 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in tech, live tech coverage. We're covering Veritas Vision 2017 at the Aria Hotel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Eric Kessels is here. He's a CTO for Fairbanks, a partner of Veritas's, out of the Netherlands, and Carlos Carrero is Senior Principal Product Manager at Veritas, and we're going to talk OpenStack, gentlemen. Yeah. Welcome. Thank you. We love this topic. I mean, five years ago, Stu, it was the hottest thing on the planet. OpenStack came out. Many people, including John Furrier, called it a Hail Mary against the Amazon, which kind of was. And now the narrative around OpenStack is, well, it's kind of nobody's really doing it, blah, blah, blah, but there are definitely pockets of interest. The developer community is still, you know, passionate about it, and service providers are, you know, still glomming onto OpenStack. So Carlos, give us the update from Veritas's perspective. What's your interest in OpenStack and your role at Veritas? Yeah, so the key thing is what Veritas has been doing with OpenStack, and also what Veritas is doing with containers, so emerging products for emerging technologies. And one of the key things is, with our partners, Fairbanks, all the things we have been doing to validate the product and to bring the product into market. So for us, Fairbanks is one of the perfect partners, because what the value that they bring with that. So they are OpenStack experts, and he will go through all the content, you know, what they do, but they are really understanding about OpenStack. They really identify the issues that customers have with OpenStack, and how they collaborate with Veritas to build hyperscale as a product, to bring those gaps into a solution, and deliver those enterprise-class services to customers that... I mean, it's the ultimate and true, the true private cloud vision. Stuart, Eric, you guys used to be VMware experts, and decided to move beyond VMware to OpenStack. What was that journey like? Take us back to... Yeah, right. So that was about, I think, five years ago. So we did a lot of VMware implementations, but we, at some stage, we wanted to be a differentiator in the market. So a lot of people knew VMware was more a commodity in the IT. So we started to design a blue ocean strategy for our company, and then we went looking in the open-source market, which open-source initiative was feasible for us to move forward with. And we still were knowledgeable about infrastructure, so then we ran into OpenStack, and we did a technical validation, and we looked on what the attention was in the market. So from that stage, we transferred completely our company from a VMware house to a complete open-source company. But it took us a while, of course, because it was not like a switch of a couple of months. I think it took us about three years to make that complete transition from being a VMware shop to being a complete open-source company. Eric, can you talk to us about your customers? Did they come saying, I want OpenStack? Are they coming saying, you know, I need to digitally transform? What's the conversation you're having with them that leads to your solution, and what are your customers doing these days? And so when we decided for OpenStack, we, at that stage, we already had the made a decision that we would move forward for the private cloud decision. So we are not focusing on public cloud initiative for OpenStack, so we think that OpenStack was initially built for private cloud environments. So one thing that we saw is that the vendor login for VMware or for Microsoft was pretty big and customers didn't like that anymore. And the costs were pretty high for the VMware licensing. So then we start talking with those customers and say, okay, hey, there's a different kind of way of running your workloads in a different kind of environment. Would you be interested in it if we can cut the cost at 50% for example? And of course, that's always a good trigger to get in contact with our customers. And what we see that our customers are more like enterprise customers, so not big service providers, but just companies like a customer that is running a customer, a customer site so that they can do customer, a call center for that. So it's really an enterprise-like company. And I just want to have the, for days that they decided to move to OpenStack because they needed to expand their infrastructure like with 20 nodes. And if they did it with OpenStack, it was one third of the price in doing that. So more than 50%. So are these cloud service providers predominantly or describe the customers? Yeah, we have, of course, customers that are service providers because I think they have a huge price pressure on providing virtual machines. So they need to cut cost on their infrastructure. And I think OpenStack is really suitable for that because it's flexible, it is open. You can incorporate your management systems into OpenStack very fairly easily. So for those companies, OpenStack was a really good choice of doing that. And we have also other kind of customers that are like we have a packaging company. So they print the packaging for McDonald's, for example. And they have developer departments in their company that want to have really fast VMs for developing their own software. And if you go by more the traditional route, it takes too long before that all is in place. So they want to have some self-service functionality. And that's also what OpenStack can provide, providing self-service for their department. So to make it more easy. Carlos, this morning your CEO Bill Coleman said that the future is software-defined, multi-cloud, and hyperscale. I'm sure you're sitting there, well my product is hyperscale. So maybe you launched the product hyperscale at the OpenStack show in Boston. We got to talk with you on theCUBE there. Bring us up to speed as to that product and how it fits into really the portfolio of you from Veritas, especially I'm kind of curious the multi-cloud world as opposed to this very specifically and on-premises type, type Boston. We talk in Boston. Boston we launched the 1.0 version. Last week we launched the 1.1 version. We're going to launch the next one together with Red Hat. It's one of the key things we're doing together working with them. And as Bill mentioned, it's multi-cloud and it's self-defined. So as you understand the architecture for hyperscale, for OpenStack, hyperscale for containers is really pure software. So that means it's the hardware of your choice. We don't have any locking as Eric mentioned is no locking into any specific platform. That's one of the key things. But also the architecture we're building is that it's the perfect thing for your private cloud because in a multi-cloud environment you still have to have something in-house. So that's the private cloud. With all the data management capabilities that we have with Veritas, we can move the data wherever we want. So typically, and that's the challenge you have with OpenStack is you get a locking, you get a close environment, how do you move the data. We got things already with NetBagget where we can just move the data from the data plane, move workloads somewhere else, do the recover and allow customers to just one click and recover that workloads wherever they want. So that's a perfect thing in all of 360 data management that we got with Veritas. So what do you hear from customers around the functionality? I mean, obviously we hear about the V-tax. People don't want to pay the VMware tax but Eric, you're talking about when you started the conversations with your customers, what if you could save 50%? You must have had conversations with customers and said, well, but I like the functionality of VMware. I like vMotion, I like the recovery capabilities and they're doing a good job of adding capabilities and stuff, so where are we? CTO perspective, in terms of the functionality of OpenStack private clouds versus sort of where VMware is. Yeah, that's a good question because the reason that we get into contact or with Veritas for this kind of functionalities because customers start running workloads on their OpenStack environment and in the beginning they don't worry about backups, they don't worry about quality of service and then they get into production and then they get problems with performance, they get, hey, I need to have a backup, how do I do that? Oh, we don't have a backup. So this kind of gaps that are really not a good result in OpenStack and these were the gaps that Hyperscale filled in. So then though on the functional comparison with VMware we could took away of those concerns and have a real good comparison on the functional level between OpenStack and VMware. I think it was interesting last week we was in the OpenStack Benelux days. I had a keynote presenting Hyperscale and I was talking about quality of service and backup data protection really, so focus on that, right? After that we had a panel with three customers and the moderator asked the three customers, what is your biggest challenge now you got OpenStack, what do you need? The first answer was backup and the moderator said, what do you mean? There is no backup and the answer for 400 people in the room said, now you got free service but that's a private and well now we hear from various. So that's the thing is that you need to move those workloads, you need data protection and they saw the demo where with one click you can recover your workloads and the third customer mentioned that it is quality of service and that's a customer that Eric has been working on already they are already working on installing a Hyperscale and they need quality of service because they have a workload and running on the cloud and they have to make sure they get the performance that they need for some critical workloads and again it's a solved problem that again all the work that we did together with Fairbanks validate and what they need to have is coming all together now. Eric one of the knocks on OpenStack has been I want simplicity and OpenStack it's got all these pieces, how do I put it together? Oh it's all software, wait backup I didn't even think of that. How does Fairbanks help? What does your stack look like and how much is it? You can just roll this out and how much is it? The customers actually, some customers like that flexibility, service providers oh I've got my management layer and things like that. What's kind of the typical environment and give some of the variables? So based on the journey that we made and of course there were good projects and bad projects there's the learning curve that we also needed to do but we managed to build the best practice for OpenStack so we now can do an implementation of OpenStack in less than two weeks because we know the components we know what you should do and what you don't have to do and so we have a good starting point about an environment where you have 11 nodes in total as a good starting point for having a production environment for OpenStack and then with hyperscale included then you need to add two data nodes additionally because then that's necessary for the copy that you need to have but 11 node configuration is from our perspective a very good starting point where you start with different customers but different sizes of course. Do you deploy the OpenStack distribution that the customer have preference on that? I know Veritas has a couple of options so. So we have a preference for canonical distribution because it's very open. I think the good thing from canonical is that the function set that they provide as an open source product is exactly the same if you want to have that with a managed service from canonical to it and I think the real cool thing about canonical is their way of deploying OpenStack because it leverage a really consistent way of deploying OpenStack so for us it's very important that when we deploy OpenStack that the result is the same on every customer side and that's what the tools from canonical providers with. So I want to ask you about what you just said about you could do an OpenStack deployment in two weeks. I can hear some cloud guy going oh, I'll just go to Amazon and spin it up. So I wonder if you could address that and as well how does that compare for instance to a VMware installation of a deployment of a private cloud, those two examples. I think when you look at the private cloud from VMware I think for the installation it takes about the same time thing but that's all about notability of the partner that's doing the installation because that's the journey that we had so we can do the implementation fast and that they can rely on that environment because as you know in OpenStack in the beginning was a little bit doubt about if it was production ready or not and to take that away it must be a solid implementation and that they can rely on that and then they can make sure that they can put their really important workloads also on top of OpenStack instead of making decisions and yeah should I run it on that or not? So from your standpoint it's parity in terms of deployment ease and functionality we could debate that all day long. What about the public cloud example? How do you respond to somebody who says oh we'll just spin it up in AWS or Azure? Yeah I think the public is still a good thing but it's not a bad thing to have public cloud because I think in the most companies you have a hybrid cloud environment so you will have VMware and maybe you have a public cloud and the private cloud in one company but it all depends a little bit on the type of workload that you're going to run inside of that environment so I think there are workloads that you can run on the public cloud but... Yeah Eric does Fairbanks get involved with how they manage that? You're going to kind of hybrid a multi-cloud environment we know Carlos wants to jump in with Veritas to answer Yeah we get the question a lot of course because we know the infrastructure how it works and as you probably know there are a lot of cloud orchestration products in the market that can do the multi-cloud management but to be honest at this moment there's not one real good product that handle all the clouds correctly and managing all the bits and pieces that you need to have for an infrastructure so we're still looking on that to find the one that can do that What's on your wish list? What are you looking for from the ecosystem? I think it's really good to have the... That there is no difference anymore about the type of workloads that you can run on different kind of environments so that you choose based on functionality what you are going to run on that now you see that's a lot about focus on virtual machines but actually it all goes about the application because that's the on the end that's something what needs to be run on that environment and having the manageability to manage the application and I think that's more important than managing the infrastructure underneath it How about jumping in with the multi-cloud commentary? Yeah well I think is that the end is the customer choice and what we do as a company is being able to give them the choice right is that we don't care and that's the norm of DNA really we did that on the past as Mike Farnrow explained today is that we didn't care about the operative systems at the beginning now we don't care about if you are using open stat containers and what do you want to run those so that is the way we're building problems nowadays with Veritas is your choice so we don't care about that anymore All right Carlos, Eric, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE Appreciate it Thank you You're welcome Okay keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest we're live from Veritas Vision Hashtag Vitas Vision This is theCUBE, right back