 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of a new era in database management brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special presentation with Nutanix. We're talking about a new era in database management to help us dig into it. First of all, I have the senior vice president and general manager of Nutanix era databases and business critical applications that is Bala Kuchibutla and one of our other cube alums, Monica Kumar who's an SPP also with Nutanix. Bala, Monica, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so first of all, Bala, a new era. We have a little bit of a punch. You've got me with some puns there. Of course, we know that the database for Nutanix solution is era. So, we always like to bring out the news first. Why don't you tell us, what does this mean? What is Nutanix announcing today? Awesome. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, so today is a very big day for us. I'm super excited to inform all of us and all the audience that we are announcing the era 2.0 GA bits for customers to enjoy it. It's some customers can download and start playing with it. So what's new with Nutanix era 2.0? As you know, 1.0 is a single cluster solution meaning the customers have to have a Nutanix cluster and then have era on the same cluster to enjoy the databases. But with era 2.0, it becomes multi-clustered solution. It's not just a multi-clustered solution. Customers can enjoy database across clusters, right? That means that they can have their always on availability group SQL servers or Postgres servers across Nutanix clusters. That means that they can spread across AZs, availability zones. Now, the most interesting point of this is it's not just across clusters. Customers can place these clusters in the cloud, right? That is AWS. You can have Nutanix cluster in the AWS cluster and then the primary production clusters may be on the Nutanix on-premise enterprise cloud kind of stuff. That's number one. Number two, we have extended our data management capabilities, data management platform capabilities and what we call them as global time machine, right? Global time machine with data access management. Like raising river that you need to harness raising river by constructing a dam and then harness it for multi-purpose whether irrigation projects or hydroelectric project kind of stuff. You need to kind of do the similar things for your data in the company, enterprise company. You need to make sure that the right persons get the right amount of data so that you don't kind of give all production data to everyone in the company. At the same time, they also need the accessibility with one click they can get the database or the data they want. So that's the data access management. Imagine a QA person only gets the sanitized snapshots or sanitized database backups for them to create the copies. And then we are extending our database engine portfolios too to introduce SAP HANA to the thing. As you know that we support Oracle today, most grace, MySQL, MariaDB and SQL server. I'm excited to inform that we are introducing SAP HANA. Our customers can do one click sandbox creation end-to-end environment for SAP HANA today on Nutanix platform. And lastly, I'm super excited to inform that we are becoming a Postgres vendor. We are going to give 24 by seven, 365 days support for Postgres database engine that's kind of provisioned through Nutanix as a platform. So this way the customers can enjoy the engine platform service altogether in one single shot with a single 1800 company that they can call and get the support they want. I'm super duper excited that this is going to make the customers a truly multi-cloud, multi-cluster data management platform. Thank you. Yeah, and I'll just add to that too. It's fantastic that we are now offering this new capability. I just want to kind of remind our audience that Nutanix for many years has been providing the foundation, the infrastructure software, but you can run all these multiple workloads, including databases today. And what we're doing with ERA is fantastic because now we are giving our customers the ability to take that database that they run on top of Nutanix to provide that as a service now, right? So now we are talking to a whole different organization here. It's database administrations, it's administrators, it's teams that run databases, it teams that care about data and providing access to data in organizations. Well, first of all, congratulations. I've talked for a couple of years to the teams at Nutanix, especially some of the people working on Postgres, really exciting stuff. And you've both seen really the unlocking of database. It used to be, we talked about, I have one database, it's kind of the one that everything runs on. Now customers, they have more databases, you talked about that flexibility as to where we run it. Would love to hear, Monica start with you, you talk about the customers, what does this really mean for them? Because one of our most mission critical applications we talk about, we're not just throwing our databases, oh, I don't wake up in the morning and say, oh, let me move it to this cloud and put it in this data center. This needs to be reliable, I need to have access to the data, I need to be able to work with it. So what does this really mean and what does it unlock for your customers? Yes, absolutely, I love to talk about this topic. I mean, if you think about databases, they are means to an end, right? And in this case, the end is, being able to mine insights from the data and then make meaningful decisions based on that. So when we talk to customers, it's really clear that data has now become one of the most valuable assets that an organization owns. Well, of course, in addition to the employees that are part of the organization and our customers, data is one of the most important assets. But most organizations, the challenges they face is a lot of data gets collected. And in fact, we've heard numbers thrown around for many years, like almost 80% of world's data has been created in the last three or four years and data is doubling every two years in terms of volume. Well, guess what? Data gets collected, it sits there. An organization is struggling to get access to it with the right performance, the right security and regulation compliance, the reliability, availability, by persona, developers need certain access, analysts needs different access, line of businesses need different access. So what we see is organizations are struggling in getting access to data at the right time by the right person on the team and when they need it. And I think that's where database as a service is critical. It's not just about having the database software which is of course important, but how you can now make that service available to your stakeholders, to developers, to lines of business within the SLAs that they demand. So is it instantly? How quickly can you make it available? How quickly can your users have access to data and do something meaningful with it and mind the insights for smarter business? And then the one thing I'd like to add is that's where IT and business really come together. That's the glue. If you think about it today, what is the glue between an IT organization and a business organization? It's the data. And that's where they are really coming together to say, how can we together deliver the right service? So you, the business owner can deliver the right outcome for our business. That's very true. Maybe I'll just add a couple of comments there. What we are trying to do is we are trying to bring the cloud experience, the RDS-like experience to the enterprise cloud and then hybrid cloud. So the customers will now have a choice of cloud. They don't need to be locked in a particular cloud. At the same time, enjoy the true cloud utility experience. We help customers create cloud, database clouds either by themselves, if they're big enough to manage the cloud themselves or they can partner with GSIs like Vipro or HCL and then create a completely managed database service kind of stuff. So this brings this cloud neutrality, portability for customers and give them the choice at their terms, Stu. Yeah. Well, absolutely. We've seen a huge growth in managed services. As you said, maybe bring us inside a little bit. You know, what does this, what does this free up customers? What, you know, we've said for so long that back when HCI first started, it was, you know, some of the storage administrators might bristle because you were taking things away from them. It was like, no, we're going to free you up to do other things that as Monica said, you know, deliver more business value, not mapping loans and doing that. How about from the DBA standpoint? What are some of those, you know, repetitive, you know, undifferentiated heavy lifting that we're going to take away from them so that they can focus on the business value? Yep. Thank you Stu. So to think about this, we all do copy-paste operations in laptops, right? Something of that sort happens in data center at a much larger scale, meaning that the same kind of copy-paste operation happens at databases at terabytes, at terabytes of scale, hundreds of terabytes. Now that is, it has become the most dreaded, complex, long-running, error-prone operation. Why should it be that way? Why should the DBA spend all these mundane tasks and then get busy for every cloning operation? It's a two-day job for me, every backup job, it's like a half-day job for me, provisioning takes like three days. We can take this undifferentiated heavy lifting by this and then let the DBAs focus on designing the cloud for them or looking for the database tuning, database design, data modeling, or AML aspects of the data kind of stuff. So we are freeing up the database ops people in a way that they can design the database cloud and make sure that their energy focus is on higher-order value things and more towards the business-centric kind of stuff, okay? Yeah, and you know what? Automation is really important here. What Bala is talking about is automating mundane grunt work. Like IT spends 80% of its time in maintaining systems. So then where is the time for innovation, right? So if we can automate stuff that's repetitive, stuff that the machine can do, the software can do, why not? And I think that's what our database as a service offering does. And I would add this, you know, the big thing our database as a service does really is provide IT organizations and DB organizations a way to manage heterogeneous databases too. It's not like, you know, here's my environment for Postgres, here's my environment for MySQL, here's my environment for Oracle, here's my environment for SQL Server. Now with a single offering, a single tool, you can manage your heterogeneous environment across different clouds on premises cloud or in a public cloud environments. I think that's the beauty we are talking about with Nutanix's era is it really, truly gives organizations that single environment to manage heterogeneous databases, apply the same automation and the ease of management across all these different environments. Yeah. I'll just add one for the comments too, that a true managed pass, obviously customers enjoy like a single shop go to public cloud, just click through and then they get the database endpoints and then someone is managing the database for them. But if you look at the enterprise data centers, they need to bring that enterprise governance structure to these databases. It's not like anyone can do anything to any all these databases. So we are kind of getting the best of both. The needed enterprise governance by these enterprise people at the same time bringing the convenience for the application teams and developers, they want to consume this databases like utility. So bringing the cloud experience, bringing the enterprise governance, at the same time, I'm super confident we can cut down the cost. So that is what Nutanix era is all about across all the cloud, including the enterprise cloud. Yeah. Well, Bala, being simpler and being less expensive or one of the original promises of the cloud that don't necessarily always come out there. So that's super important. One of the other things, you talk about these hybrid environments. It's not just that it's in the public cloud, want to understand these environments, if I'm in the public cloud, can I still leverage some of the services that are in the public cloud? So if I want to run some analytics, if I want to use some of the phenomenal services that are coming out every day, is that something that can be done in this environment? Yeah, beautiful. Thank you, Steve. So we are seeing customers to two categories. There is a public cloud customer completely born in public cloud, cloud native services. They realize that for every database, they're maintaining five or seven different copies and the management of these copies is prohibitive, just because every copy is a full, thick copy in the public cloud, meaning you take a backup snapshot and restore it, your meter like New York taxi, it starts running for your EBS and whatever they talk that you're looking at it kind of stuff. So they can leverage Nutanix clusters and then have a highly efficient cloning capability so that they can cut down some of this cost for the secondary environments that I talk about, right? What we call this copy data management. That's one kind of use scale. The other kind of customers that we are seeing whose cloud is a phenomenon. There's no way that people have to move to cloud. That's something at a sea level mandate that happens. These customers are enjoying their database experience on our enterprise cloud, but when they try to go to these big hyperscalers, they are seeing the disconnect that they're not able to enjoy some of the things that they are seeing on the enterprise cloud with us. So this transition they are talking to us, can you get this kind of functionality with Nutanix platform onto some of these big hyperscalers? So there are kind of customers moving both sides. Some customers are in public cloud, they're trying to enjoy our facilities other copy data management or Nutanix. Customers are on-prem, but they have a mandate to go to public cloud with our hybrid cloud strategy, they get to enjoy the same kind of convenience that they are seeing it on enterprise and bringing the same kind of governance that they used to do it. So that's the way we see customers here. Yeah. Manaka, I want to go back to something you talked about. Customers dealing with that heterogeneous environment that they have reminds me of a lot of the themes that we talked about at Nutanix.next because customers have, they have multiple clouds they're using. It requires different skill sets, different tooling. It's that simplicity layer that Nutanix has been working to deliver since day one. Can you talk, what are you hearing from your customers? How are they doing with this? And especially in the database world, what are some of those challenges that they're really facing that we're looking to help solve with this solution today? Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, what customers at least in our experience what they want or what they're looking for is this modern cloud platform that can really work across multiple cloud environments because people don't want to change, running, let's say an Oracle database here on-prem on a certain stack and then using a whole different stack to run Oracle database in the cloud. What they want is the same exact foundation. So they can be for sure have the right performance, availability, reliability, the applications don't have to be rewritten on top of Oracle database. They want to preserve all of that, but they want the flexibility to be able to run that cloud platform, wherever they choose to. So that's one. So that's the, you know, choosing the right and modernizing and choosing the right cloud platform is definitely very important to our customers, but you nailed it on the heads too. It's then about how do you manage it? How do you operate it on a daily basis? And that's where our customers are struggling with multiple types of tools out there, you know, custom tool for every single environment and that's what they don't want. They want to be able to manage simply across multiple environments using the same tools and skill sets. And again, and I'm going to beat the same drum, but that's when Nutanix shines. That's our design principle is it's the exact same technology foundation that we provide to customers to run any applications. In this case, it happens to be databases, exact same foundation you can use to run databases on-prem in the cloud. And then on top of that using error, boom, simple management, simple operations, simple provisioning, you know, simple copy data management, simple patching, all of that becomes easy using just a single framework to manage and operate. And I will tell you this, when we talk to customers, you know, what is it that DBAs and database teams are struggling with? They're struggling with SLAs and performance on scalability, that's one. Number two, they're struggling with keeping it up and running and fulfilling the demands of their stakeholders because they cannot keep up with how many databases they need to keep provisioning and patching and updating. So at Nutanix, now we are actually solving both those problems. With our platform, we are solving the problem of a very specific SLA that we can deliver in any cloud. And with error, we are solving the issue of that operational complexity. We're making it really easy. So again, IT stakeholders, DBAs can fulfill the demands of the business stakeholders and really help them monetize the data. Yeah, I'll just add on with one concrete example too. Like we have a big financial customer. They want to run Postgres. They are looking at the public cloud, can we do a managed services kind of stuff. But you look at this, that the difference, the cost difference between running a Postgres on your compute infrastructure versus managed services is almost like three X to four X dollars, right? Now with Nutanix platform and error, we were able to show that they can do a much reduced cost, right? Managed database service experience, including their DBA cost or including the cloud administration cost. Like we added the infrastructure, we added the people who are going to manage the cloud, internal cloud, and then end-to-end experience being plus plus of what they can see in the public cloud. That's what makes the big difference. And this is what data sovereignty, data control, compliance, and infrastructure governance, all these things coupled with cloud experience is what customers really see the value of error on the enterprise cloud. And with an extension to the public cloud with our hybrid cloud strategy, if they want to move this workload to public cloud, they can do it so today with AWS clusters and tomorrow with our Azure clusters. So that gives them that kind of insurance, not getting locked in by a big hyperscaler, but at the same time enjoy the cloud experience. That's what big customers are looking for. All right, and Bala, all the things you laid out here, what's the availability of error 2.0? Error 2.0 is actually available today. The customers can enjoy, download the bits. We already have a bunch of beta customers who are trying it out, whether you call big telco companies or financial companies, or even the big companies that manage big pensions kind of stuff. Let's talk about that kind of stuff. People are looking to us. In fact, there are customers who are looking for, when is this available for Azure clusters so that we can move some of our workloads to and manage the databases in Azure clusters too. So it is available. And I'm looking forward to great feedback from our customers and hoping that it will solve some of their major critical problems. And then in the process, they get the best of Nutanix. Yeah, Manaka, last question I have for you. This doesn't seem like it's necessarily the same traditional infrastructure go to market for a solution like this. If I think back to, you know, people think of HCI, it was like, oh, well, it was kind of a new box. We know Nutanix is a software company. More of what you do today is subscription based. So maybe if you could talk a little bit to just how Nutanix goes to market with a solution like this. Yeah, and you know what? Maybe people don't realize it, but I'm hoping a lot of people do. That Nutanix is not just an infrastructure company anymore. In the last many years, we've developed a full cloud platform. Not only do we offer, you know, the infrastructure services with hyperconverged infrastructure, which is now really the foundation. It's the hybrid cloud infrastructure. As you know, we used to, we talked to you a month ago and we talked about the evolution of HCI to really becoming that hybrid cloud infrastructure. But in addition to that, we also offer other data center services on storage, DR, networking. We also offer DevOps services with application, you know, provisioning automation, application orchestration, and then of course, database services that we're talking about today. And we offer desktop services. So Nutanix has really evolved in the last few years to a complete cloud platform, really focusing on the applications and workloads that run on top of the infrastructure stack. So not just the infrastructure layer, but how can we be the best platform to run your databases? Your end is a computing workloads, your analytics applications, your enterprise applications, cloud native applications. So that's what this is. And you know, databases is one of our most successful workloads that runs on Nutanix very well because of the way the infrastructure software is architected because it's really great to scale high performance because of again, our superior architecture. And now with ARA, it's a tool, it's all in one. Now it's also about really simplifying the management of databases and delivering them speedily and with agility to drive innovation in the organizations. Yeah, thank you, Monica. Thank you. I'll just add a couple of lines of commentary to that. GTM for databases, as you rightly call it, it's going to be a challenge. And historically, we are seen as an infrastructure company, but the beauty of databases is so adjacent to the infrastructure, the storage. So the language slide becomes easy. And in fact, this holistic way of looking at solving the problem at the solution level rather than infrastructure helps us to go to a different kind of buyer, different kind of decision maker. And we are learning and I can tell you confidently the kind of progress that we have seen in one end of year, the kind of customers that we are winning and proving that we can bring a big difference to them. Though there is a challenge of GTM speaking language of database, but the sheer nature of cloud platform, the way the other hyperscalers work, that's the kind of language that we take. You can run your solution and here is how you can cut down your database backup time from hours to less than a minute. Here is how you can cut down your patching from 16 hours to less than one hour. Here is how you can cut down your approaching time from multiple weeks to less than a matter of minutes. That holistic way of approaching it, coupled with the power of the platform, really making the big difference for us. And I usually tell every time I meet, can you give us an opportunity to cut down your database cost, the TCO, total cost of operations by close to 50% that gets them excited, that lets them move in and say, how do you plan to do it? And then we go about, how do we do it? And we do a deep dive on PC, POSIS and all the way. So I'm excited. I think this is going to be a big play for Nutanix. We're going to make big difference. Absolutely. Well, Bala, congratulations to the team. Monica, both of you, thank you so much for joining. Really excited for all the announcements. Thank you so much. All right, and stay with us. We're going to dig in a little bit more with one more interview for this product launch of the new era and database management from Nutanix. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.