 And Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. Francisco, welcome everybody. This is theCUBE, we're here at Moscone and Moscone North. Eric Basier is here, he is with Quantum Corporation. The company has had a very interesting history and now a critical supplier of storage technologies to the enterprise. Eric, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you. So give us the update, what's new with Quantum? You guys have really evolved, you've made some interesting strategic moves over the years and now are sort of right in the heart of VMware land. Yeah, you know, Quantum, we're a storage company and we focus on storage for what we call demanding workflows. And we've got really everything in our portfolio from flash, hybrid storage, object storage, all the way out to tape and we're even using the cloud as a tier of storage now. So as a target for archiving backup information? Archiving, offsite, disaster recovery storage. So we'll get into that and I'm interested in that space. It's sort of coming back in a big way, so much data. So what are you doing here at VMworld? What's going on at your booth? What's the conversation like with customers? Take us through that. Yeah, here at VMworld, we're showcasing a few different solutions we have related to kind of virtualization storage. So we're talking about our hybrid flash storage, for primary storage, for virtual workloads. And then we're also talking about our solutions for protecting VMs, as well as some different archiving solutions and some new products we have in that space as well. And then you have this t-shirt on us that's kicked the cartel. You got a theme of break up the cartel. I've been talking for years, those of you who follow me on Wikibon know, we've written about the storage cartel and you've essentially got four or five players that are sort of moving the chessboard and you got innovators coming in and adding value and delivering ROI. What's it all about, breaking the kick the cartel? This is our theme for the show and it's been good. This has been getting a lot of good attention. I mean, as you said, a lot of our customers feel like they're sort of locked in almost to kind of the status quo with some of these big entrenched storage vendors and this is just our way to be provocative, to have a little bit of fun and to just get people to think about challenging the status quo. So, okay, so it's a tagline, but what's behind it? What's your take on the cartel and how does quantum go about kicking the cartel? I think in a couple of different areas. I mean, number one, when it comes to just storage, there's a lot of vendors out there that have what I would call kind of a one-size-fits-all approach to designing storage solutions. And one of the things that really differentiates quantum, I think, is a unique approach to tiered storage based on the customer's workflow. I mean, that's kind of our expertise is in tiered storage. And I can talk a little bit more about that. Part of that is, you know, we believe that high performance and low cost, you know, those things don't have to be mutually exclusive if we can design a tiered storage solution in the right way. The other area about the cartel is, especially when it comes to backup and data protection, companies are really trying to reduce their backup costs. And I think we have ways that we can help them do that with some of our partnerships. And, you know, get to a way where maybe they're not using these kind of large centralized kind of backup applications that are wanting to control all of their data, you know? So I think a couple of different aspects to how we can kind of help companies kick the cartel. So let's take those sort of separately. Let's start with this tiered storage. I mean, the concept of tiered storage has been around for a while, you know, put the active data on the fast storage, put the inactive data on the slow storage. And in the old days, it was like, good luck trying to figure out how to get it there. I would just leave it there and not worry about it and just buy more storage. And then we began to see some automation around that. So what's unique and exciting about what quantum is doing? Yeah, we've got really depending on the use case, whether that's primary storage or archive storage or even data protection, we build tiered storage policies into kind of everything that we do. One unique area that we're promoting at the show is with our QXS hybrid flash storage. And one of the things that we've seen is that our customers are dealing with, when you think about primary storage land, they're dealing with a lot more random workloads on their applications and it's driven by, you know, these mobile devices and their users needing kind of 24 by seven access all around the world. We designed unique real time tiering into our QXS hybrid storage line so that we can respond to these kind of random workloads and we can very quickly promote hot data sets up from, you know, hard drive tier up to a flash tier within the array to give that application or that user that kind of accelerated boost and performance. So it's not a batch job. Not a batch job, that's right. Okay, and you got secret sauce in order to do that and cool tech. Okay, cool. The second area we touched on was backup and that is another passionate area of mine. Backup for decades has been a one size fits all, which means essentially by definition, except on that perfect spot in the bell curve, you're either paying too much or you're under protected. So talk about your philosophy on data protection. Yeah, you know, this is one of these areas where maybe the cartel, you know, they take this one size fits all approach to backup and one of the things that we're seeing in the backup space is the nature of backup and data protection is completely changing in the data center. Companies are starting to look at, you know, I would say sort of this legacy approach is you have your sort of production applications, you have one kind of centralized backup app that's kind of this middleware and you have your backup storage. And what we see is that companies are becoming more sophisticated about different ways to protect data maybe on an application by application basis, you know, and we're starting to see, you know, and have that type of integration directly with the production apps. So that infer from that that there's some notion of value that an application has value and the high value applications maybe need, you're happy to spend more money on protecting them and the low value guys maybe let them let it ride. So what if I lose the data? So how do you approach that spectrum? Well, you know, for quantum, we try to understand the customer's use case. We try to understand how those applications are enabling their business and then what can we do to help improve the performance or the availability of that? Two different aspects of that that we're actually talking about here at the show. One is that, you know, again, thinking about the backup storage, this notion of kind of high performance versus low cost. If we can deliver high performance backups and still achieve the right cost point based on employing tiered storage. In this case, it's a combination of disc and tape that we can do. If we can do a faster backup, we can then enable that production application to spend more time operating it, you know, kind of full performance. And is the reciprocity on recovery? So that's, you know, again, what it's all about and data protection. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, kind of the same thing. I think if I oversimplify it a little bit, the notion of being able to quickly recover data or quickly restore or access data from a fast tier, a disc tier, but still be able to use perhaps tape for your longer term, you know, retention for compliance or regulatory reasons, if that makes sense. So yeah, absolutely fast recovery, instant access to data in some cases, which gets us into the archiving kind of realm, which I can talk about. Yeah, so I wanna go there, but before we do, while we're on backup, we've had Veeam on before, you guys have announced a partnership with Veeam. What's going on there? Yeah, we're really excited about that. Just last week, actually, we announced a new premier technology alliance with Veeam. And, you know, they're one of these partners of ours that, number one, they've had great success and they've built a great product that I think does a great job of protecting data, you know, specifically virtual machines. And by partnering with Veeam, we think that we can help not only, you know, improve the sort of production application availability and performance for our customers, and that's some of what Veeam brings, but also, you know, just reduce backup costs, you know, just plain reduce the cost of doing backups and restores, which is kind of part of what people need to do. Okay, so I wanna, let's go into the archive discussion. You've mentioned tape, it's interesting, right? Five, seven years ago, it was like, oh, tape is dead, tape is dead. We see tape as, Wikibon's written about the renaissance and tape because it's the most cost-effective for long-term archiving. In some cases, if combined with Flash, for instance, performance can actually be better than spinning disk. And it's like, it's not a lot of investment these days going into spinning disk. And tape, you can do some interesting things with head, so it's not a simple, you know, one and zero with tape, in our view anyway, it's more of a balanced approach. I'm inferring that you guys agree with that, but talk more about your archiving strategy, what you're seeing there, where tape fits in. Yeah, for sure, I mean, and in fact, this goes back to one of your earlier questions about, you know, how do we think about the different types of data and even protecting them differently? One of the things that our customers are really struggling with the most, I think, is managing and storing unstructured data. You know, and what I mean by that is kind of unstructured file content, these large files that tend to proliferate on maybe primary NAS or something like that. And we introduced a new product earlier this year called Artico. It's designed to be kind of an archive storage product with a NAS interface. But one of the things that we've done is we've taken our tiered storage technology and some of that automated tiering we can do, and we can now deliver that in the data center where we can say, this is a different way to store unstructured data. By starting to pull some of that unstructured data off of the primary storage layer, think about old unstructured files that maybe aren't being worked on every day. By pulling that off of the production systems, we're actually also freeing up the backup process. You know, you no longer need to protect that data or back it up using a batch process every day. Therefore, you're reducing primary storage costs, but you're also freeing up those resources to enable the production applications, increase performance, increase availability. So it does all kind of tie together. So you're reclaiming wasted space, essentially. I mean, you can brute force it with Ddupe, which is great, you should do that. But you're saying, you're using other techniques to free up space. How do you do that? Is it algorithmic? Again, you have secret sauce to do that? Yeah, we've got, there's two different ways to do it and there's two different ways companies could kind of deploy it. If they want to actually archive files off of a primary NAS system, we have software that we offer that will actually tear those files or move the files off of primary storage based on policies the user sets and it'll leave a link or a stub so that their knowledge users, you know, you or I could still go access the data, but it's been moved off to archive storage. In that case, once we've moved that file to our article share, if you think about that, once it's stored within that file system, that's where we can employ our unique tiered storage policies to move that file content off to, could be on premise tape, could be more of a disk layer like a cache, could even be the public cloud and I can talk about that more. We've got object storage we can use there too, but again, it's all about different tiers. That would be one option. The other option is we have customers that just would deploy that as kind of another NAS share in their environment next to their existing primary storage NAS, if you want to think about it that way. And they just start to drag and drop files onto it and then again, once it's on that file system, we tear it off based on policies they set. So you have a large portfolio so a customer can have a lot of choice, but it sounds like you're helping them as well, you and your channel sort of develop solutions that work and you've got a lot of options and not forcing them into a single solution. Is that fair? That's right, and this is kind of, again, this is almost the new NAS. It's kind of a different way to think about unstructured data storage. That's really where we see this fitting and where we've had that, a lot of initial customer success is where they have hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of this unstructured file content. And NAS, meaning the simplicity of the NAS protocol and the ubiquity of the NAS protocol, but you're extending the use cases with different types of media. The technology that allows you to move between them. It's exactly right. So for example, we can, with our new article product in our technology, we can have a file that is actually stored physically on a tape library, it might be on premise, but to URI user, I can still get to that file through a network interface. Likewise, we can be storing that file on public cloud, but that's all kind of abstracted from the user. To URI, it just looks like a NAS share on the network. Cool, all right. So we're almost out of time. Let me, I wonder if you could just sort of summarize quantum and your storage strategy and then I got one final follow up question. Yeah, I mean, for us, you know, we're a storage company, we're focused on kind of this workflow approach to storage. We want to understand the workflows of our customers, the applications that drive their business, and then how can we employ our tiered storage portfolio and our technologies to let them achieve that high performance at the right cost point. It doesn't have to be a trade off. And the last question, of course it's on your t-shirt, but the bumper sticker is the truck pulls away from VMworld 2015, what's it say? Kick the cartel, kick the cartel. Eric, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, it was really a pleasure having you. Yeah, thank you. All right, keep it right there, but we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this, this is theCUBE, we're live from Moscone in San Francisco, right back.