 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, hard to believe our 11th year at the show. Obviously the first time we're doing these virtually. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni is a regular on the program, Sam Warner, he is the vice president of product at IBM. Sam, thanks so much for joining us. Hey Stu, thanks for having me. It's great to be with you again and great to be at VMworld virtually. Different experience this year, but still just as exciting as always. Yeah, well, obviously a long history between IBM and VMware. I go back in my memory to like 2002. Most people hadn't even heard of virtualization. I was working for a certain storage company and IBM and HP and Dell were all banging on our door saying you really need to support this stuff. This is really important. Obviously a lot has changed in the subsequent years. VMware's high level message talks a lot about cloud. They've got a lot of big partnerships, including IBM of course on the cloud side as well as the system side. So why don't you bring us in your team, the relationship with VMware these days? Yeah, thanks and that's a great intro. We do have a very long relationship in history with VMware. And the thing I love about the VMware community is I'm a storage person. People in the VM world really understand the importance of storage and having a strategy around storage for how it's deployed, simplifying the management, automating things and probably most importantly bringing some of the security aspects especially in today's world. So we've got really, really strong integration with our flash system family making it very easy to deploy and ensure you've got end to end data protection, encryption and everything you need to secure your mission critical applications in your VMware environment. And we've spent, IBM is a leader in data protection software and we've made large investments in our integration with VMware to ensure our customers are able to secure their data and ensure that they have backups that they can easily restore. And we've tried to make it simple enough that the VM administrator can actually do it on their own. Yeah, Sam, I mentioned one of the big messages we hear from VMware of course is that you can take that VMware stack and put it lots of places. Of course they have heavy data center environments but can live in Amazon with VMware and AWS. I mentioned the IBM cloud partnership, all the other clouds. And from a data protection standpoint really they've made it so that their partners can kind of come along with that story. So what are you seeing from your standpoint? Obviously I expect the IBM cloud is a piece of it but are you also your data protection? Does that play across kind of the full spectrum of what VMware is doing? Absolutely. So I mean, if you want to back up your VMware environment on AWS you can use spectrum protect plus you can do it for on-prem you can do it in IBM cloud. It's interesting because the data protection software is now being used for much broader use cases. We've moved to a world where you take snapshots of your data which allows you to do instantaneous recovery it allows you to offload for longer term backups and archives or disaster recovery but it also allows you to do things like data migration open up new analytics, make data available for analytics and other environments. So we're seeing our customers who are using spectrum protect suite on-premises actually then leverage it in different cloud environments both for DR and the cloud and for things like dev test or analytics. So I think that connection, both leveraging the underlying VMware capabilities but having a very strong application running on top that can help you with the orchestration gives you the ability to really take advantage of a hybrid multi-cloud environment. Yeah and Sam something that really goes side by side if we're talking about data protection, big conversations we've been having with customers the last few years has been things like governance dealing with GDPR and what's the CCCP from California as well as the cyber resiliency ransomware and everything like that. So how does that fit into give us the update on your end when it comes to those pieces? It's a great question because as storage administrators I think they struggle quite a bit with a lot of different priorities that are at odds with each other. There's this big push for AI a big push for driving great insights from the institutional knowledge of an enterprise and driving new value to customers. So and enterprises are obviously hiring data scientists and building out these neural networks. The problem is at odds with that strategy making data available you have GDPR requirements and you also have growing threats, cyber threats out there. We've even seen it increase within this COVID world if you think that criminals back off when there's a global pandemic the answer is no they do not. So there's this increased threat and increased regulation so you really need a strategy for how you're gonna manage that data and actually that's where something like a spectrum protect plus can come in allows you to take snapshots, build a catalog of your data and do some analysis on the different types of data you wanna make available for these different use cases and actually bring that data into an environment where it's safe and secure and you can also bring the copy back later. Early on people would make copies and move it everywhere you lose track of the data you don't really have a single source of truth anymore. So it's really important to have an intelligent cataloged approach to doing this. Wonderful. Well, Sam, one of the other big themes we see at the show obviously is VMware has a big push into that cloud native discussion, Kubernetes, containerization. I've spoken with your team plenty of times at the KubeCon shows. So help connect us. There's still a little bit of two different worlds, VMs and containers. Yes, they're coming together but it's infrastructure versus app developers and oftentimes there's the technology pieces and then of course, as we always know those organizational challenges can really slow things down if we don't plan properly. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. And in fact, VMware took years and years to get to where it is today but now it gives you a lot of the core capabilities you need to do to do data protection. VADP wasn't built overnight. When you look at Kubernetes and where it is today it's still in pretty early stages of that. It doesn't, we have CSI drivers, the container storage interface, they allow you to do snapshots. If you go to various storage vendors there are kind of different phases in their work on it. It's a little bit of the wild west I would say right now. Early on in Kubernetes environments or container environments they were used for stateless applications as we all know. Now that we're moving more mission critical workloads and moving towards stateful applications data protection becomes critical. And in fact, from our customers it's one of the biggest challenges they say they're encountering in their digital transformation as they move to a hybrid multi-cloud container world. So what we're doing with Spectrum Protect Plus is we're integrating directly into these CSI drivers and providing customers the capability to do application and container aware snapshots of their data. Building this catalog of information about the data and being able to make it not only available for other use cases but also in the event you have to recover if there's a ransomware attack, if you lose a file, if something anything malicious happens or a disaster you can actually get back to the data you need quickly. Which is obviously just as important in a Kubernetes environment as in a VMware environment. Yeah, Sam it's so good to hear some of the progress here. You and I we lived through that fixing storage for virtual environment and really took about a decade to go from just, okay well, I can back up everything to, wait I can really have that VM granularity. But we're about five years into containerization and storage, you talked about the CSI plug and you talked about what we can do there. So it looks like we've learned from the past we can accelerate a bit what we're doing so that we can have that full stack solution in these modern environments. Yeah, I mean obviously we're taking the learnings that we got from those environments and we have a lot of customers who are leveraging their VMware environment and building on top of that. And we also have others that are looking at moving towards bare metal in some cases. So we need to provide a lot of the same level of automation and integration that we have in VMware environments. So we're able to leverage all the learnings we have from all those years and all the challenges we had to make storage much easier to manage and deploy in these environments. So I think it'll be a much shorter learning curve this time around. Yeah, absolutely. It's been great to see the communities rally so much maturation. All right Sam, what else should people know about these solutions? We're not going to be all jammed together in either San Francisco or Las Vegas but there's always great conversations at the show. Lots of customers, lots of learning. So what do you want people to take away from VMworld when it comes to IBM? Well, I think you, obviously the announcements the VMware's making this week are very exciting. And I think you'll see that our storage platforms continue to come along with VMware and provide, I would say the most secure and performant storage options for VMware environments with end-to-end encryption, our ability to do snapshots of cataloging with a snapshot for quick recovery, our ability to move into hybrid multi-cloud environments I think gives a very flexible storage infrastructure for your VMware world. And also as you move beyond, as you adopt containers we have very good integration with OpenShift and any type of Kubernetes framework. So we're able to support you today with VMware and whether you're continuing to move forward with VMware and Kubernetes on top of it or moving forward to a hybrid multi-cloud version on bare metal, we can support all of those environments with very secure storage infrastructure. The one other thing that I think people need to keep in mind is the concept of air gapping and having copies outside of their storage infrastructure. We're actually able to bring you tape storage as an extension to your environment. Tape is the true air gap. We actually can pull the cartridge out and put it on a shelf and I can assure you nobody is gonna be able to change that data. So in the event something really happens we can recover from tape. We can give you the ability to copy the data to the cloud in a logical air gap. You can consider that a separate network. So to some extent it is an air gap and you can retrieve the data back. And we can give you the ability to do snapshots in place which would be your quickest recovery path. So we can give you the ability to do all three of those things within our storage products giving the ultimate secure environment and many options for recovery in this increasingly vicious world of IT I guess. Yeah, well, Sam, what's old is new again we know that everything in IT is always additive. I remember a couple of years ago we were joking with we had that flip turn of taking flash and tape. And a few years back if you looked underneath a lot of the cloud solutions like some of those deep archives there often was tape there. So Sam, thank you so much. Great to catch up with you. So many pieces. I hope you and the team have, you know lots of good conversations at VMworld. Thank you Stu. It's great to be here with you again. Stay tuned, lots more coverage from VMworld 2020 the global digital online experience. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.