 Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, welcome back to SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage of Amazon re-invent 2015. I'm Stu Miniman, wikibon.com. Happy to have on this segment, I've got Jennifer Gill, a returning CUBE alum, who is the director of global product marketing, with Zerto. Jennifer, welcome back. Thank you. And we've got a first-time guest, Josh Oat, who is the assistant engineer with Tancati. Josh, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so Josh, I'm going to start with you. Can you just give us a little bit background, your role, and tell us a little bit about Tancati. Well Tancati is a materials company, so they're manufacturing, doing several different business units with several clients around the world, actually, I'm in charge of the U.S. and America's shared server center for IT, and I handle a lot of the infrastructure servers and that kind of stuff, the whole stack of equipment, so yeah, so that's basically our setup right now. All right, so you say infrastructure, how does cloud fit into that? Well, it's been an initiative to be able to get out of the data center traditional data center and be able to put it up there in the cloud. Amazon has been, obviously, the leader in that, so we started tiptoeing toward there with storage first and then just saw how easy it was going to compute and then just the curve went very steep and we're just on the plan to move all in eventually. And so it's been a big strategy now. All right, so can you bring us up to speed as to how does Zerto fit into that discussion then? Well, Zerto came in as a, obviously, a disaster recovery strategy for us. We were looking to do a traditional backups, file backups, back up the tape, things like that. We had traditionally an acquisition company, acquiring companies, they already had their own kind of systems that we're inheriting with their own backup strategies and kind of stuff. Zerto came in, was able to standardize the disaster recovery and cross-platform, cross-storage, we were able to plug them right in and be able to get a high level of confidence in being able to recover our servers. Yeah, so Jennifer, let me bring into the conversation here. Yeah, I mean, that standardization's a real tough challenge. I saw you a few weeks ago at VMworld. Zerto plays across quite a few technologies, so just, I guess, gives the high level on how Zerto fits into that and maybe gives a little color to what Josh was talking about. Yeah, so Zerto, you can replicate from anything to anything, so the hardware is completely irrelevant. It can be whatever you want. So you can use really high-performing storage for your production environment and then use something a little less expensive on your target site for disaster recovery. With 4.0, that's when we expanded into different types of hypervisors. So you can use VMware and your supercharged storage for your production environment and then maybe HyperBee with something a little less expensive for disaster recovery or tests and development. And then even if you want to go more cost-effective then you could do DR to AWS. And companies like TenCotton that do look to grow through acquisition because you're going to acquire this entire company and you're going to get their IT infrastructure and you don't know what you're getting. So with Zerto, because we play in the hypervisor in that virtual layer, we have that layer that enables mobility and agility within the infrastructure. First use case is usually disaster recovery, but then companies really open their eyes and say, wow, I can use Zerto for so many things. I can use this for easy migrations. I can start to move applications into the cloud and maybe leave them there. I can do disaster recovery to the cloud. So it's a really powerful tool once people start looking at it. All right, Josh, it's a try. I've worked with so many companies that have done those acquisitions. And I mean, that's put typically such huge strain on IT. So it's easy now. I can just go ahead and buy more companies and it's a snap for IT. Is that, where does this end, the kind of the Zerto solution? I'm sure there's still lots of other work you need to do from an IT standpoint. There is, but like Jennifer said, it's becoming a tool that we use in the data center now where that we can migrate servers easily between data centers or now to AWS. We had a story where we brought on the new company in California. We wanted to bring their ERP system into our data center. We didn't have a tool who's either back it up to a physical storage and ship it or across their internet connection, which was very slow at the time. It was going to take a long time. We were talking downtime. We use Zerto. We told them, hey, you wouldn't expect some downtime while we move this. I think after we initially seated the server, I think 10 minutes they were down why it was brought up in our data center and then they're back up and working. I mean, they didn't really recognize anything that happened. Yeah, so one of the things that's been really interesting to watch at this show over the last couple of years is there's some really big companies. One that you thought traditionally cloud would probably be a no-no. That are getting up on stage, Capital One this morning said, cloud's more secure than my data center is. GE said it's a foregone conclusion that we're pushing stuff to the cloud. How does your organization fundamentally think about cloud and maybe how have that been changing recently? Well, we've embraced it. We have a very forward-thinking management team so they're very open to it. We're moving other things into the cloud. It's very natural just to start moving servers and data center there. Our biggest concern or worry or challenge might be we're not bringing stuff up brand new there. We're looking to shift something over. So now with Zerto as a tool, we're able to replicate the servers over there instead of building anything from scratch. So that's a big selling point. That's also a big use case to be able to just test it. Does this cloud stuff work? We can migrate something over there, test it, run some tests in it, see if it's performing like we expected to perform up in the clouds as secure as we thought it was. And yeah, it's really helped us with being able to prove the cloud stuff works. I mean, Jennifer, traditionally backup, disaster recovery, replication, these were complicated solutions that, traditional storage companies, it was extra licenses, usually get professional services involved. And how does cloud supercharge this? Yeah, so with a solution like Zerto, you have all of those things, so those different tools that you were kind of coordinating are now in one. And now you're able to go to the cloud and you can just kind of select, sorry, I'm looking at this level of processing power and storage and then order that stack essentially. And it's just available. So turning on IT, it's kind of interesting. You know, when you think about looking at procuring a data center or procuring more hardware that you need to run your business, it was ordering and waiting, et cetera. Or you kind of, now with Amazon, you slip your credit card and say, okay, I want this and say, okay, great, here it is. And you can use this for production or testing development and things like that. In terms of a business, I think how much faster now you can react to, we have this changing business requirement and we need to run this application. It's huge, we don't have the infrastructure. It's like, oh no, we're going to fall behind. Nope, we can just go to the cloud and we can run it there and it'll be up and available and ready to go in hours or days. Yeah, so I guess there have been some inhibitors to people considering cloud. Security was one talked about for many years. Uncertainty of pricing has been there. Have you seen a maturation in this discussion with customers that you're working with? Absolutely, it's funny, we had kind of the same opinion as you. When we first started coming to re-invent last year, we were like, oh, we'll see who's there, but we were thinking it was companies who couldn't afford anything. They were looking at cloud for cost reasons and then maybe a few innovators who were really leading the charge, like Tancata. And we were surprised to see the big banks, the pharmaceutical companies like, oh no, we're absolutely looking at cloud. It made me not for our mission critical tier one workloads, but for a tier two or tier three workload, why are we going to keep that extra data center around? Why don't we just put it in the cloud? And I think people are getting more and more comfortable with the security with Zerto. As Josh mentioned, you can do failover, see how it works, make sure it's going to meet your needs, look at the performance. So you have that assurance that, gee, I thought I was going to get something a little less than and I'm really not. I'm getting the performance that I needed and I look for and you're able to verify that and print out a report and show that to management and say, hey, we did this failover test with Zerto and we're able to see that it's running very well. So we might want to consider cloud for other things beyond just maybe those tier three applications. Yeah. Josh, anything you want to add on that? No, that's exactly it. I mean, we're looking, that's what we're doing. We're consolidating data centers. I mean, we grew, you know, typically where we had one of our locations was our data center and we're like, okay, something like could happen here. So we go to a, you know, a Colo and so now we're running a Colo and then the other location is our backup. Now we can move applications back and forth there. Now, okay, we got to get rid of the backup data center. Now Amazon is going to be our backup data center from our Colo location. Eventually, you know, the plan is now migrate everything, replicate everything over to Amazon. That's going to be our location. Josh, one of the great benefits of the cloud, of course, is you know, you're paying for what you use. And when you looked at kind of backup or replication type solutions, there was often, you know, underutilization. As we said, you know, you build a second data center, you do anything like that. Did you do any kind of metrics kind of beforehand or measuring after as to, you know, what the cost saving is for, you know, other options? That continues to evolve. But yeah, that is the biggest attractive selling point is that you only use what you're using. And that's why we're phasing it in and using what we need to now. And then we can test it and turn it off, test it, turn it off. And that's a huge selling point. And that's- You bring a good point. One of the challenges usually backup is you don't test it. Right. As I say, backing up is something but recovering is everything, right? So did you actually test pretty regularly then? It sounds like? Yes, yeah. We do test, especially into the AWS file quite a bit. Zert has been great to work with. I think we've been working with them very closely even going into AWS. They ask for feedback all the time, like what works, what doesn't work, what do you want to see, what features. So we're constantly testing that and we're giving them feedback. They're giving us feedback. We're working closely with them so that helps out. And now our replication and recovery into AWS is much, much faster as we continue on this path. Yeah, Jennifer, you must have some metrics. You know, compared to traditional backup, you know, what's the cost savings when using a Zerto solution? Yeah, so there's so many different numbers that we see it's really hard to look at, you know, what the real savings is. I mean, you know, we have customers just say, project that, you know, it could be a 60, 70% savings versus, you know, they're looking at, you know, paying a couple thousand dollars a month versus the quarter of a million dollar investment. So it can be very significant, but you know, of course it varies by size, you know, speed, what you're looking for, all those other kinds of things. But you know, we see savings, you know, I don't want to say a percentage, but you know, the customer is looking at a couple thousand dollars a month versus the $250,000 a year on, you know, maintaining and upgrading and all those other things. Right, and you're also moving from the CapEx to OpEx model. And I mean, something we hear over and over is, you know, the savings almost is secondary because I can just work so much faster, whether it gives me more agility. And rather than, you know, putting all these processes that could take months or longer, this is something I can do much faster. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Any learnings that you've had, Josh, is that you'd want to share with your peers as to kind of view your original expectation versus what you've found? As far as moving to the cloud, or moving to Amazon, yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, I think it's good to test it out and that Zerto makes it easy for us to say, take your workload, your servers, your application, whatever, pick it up, place it in the Amazon cloud, and then you can run it right there and, you know, especially if cost is a problem, you run it for however long you want to run it and test it, turn it off, and you know exactly the kind of production you're going to get out of it, and then you can, Amazon's really good about telling you exactly how much that's going to cost you, you know, per month to have that storage and compute. And you can play around, and now with the instance types, you can play around with, all right, if I fell over to a bigger server or a smaller server, I might not need what I have provisioned on from in the cloud as well. So that's a big element, and also cost savings when you go to the off-ex model. Yeah, Jennifer, can you share with us, what kind of conversations are you having in the booth area around the show? What are bringing end users to come talk to you? Yeah, so, well, two key use cases. So the first disaster recovery, and that's kind of where Josh and Tancata started. So looking at, wow, I can run this in a cloud environment and when I replicate the data, I'm only using S3 storage. I'm not using any compute resources other than to run the cloud appliance that's going to manage your recovery when you do fail over. So in terms of what I'm using, wow, I'm only paying for the storage and then I can not have to pay for the processing power until I fail over. That's very attractive. And then the other is customers like, you know what, we're getting out of the data center business and we're looking for something that can move applications from on-prem into AWS. And we also have migrations licensing and as Josh mentioned, moving a 300 gigabyte ERP application from California to Georgia with 10 minutes of downtime, you know, you'll see similar results with that in AWS. So if you're looking to kind of move into the cloud and because Zerto does protect at the virtual protection group layer, that's a group of VMs that make up an application. So it's not like an all or nothing, like you're going to get with, you know, if you were trying, I don't know how it would work, but if you're trying to use storage application to get something into the cloud, it's not an all or nothing. You can select, I want this workload, we're going to move into the cloud or we're going to see how it goes. And you can start with just that one workload. So migrations and then the disaster recovery just because the cost savings is so significant. You know, Josh, I just want to give you the final word, you know, what do you get from coming to a show like re-invent, what would you share with your peers as kind of the value in opportunities at a show like this? Yeah, in addition to, you know, funding out about more of the AWS services and things that they're doing, just learning from peers and finding out how they're using AWS and applications like Zerto and just how it's working in their organization and you can get a lot of tricks and tips with that. All right. Well, Josh Oates, Jennifer Gill, thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from AWS re-invent 2015. Thank you for watching.