was going to be huge and so I just went straight into the internet in 1995. And have been in the startup world ever since. >> Must love that show, Halt and Catch Fire a series which I love reminiscing. >> AMC great show. >> Just watching that my life right before my eyes. Us old folks. Talk about your investment. You are at Wasabi Ventures now. Blitzscaling Ventures. You guys looks like you're going to do a little combination bring capital around blitzscaling, advising. What's Blitzscaling Ventures? Give a quick commercial. >> So the best way to think about it is for the entrepreneurs who are actually are blitzscaling, the question is how are you going to get the help you need to figure out how to steer around the corners to avoid the pitfalls that can occur as you're growing rapidly. And Blitzscaling Ventures is all about that. So obviously I bring a wealth of experience, both my own experience as well as everything I learned from putting this book together. And the whole goal of Blitzscaling Ventures is to find those entrepreneurs who have those blitzscalable opportunities and help them navigate through the process. >> And of course being a Mental Samurai that you are, the clock is really important on blitzscaling. >> There are actually are a lot of similarities between the startup world and Mental Samurai. Being able to perform under pressure, being able to move as quickly as possible yet still be accurate. The one difference of course is in our startup world you often do make mistakes. And you have a chance to recover from them. But in Mental Samurai you have to be perfect. >> Speed, alignment, resource management, capital deployment, management team, investors, all critical factors in blitzscaling. Kind of like entrepreneurial going to next level. A whole nother lesson, whole nother battlefields. Really the capital markets are flush with cash. Post round B so if you can certainly get altitude there's a ton of capital. >> Yeah. And the key is that capital is necessary for blitzscaling but it's not sufficient. You have to take that financial capital and you have to figure out how to combine it with the human capital to actually transform the business in the industry. >> Of course I know you've got to catch a plane. Thanks for coming by in the studio. Congratulations on the Mental Samurai. Great show. I'm looking forward to April 30th. Tuesdays at 9 o'clock, the Mental Samurai. Chris will be an inaugural contestant. We'll see how he does. He's tight-lipped, he's not breaking his disclosure. >> I've got legal requirements. I can't say anything. >> Just say he's sticking to his words. He's a man of his words. Chris, great to see you. Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, kind of venture you want to talk to Chris Yeh, co-founder, general partner of blitzscaling. I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (upbeat music) Live from Boston Massachusetts. It's theCube! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> It is day three of the Red Hat Summit, here in Boston Massachusetts. I'm Rebecca Knight. Along with Stu Miniman. We are wrapping up this conference Stu. We just had the final keynote of the morning. Before the cameras were rolling, you were teasing me a little bit that you have more scoop on the AWS deal. I'm interested to hear what you learned. >> (Stu) Yeah, Rebecca. First of all, may the fourth be with you. >> (Rebecca) Well, thank you. Of course, yes. And also with you. >> (Stu) Always. >> Yeah. (giggles) >> (Stu) So, day three of the keynote. They started out with a little bit of fun. They gave out some "May The Fourth Be With You" t-shirts. They had a little Star Wars duel that I was Periscoping this morning. So, love their geeking out. I've got my Millennium Falcon cuff links on. >> (Rebecca) You're into it. >> I saw a bunch of guys wearing t-shirts >> (Rebecca) Princess Leia was walking around! >> Princess Leia was walking around. There were storm troopers there. >> (Rebecca) Which is a little sad to see, but yes. >> (Stu) Uh, yeah. Carrie Fisher. >> Yes. >> Absolutely, but the Amazon stuff. Sure, I think this is the biggest news coming out of the show. I've said this a number of times. And we're still kind of teasing out exactly what it is. Cause, partially really this is still being built out. There's not going to be shipping until later this year. So things like how pricing works. We're still going to get there. But there's some people that were like "Oh wait!' "Open shift can be in AWS, that's great!" "But then I can do AWS services on premises." Well, what that doesn't mean, of course is that I don't have everything that Amazon does packaged up into a nice little container. We understand how computer coding works. And even with open-source and how we can make things server-less. And it's not like I can take everything that everybody says and shove it in my data center. It's just not feasible. What that means though, is it is the same applications that I can run. It's running in OpenShift. And really, there's the hooks and the API's to make sure that I can leverage services that are used in AWS. Of course, from my standpoint I'm like "OK!" So, tell me a little bit about how what latency there's going to be between those services. But it will be well understood as we build these what it's going to be use for. Certain use cases. We already talked to Optim. I was really excited about how they could do this for their environment. So, it's something we expect to be talking about throughout the rest of the year. And by the time we get to AWS Reinvent the week after Thanksgiving, I expect we'll have a lot more detail. So, looking forward to that. >> (Rebecca) And it will be rolled out too. So we'll have a really good sense of how it's working in the marketplace. >> (Stu) Absolutely. >> So other thoughts on the key note. I mean, one of the things that really struck me was talking about open-source. The history of open-source. It started because of a need to license existing technologies in a cheaper way. But then, really, the point that was made is that open-source taught tech how to collaborate. And then tech taught the world how to collaborate. Because it really was the model for what we're seeing with crowdsourcing solutions to problems facing education, climate change, the developing world. So I think that that is really something that Red Hat has done really well. In terms of highlighting how open-source is attacking many of the worlds most pressing problems. >> (Stu) Yeah, Rebecca I agree. We talked with Jim Whitehurst and watched him in the keynotes in previous days. And talked about communities and innovation and how that works. And in a lot of tech conferences it's like "Okay, what are the business outcomes?" And here it's, "Well, how are we helping the greater good?" "How are we helping education?" It was great to see kids that are coding and doing some cool things. And they're like, "Oh yeah, I've done Java and all these other things." And the Red Hat guys were like, "Hey >> (Rebecca) We're hiring. Yeah. (giggles) >> can we go hire this seventh grader?" Had the open-source hardware initiative that they were talking about. And how they can do that. Everything from healthcare to get a device that used to be $10,000 to be able to put together the genome. Is I can buy it on Amazon for What was it? Like six seven hundred dollars and put it together myself. So, open-source and hardware are something we've been keeping an eye on. We've been at the Open Compute Project event. Which Facebook launched. But, these other initiatives. They had.... It was funny, she said like, "There's the internet of things." And they have the thing called "The Thing" that you can tie into other pieces. There was another one that weaved this into fabric. And we can sensor and do that. We know healthcare, of course. Lot's of open-source initiatives. So, lots of places where open-source communities and projects are helping proliferate and make greater good and make the world a greater place. Flattening the world in many cases too. So, it was exciting to see. >> And the woman from the Open-Source Association. She made this great point. And she wasn't trying to be flip. But she said one of our questions is: Are you emotionally ready to be part of this community? And I thought that that was so interesting because it is such a different perspective. Particularly from the product side. Where, "This is my IP. This is our idea. This is our lifeblood. And this is how we're going to make money." But this idea of, No. You need to be willing to share. You need to be willing to be copied. And this is about how we build ideas and build the next great things. >> (Stu) Yeah, if you look at the history of the internet, there was always. Right, is this something I have to share information? Or do we build collaboration? You know, back to the old bulletin board days. Through the homebrew computing clubs. Some of the great progress that we've made in technology and then technology enabling beyond have been because we can work in a group. We can work... Build on what everyone else has done. And that's always how science is done. And open-source is just trying to take us to the next level. >> Right. Right. Right. And in terms of one of the last... One of the last things that they featured in the keynote was what's going on at the MIT media lab. Changing the face of agriculture. And how they are coding climate. And how they are coding plant nutrition. And really this is just going to have such a big change in how we consume food and where food is grown. The nutrients we derive from fruit. I was really blown away by the fact that the average apple we eat in the grocery store has been around for 14 months. Ew, ew! (laughs) So, I mean, I'm just exciting what they're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely right. If we can help make sure people get clean water. Make sure people have availability of food. Shorten those cycles. >> (Rebecca) Right, right. Exactly. >> The amount of information, data. The whole Farm to Table Initiative. A lot of times data is involved in that. >> (Rebecca) Yeah. It's not necessarily just the stuff that you know, grown on the roof next door. Or in the farm a block away. I looked at a local food chain that's everywhere is like Chipotle. You know? >> (Rebecca) Right. >> They use data to be able to work with local farmers. Get what they can. Try to help change some of the culture pieces to bring that in. And then they ended up the keynote talking more about innovation award winners. You and I have had the chance to interview a bunch of them. It's a program I really like. And talking to some of the Red Hatters there actually was some focus to work with... Talk to governments. Talk to a lot of internationals. Because when they started the program a few years ago. It started out very U.S.-centric. So, they said "Yeah." It was a little bit coincidence that this year it's all international. Except for RackSpace. But, we should be blind when we think about who has great ideas and good innovation. And at this conference, I bumped into a lot of people internationally. Talked to a few people coming back from the Red Sox game. And it was like, "How was it?" And they were like, "Well, I got a hotdog and I understood this. But that whole ball and thing flying around, I don't get it." And things like that. >> So, they're learning about code but also baseball. So this is >> (Stu) Yeah, what's your take on the global community that you've seen at the show this week? >> (Rebecca) Well, as you've said, there are representatives from 70 countries here. So this really does feel like the United Nations of open-source. I think what is fascinating is that we're here in the states. And so we think about these hotbeds of technological innovation. We're here in Boston. Of course there's Silicon Valley. Then there are North Carolina, where Red Hat's based. Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, of course. So all these places where we see so much innovation and technological progress taking place here in the states. And so, it can be easy to forget that there are also pockets all over Europe. All over South America. In Africa, doing cool things with technology. And I think that that is also ... When we get back to one of the sub themes of this conference... I mean, it's not a sub theme. It is the theme. About how we work today. How we share ideas. How we collaborate. And how we manage and inspire people to do their best work. I think that that is what I'd like to dig into a little today. If we can. And see how it is different in these various countries. >> Yeah, and this show, what I like is when its 13th year of the show, it started out going to a few locations. Now it's very stable. Next year, they'll be back in San Francisco. The year after, they'll be back here in Boston. They've go the new Boston office opening up within walking distance of where we are. Here GE is opening up their big building. I just heard there's lots of startups when I've been walking around the area. Every time I come down to the Sea Port District. It's like, "Wow, look at all the tech." It's like, Log Me In is right down the road. There's this hot little storage company called Wasabi. That's like two blocks away. Really excited but, one last thing back on the international piece. Next week's OpenStack Summit. I'll be here, doing theCube. And some of the feedback I've been getting this week It's like, "Look, the misperception on an OpenStack." One of the reasons why people are like, "Oh, the project's floundering. And it's not doing great, is because the two big use case. One, the telecommunication space. Which is a small segment of the global population. And two, it's gaining a lot of traction in Europe and in Asia. Whereas, in North America public cloud has kind of pushed it aside a little bit. So, unfortunately the global tech press tends to be very much, "Oh wait, if it's seventy-five percent adoption in North America, that's what we expect. If its seventy-five percent overseas, it's not happening. So (giggles) it's kind of interesting. >> (Rebecca) Right. And that myopia is really a problem because these are the trends that are shaping our future. >> (Stu) Yeah, yeah. >> So today, I'm also going to be talking to the Women In Tech winners. That very exciting. One of the women was talking about how she got her idea. Or really, her idea became more formulated, more crystallized, at the Grace Hopper Conference. We, of course, have a great partnership with the Grace Hopper Conference. So, I'm excited to talk to her more about that today too. >> (Stu) Yeah, good lineup. We have few more partners. Another customer EasiER AG who did the keynote yesterday. Looking forward to digging in. Kind of wrapping up all of this. And Rebecca it's been fun doing it with you this week. >> And I'm with you. And may the force... May the fourth be with you. >> And with you. >> (giggles) Thank you, we'll have more today later. From the Red Hat Summit. Here in Boston, I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. (upbeat music)

>> [Announcer] Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Spark Summit East 2017, brought to you by Data Breaks. Now, your host, Dave Alante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to snowy Boston everybody, this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Arun Murthy is here, he's the founder and vice president of engineering at Horton Works, father of YARN, can I call you that, godfather of YARN, is that fair, or? (laughs) Anyway. He's so, so modest. Welcome back to the Cube, it's great to see you. >> Pleasure to have you. >> Coming off the big keynote, (laughs) you ended the session this morning, so that was great. Glad you made it in to Boston, and uh, lot of talk about security and governance, you know we've been talking about that years, it feels like it's truly starting to come into the main stream Arun, so. >> Well I think it's just a reflection of what customers are doing with the tech now. Now, three, four years ago, a lot of it was pilots, a lot of it was, you know, people playing with the tech. But increasingly, it's about, you know, people actually applying stuff in production, having data, system of record, running workloads both on prem and on the cloud, cloud is sort of becoming more and more real at mainstream enterprises. So a lot of it means, as you take any of the examples today any interesting app will have some sort of real time data feed, it's probably coming out from a cell phone or sensor which means that data is actually not, in most cases not coming on prem, it's actually getting collected in a local cloud somewhere, it's just more cost effective, why would we put up 25 data centers if you don't have to, right? So then you got to connect that data, production data you have or customer data you have or data you might have purchased and then join them up, run some interesting analytics, do geobased real time threat detection, cyber security. A lot of it means that you need a common way to secure data, govern it, and that's where we see the action, I think it's a really good sign for the market and for the community that people are pushing on these dimensions of the broader, because, getting pushed in this dimension because it means that people are actually using it for real production work loads. >> Well in the early days of Hadoop you really didn't talk that much about cloud. >> Yeah. >> You know, and now, >> Absolutely. >> It's like, you know, duh, cloud. >> Yeah. >> It's everywhere, and of course the whole hybrid cloud thing comes into play, what are you seeing there, what are things you can do in a hybrid, you know, or on prem that you can't do in a public cloud and what's the dynamic look like? >> Well, it's definitely not an either or, right? So what we're seeing is increasingly interesting apps need data which are born in the cloud and they'll stay in the cloud, but they also need transactional data which stays on prem, you might have an EDW for example, right? >> Right. >> There's not a lot of, you know, people want to solve business problems and not just move data from one place to another, right? Or back from one place to another, so it's not interesting to move an EDW to the cloud, and similarly it's not interesting to bring your IOT data or sensor data back into on-prem, right? Just makes sense. So naturally what happens is, you know, at Hortonworks we talk of kinds of modern app or a modern data app, which means a modern data app has to spare, has to sort of, you know, it can pass both on-prem data and cloud data. >> Yeah, you talked about that in your keynote years ago. Furio said that the data is the new development kit. And now you're seeing the apps are just so dang rich, >> Exactly, exactly. >> And they have to span >> Absolutely. >> physical locations, >> Yeah. >> But then this whole thing of IOT comes up, we've been having a conversation on The Cube, last several Cubes of, okay, how much stays out, how much stays in, there's a lot of debates about that, there's reasons not to bring it in, but you talked today about some of the important stuff will come back. >> Yeah. >> So the way this is, this all is going to be, you know, there's a lot of data that should be born in the cloud and stay there, the IOT data, but then what will happen increasingly is, key summaries of the data will move back and forth, so key summaries of your EDW will move to the cloud, sometimes key summaries of your IOT data, you know, you want to do some sort of historical training in analytics, that will come back on-prem, so I think there's a bi-directional data movement, but it just won't be all the data, right? It'll be key interesting summaries of the data but not all of it. >> And a lot of times, people say well it doesn't matter where it lives, cloud should be an operating model, not a place where you put data or applications, and while that's true and we would agree with that, from a customer standpoint it matters in terms of performance and latency issues and cost and regulation, >> And security and governance. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely. >> You need to think those things through. >> Exactly, so I mean, so that's what we're focused on, to make sure that you have a common security and governance model regardless of where data is, so you can think of it as, infrastructure you own and infrastructure you lease. >> Right. >> Right? Now, the details matter of course, when you go to the cloud you lose S3 for example or ADLS from Microsoft, but you got to make sure that there's a common sort of security governance front and top of it, in front of it, as an example one of the things that, you know, in the open source community, Ranger's a really sort of key project right now from a security authorization and authentication standpoint. We've done a lot of work with our friends at Microsoft to make sure, you can actually now manage data in Wasabi which is their object store, data stream, natively with Ranger, so you can set a policy that says only Dave can access these files, you know, George can access these columns, that sort of stuff is natively done on the Microsoft platform thanks to the relationship we have with them. >> Right. >> So that's actually really interesting for the open source communities. So you've talked about sort of commodity storage at the bottom layer and even if they're different sort of interfaces and implementations, it's still commodity storage, and now what's really helpful to customers is that they have a common security model, >> Exactly. >> Authorization, authentication, >> Authentication, lineage prominence, >> Oh okay. >> You want to make sure all of these are common sources across. >> But you've mentioned off of the different data patterns, like the stuff that might be streaming in on the cloud, what, assuming you're not putting it into just a file system or an object store, and you want to sort of merge it with >> Yeah. >> Historical data, so what are some of the data stores other than the file system, in other words, newfangled databases to manage this sort of interaction? >> So I think what you're saying is, we certainly have the raw data, the raw data is going to line up in whatever cloud native storage, >> Yeah. >> It's going to be Amazon, Wasabi, ADLS, Google Storage. But then increasingly you want, so now the patterns change so you have raw data, you have some sort of an ETL process, what's interesting in the cloud is that even the process data or, if you take the unstructured raw data and structure it, that structured data also needs to live on the cloud platform, right? The reason that's important is because A, it's cheaper to use the native platform rather than set up your own database on top of it. The other one is you also want to take advantage of all the native sources that the cloud storage provides, so for example, linking your application. So automatically data in Wasabi, you know, if you can set up a policy and easily say this structured data stable that I have of which is a summary of all the IOT activity in the last 24 hours, you can, using the cloud provider's technologies you can actually make it show up easily in Europe, like you don't have to do any work, right? So increasingly what we Hortonworks focused a lot on is to make sure that we, all of the computer engines, whether it's Spark or Hive or, you know, or MapReduce, it doesn't really matter, they're all natively working on the cloud provider's storage platform. >> [George] Okay. >> Right, so, >> Okay. >> That's a really key consideration for us. >> And the follow up to that, you know, there's a bit of a misconception that Spark replaces Hadoop, but it actually can be a processing, a compute engine for, >> Yeah. >> That can compliment or replace some of the compute engines in Hadoop, help us frame, how you talk about it with your customers. >> For us it's really simple, like in the past, the only option you had on Hadoop to do any computation was MapReduce, that was, I started working in MapReduce 11 years ago, so as you can imagine, it's a pretty good run for any technology, right? Spark is definitely the interesting sort of engine for sort of the, anything from mission learning to ETL for data on top of Hadoop. But again, what we focus a lot on is to make sure that every time we bring in, so right now, when we started on HTP, the first on HTP had about nine open source projects literally just nine. Today, the last one we shipped was 2.5, HTP 2.5 had about 27 I think, like it's a huge sort of explosion, right? But the problem with that is not just that we have 27 projects, the problem is that you're going to make sure each of the 27 work with all the 26 others. >> It's a QA nightmare. >> Exactly. So that integration is really key, so same thing with Spark, we want to make sure you have security and YARN (mumbles), like you saw in the demo today, you can now run Spark SQL but also make sure you get low level (mumbles) masking, all of the enterprise capabilities that you need, and I was at a financial services three or four weeks ago in Chicago. Today, to do equivalent of what I showed today on demo, they need literally, they have a classic ADW, and they have to maintain anywhere between 1500 to 2500 views of the same database, that's a nightmare as you can imagine. Now the fact that you can do this on the raw data using whether it's Hive or Spark or Peg or MapReduce, it doesn't really matter, it's really key, and that's the thing we push to make sure things like YARN security work across all the stacks, all the open source techs. >> So that makes life better, a simplification use case if you will, >> Yeah. >> What are some of the other use cases that you're seeing things like Spark enable? >> Machine learning is a really big one. Increasingly, every product is going to have some, people call it, machine learning and AI and deep learning, there's a lot of techniques out there, but the key part is you want to build a predictive model, in the past (mumbles) everybody want to build a model and score what's happening in the real world against model, but equally important make sure the model gets updated as more data comes in on and actually as the model scores does get smaller over time. So that's something we see all over, so for example, even within our own product, it's not just us enabling this for the customer, for example at Hortonworks we have a product called SmartSense which allows you to optimize how people use Hadoop. Where the, what are the opportunities for you to explore deficiencies within your own Hadoop system, whether it's Spark or Hive, right? So we now put mesh learning into SmartSense. And show you that customers who are running queries like you are running, Mr. Customer X, other customers like you are tuning Hadoop this way, they're running this sort of config, they're using these sort of features in Hadoop. That allows us to actually make the product itself better all the way down the pipe. >> So you're improving the scoring algorithm or you're sort of replacing it with something better? >> What we're doing there is just helping them optimize their Hadoop deploys. >> Yep. >> Right? You know, configuration and tuning and kernel settings and network settings, we do that automatically with SmartSense. >> But the customer, you talked about scoring and trying to, >> Yeah. >> They're tuning that, improving that and increasing the probability of it's accuracy, or is it? >> It's both. >> Okay. >> So the thing is what they do is, you initially come with a hypothesis, you have some amount of data, right? I'm a big believer that over time, more data, you're better off spending more, getting more data into the system than to tune that algorithm financially, right? >> Interesting, okay. >> Right, so you know, for example, you know, talk to any of the big guys on Facebook because they'll do the same, what they'll say is it's much better to get, to spend your time getting 10x data to the system and improving the model rather than spending 10x the time and improving the model itself on day one. >> Yeah, but that's a key choice, because you got to >> Exactly. >> Spend money on doing either, >> One of them. >> And you're saying go for the data. >> Go for the data. >> At least now. >> Yeah, go for data, what happens is the good part of that is it's not just the model, it's the, what you got to really get through is the entire end to end flow. >> Yeah. >> All the way from data aggregation to ingestion to collection to scoring, all that aspect, you're better off sort of walking through the paces like building the entire end to end product rather than spending time in a silo trying to make a lot of change. >> We've talked to a lot of machine learning tool vendors, application vendors, and it seems like we got to the point with Big Data where we put it in a repository then we started doing better at curating it and understanding it then starting to do a little bit exploration with business intelligence, but with machine learning, we don't have something that does this end to end, you know, from acquiring the data, building the model to operationalizing it, where are we on that, who should we look to for that? >> It's definitely very early, I mean if you look at, even the EDW space, for example, what is EDW? EDW is ingestion, ETL, and then sort of fast query layer, Olap BI, on and on and on, right? So that's the full EDW flow, I don't think as a market, I mean, it's really early in this space, not only as an overall industry, we have that end to end sort of industrialized design concept, it's going to take time, but a lot of people are ahead, you know, the Google's a world ahead, over time a lot of people will catch up. >> We got to go, I wish we had more time, I had so many other questions for you but I know time is tight in our schedule, so thanks so much Arun, >> Appreciate it. For coming on, appreciate it, alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, it's The Cube, we're live from Spark Summit East in Boston, right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCUBE covering BigData New York City 2016, brought to you by headline sponsors Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, and our ecosystem sponsors. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Peter Burris. >> Welcome back to theCUBE everybody. This is BigData NYC and we are covering wall to wall, we've been here since Monday evening. We we're with Nvidia, Nvidia talking about deep learning, machine learning. Yesterday we had a full slate, we had eight data scientists up on stage yesterday and then we covered the IBM event last night, the rooftop party. Saw David Richards there, hanging out with him, and wall to wall today and tomorrow. Jagane Sundar is here, he is the CTO of WANdisco, great to see you again Jagane. >> Thanks for having me Dave. >> You're welcome. It's been a while since you and I sat down and I know you were on theCUBE recently at Oracle Headquarters, which I was happy to see you there and see the deals that are going on you've got good stuff going on with IBM, good stuff going on with Oracle, the Cloud is eating the world as we sort of predicted and knew but everybody wanted to put their head in the sand but you guys had to accommodate that didn't you. >> We did and if you remember us from a few years ago we were very very interested in the Hadoop space but along the journey we realized that our replication platform is actually much bigger than Hadoop. And the Cloud is just a manifestation of that vision. We had this ability to replicate data, strongly consistent, across wide area networks in different data centers and across storage systems so you can go from HDFS to a Cloud storage system like S3 or Azure Wasabi and we will do it with strong consistency. And that turned out to be a bigger deal than actually providing just replication for the Hadoop platform. So we expanded beyond our initial Hadoop Forex and now we're big in the Cloud. We replicate data to many Cloud providers and customers use us for many use cases like disaster recovery, migration, active/active, Cloud bursting, all of those interesting use cases. >> So any time I get you on theCUBE I like to refresh the 101 for me and for the audience that may not be familiar with it but you say strongly consistent, versus you hear the term eventual consistency, >> Jugane: Correct. >> What's the difference, why is the latter inadequate for the applications that you're serving. >> Right so when people say eventually consistent, what they don't remember is that eventually consistent systems often have different data in the different replicas and once in a while, once every five minutes or 15 minutes, they have to run an anti-entropy process to reconcile the differences and entropy is the total randomness right if you go back to your physics, high school physics. What you're really talking about is having random data and once every 10 minutes making it reconcile and the reconciliation process is very messy, it's like last right winds and the notion of time becomes important, how do you keep time accurate between those. Companies like Google have wonderful infrastructure where they have GPS and atomic clocks and they can do a better job but for the regular enterprise user that's a hard problem so often you get wrong data that's reconciled. So asking the same query you may get different answers and your different replicas. That's a bad sign, you want it consistent enough so you can guarantee results. >> Dave: And you've done this with math, right? >> Exactly, our basis is an algorithm called Paxos, which was invented by a gentleman called Leslie Lamport back in '89 but it took many decades for that algorithm to be widely understood. Our own chief scientists spent over a decade developing those, adding enhancements to make it run over the wide area network. The end result is a strongly consistent system, mathematically proven, that runs over the wide area network and it's completely resistant to failure of all sorts. >> That allows you to sort of create the same type of availability, data consistency as you mentioned Google with the atomic clocks, Spanner I presume, is this fascinating, I mean when the paper came out I was, my eyes were bleeding reading it and but that's the type of capability that you're able to bring to enterprises right? >> That's exactly right, we can bring similar capabilities across diverse networks. You can have regular networking gear, time synchronized by NTP, out in the Cloud, things are running in a virtual machine where time adrift most of the time, people don't realize that VMs are pretty bad at keeping time and all you get up in the Cloud is VMS. Across all those enviroments we can give you strongly consistent replication at the same quality that Google does with their hardware. So that's the value that we bring to the Fortune 500. >> So increasingly enterprises are recognizing that data has an, I don't want to say intrinsic value but data is a source of value in context all by itself. Independent of any hardware, independent of any software. That it's something that needs to be taken care of and you guys have an approach for ensuring that important aspects of it are better taken care of. Not the least of which, is that you can provide an option to a customer who may make a bad technology choice one day to make a better technology choice the next day and not be too worried about dead ending themselves. I'm reminded of the old days when somebody who was negotiating an IBM main frame deal would put an Amdahl coffee cup in front of IBM or put an Oracle coffee cup in front of SAP. Do you find customers metaphorically putting a WANdisco coffee cup in front of those different options and say these guys are ensuring that our data remains ours? >> Customers are a lot more sophisticated now, the scenarios that you pointed out are very very funny but what customers come to us for is the exact same thing, the way they ask it is, I want to move to Cloud X, but I want to make sure that I can also run on Cloud Y and I want to do it seamlessly without any downtime on my on-prem applications that are running. We can give them that. Not only are they building a disaster recovery environment, often they're experimenting with multiple Clouds at the same time and may the better Cloud win. That puts a lot of competition and pressure on the actual Cloud applications they're trying. That's a manifestation in modern Cloud terms of the coffee cup competitor in the face that you just pointed out. Very funny but this how customers are doing it these days. >> So are you using or are they starting to, obviously you are able to replicate with high fidelity with strong fidelity, strong consistency, large volumes of data. Are you starting to see customers, based on that capability actually starting to redesign how they set up their technology plant? >> Absolutely, when customers were talking about hybrid Cloud which was pretty well hyped a year or so ago, they basically had some data on-prem and some other data in the Cloud and they were doing stuff but what we brought to them was the ability to have the same data both on-prem and in the Cloud, maybe you had a weekly analytics job that took a lot of resources. You'd burst that out into the Cloud and run it up there, move the result of that analytics job back on-prem. You'd have it with strong consistency. The result is that true hybrid Cloud is enabled when only when you have the same exact data available in all of your Cloud locations. We're the only company that can provide that so we've got customers that are expanding their Cloud options because of the data consistency we offer. >> And those Cloud options are obviously are increasing >> Jugane: They are. >> But there's also a recognition that it's as we gain more experience with Cloud, that different workloads are better than others as we move up there. Now Oracle with some of their announcements last week may start to push the envelope on that a little bit but as you think about where the need for moving large volumes of data with high, with strong consistency what types of applications do you think people are focusing on? Is it mainly big data or are there other application styles or job types that you think are going to become increasingly important? >> So we've got much more than big data, one of the big sources of leads for us now is our capability to migrate netapp filers up into the Cloud and that has suddenly become very important because an example I'd like to give is a big financial firm that has all of its binaries and applications and user data and netapp filers, the actual data is in HDFS on-prem. They're moving their binaries from the netapp up into the Cloud in a specific Cloud windows equal into the filer and the big data part of it from HDFS up into Cloud object store, we are the only platform that can deal with both in the strong consistent manner that I've talked about and we're a single replication platform so that gives them the ability to make the sort of a migration with very low risk. One of the attributes of our migration is that we do it with no downtime. You don't have to take your online, your on-prem environment offline in order to do the migration so they are doing that so we see a lot of business from that sort of migration efforts where people have data in mass filers, people have data in other non-HDFS storage systems. We're happy to migrate all of those. Our replication platform approach, which we've taken in the last year and a half or so is really paying off in that respect. >> And you couldn't do that with conventional migration techniques because it would take too long, you'd have to freeze the applications? >> A couple of things, one you'd probably have to take the applications offline, second you'd be using tools of periodic synchronization variety such as RSYNC and anybody in the devops or operations whose ever used RSYNC across the wide area network will tell you how bad that experience is. It really is a very bad experience. We've got capability to migrate netapp filer data without imposing a load on the netapp's on-prem so we can do it without pounding the crap out of the netapp's server such that they can't offer service to their existing customers. Very low impact on the network configuration, application configuration. We can go in, start the migration without downtime, maybe it takes two, three days for the data to get up over there because of mavenlink. After that is done, you can start playing with it up in the Cloud. And you can cut over seamlessly so there's so real downtime, that's the capability we've seen. >> But you've also mentioned one data type, binaries, they can't withstand error propagation. >> Jugane: Absolutely. >> And so being able to go to a customer and say you're going to have to move these a couple times over the course of the next n-months or years, as a consequence of the new technology that's now available and we can do so without error propagation is going to have a big impact on how well their IT infrastructure, their IT asset base runs in five years. >> Indeed, indeed. That's very important. Having the ability to actually start the application, having the data in a consistent and true form so you can start, for example, the data base and have it mount the actual data so you can use it up in the Cloud, those are capabilities that are very important to customers. >> So there's another application. If you think about, you tend to be more bulk, the question I'm going to ask is and at what point in time is the low threshold in terms of specific types of data movement. Here's why I'm asking. IOT data is a data source or is a use-case that has often the most stringent physical constraints possible. Time, speed of light, has an implication but also very importantly, this notion of error propagation really matters. If you go from a sensor to a gateway to another gateway to another gateway you will lose bits along the way if you're not very careful. >> Correct. >> And in a nuclear power plant, that doesn't work that way. >> Jugane: Yeah. >> Now we don't have to just look at a nuclear power plant as an example but there's increasingly industrial IOTs starting to dramatically impact not just life and death circumstances but business success or failure. What types of smaller batch use-cases do you guys find yourselves operating in, in places like IOT where this notion of error or air control strong consistency is so critical? >> So one of the most popular applications that use our replication is Spark and Spark Streaming which as you can imagine is a big part of most IOT infrastructure, we can do replication such that you ingest into the closest data center, you go from your server or your car or whatever to the closest data center, you don't have to go multiple hops. We will take care consistency from there on. What that gives you is the ability to say I have 12 data centers with my IOT infrastructure running, one data center goes down, you don't have a downtime at all. It's only the data that was generated inside the data center that's lost. All client machines connecting to that data center will simply connect to another data center, strong replication continues, this gives you the ability to ingest at very large volumes while still maintaining the consistency and IOT is a big deal for us, yes. >> We're out of time but I got a couple of last minute questions if I may. So when you integrate with IBM, Oracle, what kind of technical issues do you encounter, what kind of integration do you have to do, is it lightweight, heavyweight, middleweight? >> It's middleweight I would say. IBM is a great example, they have a deep integration with our product and some of the authentication technology they use was more advanced than what was available in open source at that time. We did a little of work, and they did a little bit of work to make that work, but other than that, it's a pretty straight forward process. The end result is that they have a number of their applications where this is a critical part of their infrastructure. >> Right, and then road map. What can you tell us about, what should we look for in the future, what kind of problems are you going to be solving? >> So we look at our platform as the best replication engine in the world. We're building an SDK, we expect custom plugins for different other applications, we expect more high-speed streaming data such as IOT data, we want to be the choice for replication. As for the plugins themselves, they're getting easier and easier to build so you'll see wide coverage from us. >> Jugane, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure to have you. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back to wrap. This is theCUBE, we're live from NYC. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)