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