 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018. It was day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets. Our ninth year covering VMworld, we have like 96 interviews, a lot of content happening, a lot of updates from the entrepreneurs, from the executives and also the partnerships in this segment we're going to be talking. Cisco and Veeam we got, Stefan Renner who's the technical director of Global Alliances for Veeam and Chris O'Brien, technical marketing director at Cisco. Programmable networks, easy to use, backup, restore, disaster recovery, all this great stuff. You guys just get here from Omnia? Welcome to theCUBE. It's a good party. Welcome to theCUBE. Do we look like that? I feel like that. You know, you guys have been very successful on the Veeam side. We had Peter, McKay, the co-CEO on yesterday. Cisco has been very active and relevant in programmable dev ops or dev net ops has been called in there. So the need to make things programmable and easy are a nice combination. You guys have a partnership. How is the Cisco Veeam partnership going? How did it start? Take a minute to explain how it all came together and what's the current situation of the partnership? Well, I think from a Cisco perspective the partnership is going great, fantastic. I mean they're a partner of the year. You know, what we're hearing from our customers, they want us to solve some of their problems around how do they scale and manage their data, right? With, you know, I'm from the UCS business unit. We see an opportunity for us to kind of bring what we can, you know, UCS was built on programmability, right? We have the APIs, we have those capabilities. So, you know, we started out with Veeam a few, I guess 18 months ago, maybe two years ago, really focusing on some solutions around our HyperFlex platform and we released a number of validated designs. So when we do these validated designs, it's not, you know, just Cisco doing the work. We're in the labs together, we're developing the solution. With Veeam. With Veeam, all the engineering efforts and then obviously as you go through and you grow that solution, you really see an opportunity where you can, you know, enhance the solution. So things like automation, you know, we want to bring that to the table certainly with our partner. And what's your contribution on this? Obviously Veeam's role in the solution. So you guys doing joint validations or joint engineering. Talk about the integration piece with Cisco, why it's important. We look back maybe just two years, right? So I tried Veeam actually three years ago, right? Three and a half years ago. And when I try, we really started to kick off the thing with Cisco. So it's a bit more than two years, I would say it's three years, right? But in these days, like a couple of years back, it's more about finding a data protection platform where we can host Veeam on. Meaning a backup server, right? In these days, it was more about backup and recovery. Well, today we talk about hyper-availability, right? It's not only about backing up stuff or recovering stuff. It's about providing the whole platform, the whole orchestration layer for data availability. And back in these times, three years ago, it was about finding an S30 to 60 or a C240 server of Cisco which fits exactly the needs we need for Veeam to run on it, right? But over the last now 24 months, since Cisco really started Hyperflex and going into hyperconvergency, we partnered with them to make sure we have the right data protection for this kind of solution, right? And that's what we just talked about, talking about integrations, right? So we really invested a lot of time and efforts on both sides. It's not only a Veeam development. It's also trying to see Cisco developed to integrate into Hyperflex to make sure we can provide the right data protection for the customer needs are, right? So talk about the high availability. I just want to just talk about that for a second because I think this really highlights one of the relationship and the desire in the market for real-time data, whether it's for developers or for applications to integrate. High availability is about having data available and integrating into whatever that would be, whether it's a mishmash of application development and routing across networks. This is a huge deal and this is not like a punchline. High availability used to be, oh, we have a data center where it's fault tolerant. There's a whole other new level that debt's going through. Can you just talk about what that means because backing it up and making it available means something different now? Yeah, I do agree because again, looking back it was really about backing up and recovering stuff, right? If I look back a couple of years, customers are looking for a solution that are able to pull the VM out of the Eastern Data Center, make sure it stores somewhere and I can get it back once it's deleted, right? But now, if you look also, if you look at VMworld, right, VMworld, it's all about automation, it's about APIs, being sure I can integrate this data protection platform in my centralized management interfaces, making sure I have an orchestration layer on top of it. So it's not only about backing up and recovery anymore, it's about the whole stack from end to end, right? Getting data from A to C, maybe get it off-site to an S3 storage for long-term retention. So we really went from an on-premise very small kind of solution stack to a big solution stack going from a VM into the cloud and overlaying that stuff. Stefan, I want you to comment on this and of course I want to get your take as well. Talk about the time aspect of it because you mentioned, okay, I can get it back. Okay, get it, get the data back. When you talk about making data available, the time series or the time frame is critical. Some cases, latency, nanoseconds, milliseconds. This is the new normal. You guys got to make that happen. Talk about that dynamic. Are customers really doing that? Obviously they want it, but what are some of the examples? They are, in terms of speed, like in data protection and availability, if I talk about speed, I really talk about SLAs and RTS and RPOs, right? So how often do I back up? How often do I have a recovery point? That's what you just talked about. And how fast can I get a data application back once it's gone or once it's deleted or once there is an issue in my data center, right? And again, over the last couple of years that really involved because in the early days, customers said, you know, I want to have that, but it's luxury, right? I don't want to pay for it. It's too expensive, I can't afford that. But looking in these days, and today, even at that conference, you talk to customers and say, I need it, right? It's critical. I cannot live a second without my data. So this kind of RTOs requirements, they really went down from maybe a day, which was like usual 10 years back, to like five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes right now. That's maybe the maximum you can really afford as a customer. And that's where the integration part comes in and all the stuff we do with Cisco, right? Because with the integration, we can actually make sure that we can cover that and get data back in like 10 minutes, right? So we're really talking about a whole new way of delivering infrastructure. If I go back to the early days of, you know, UCS and Converged Infrastructure, we're like, hey, we can support 1,000 VMs. And they're like, how are you going to back 1,000 VMs up? And we're like, well, let's see, we're working on that. Today, you guys are taking this platform approach. It's a fundamental part of cloud developer DevOps. And so I wonder if you could talk about, you know, when we were at Cisco Live, the DevNet area was one of the most exciting parts of the show. And if you think about traditional enterprise companies, really not many, I think one has really done a good job with developers at Cisco. So where do developers play? Is this like a platform play really for cloud and hybrid infrastructure? I wonder if you could talk about that, the role of developers and how you're sort of approaching this mindset. Yeah, I think, you know, from our perspective, you know, there's no downtime window. You know, there's no scheduled windows of downtime, right? I mean, we don't have that anymore. So the way that we look at our infrastructure, we certainly want it to be robust to address latency issues and concerns. And what we're doing with Veeam is really tweaking that infrastructure to make that data available when it's called on. So you can consume it as a developer, as part of the DevOps team. All of our infrastructure, as you guys probably know, are all open systems, all policy based models. So with these APIs being available, you know, it allows developers to, you know, consume more. If you need to scale out these infrastructures quickly, we can do it. So we're certainly playing in the DevNet space. It's growing. We have our own separate conference. The network becomes more and more important every day. I mean, at a whole another level, talking about programmability, you got to be ready for anything Veeam wants to do with you or whatever the customers wants with respect to high availability. And as the definition changes, you got to be enabling them. It's only available if you can get to it through the network. And we certainly carry that all the way through the UCS fabric. Talk about Veeam strategy, because I think there's this general perception that, oh, Veeam does backup for small and medium sized business. That's Veeam. And we had Peter McKay on yesterday said, you know, a third of our business is SMB, a third is commercial, a third is enterprise. Number one, number two is, you guys are getting into sort of the orchestration and management for data availability. So can you talk about the sort of extension of Veeam in that regard? Yeah, I want to actually grab up your number because you talked about, oh, we got 1000 VMs, right? That needs to be backup and recovered. That was a couple of years back. Today we talk more about 10,000 VMs, right? Customers actually here at the booth, I talk to customer that talk about 10,000, 20,000 VMs that needs to be available. Now I would call a customer that hosts 10,000 VMs no longer an SMB customer, right? That's more of the enterprise. And you're right. And I guess Peter McKay said the same. I didn't actually watch the video, so hopefully I'm not in love with him, but the strategy is for sure going into the enterprise, making sure the products actually fit the enterprise needs, right? Talking about the orchestration piece I mentioned before, the Veeam Availability Orchestrator we recently announced and released, right? That's certainly a step into the enterprise market because an SMB customer, even a mid-range customer, they will not invest in an orchestration layer that provides the full capabilities to fail over secondary data centers and all that stuff, right? That's certainly an enterprise play. And that's also where the company's heading to, making sure we have the right fit for the still SMB customers and mid-range customers, because I think they're still important to the business, right? I'm not saying they're not important, but also having the right products and the scale. And I think scale is actually something we're going to talk about anyway in this conversation, the right scale to even cover that customer, like 10,000 VMs, 20,000 VMs that are approaching us. Well, I think the other big trend that we see, and I wonder if you guys could comment is, again, data protection backup used to be, you know, an afterthought. And it also used to be kind of a one-size-fits-all. So that means, almost by definition, you're either under-protected or over-protected. It's been in too much or too little. So today you're offering much more granularity and the like. It's a fundamental component of the platform that you're developing, and it's extending beyond just backup. Call it data protection. There's a security component. There's a DevOps and cloud piece. There's a management piece. Maybe you guys could give us your perspectives on those trends. So a short comment on that one actually, in each and every of my sessions I speak here, I always say, you know, once you consider to replace a storage system or a vise for environment or you consider to use ACI, right? Make sure you include data protection immediately, like on day one of your project, because you're completely right. The last year or so, even still now, I'm, a lot of customers I'm going to, they tell me, oh, I replaced all my infrastructure the last six months, eight months, and now I want to do data protection. Then I get in and I say, yeah, unfortunately what you did on your infrastructure is completely wrong for the expectations and the requirements you have on data protection, right? So that's exactly what you talk about. You need to bring together those projects and make sure you bring them on the one hood, right? And talk about this from day one, otherwise you might get into the wrong direction. So yeah. I do that. That whole house view of the world. And I think, you know, from a Cisco perspective, we really look at, we're unifying the data. We haven't, your intentions are, your intentions are production apps, your intentions are data protection. And I think, you know, through ACI, we can certainly create the application profiles to make that happen. We carry through our fabric with the UCS system. So, you know, for us, you know, we see ourselves as flexible enough to deliver all these options. Obviously there's some improvements that we can bring, you know, we were talking earlier. But, you know, that's part of the roadmap and part of the, you know, where we want to go with these. I think one of the things I'm impressed with Cisco about and looking at the analysis is that the network guys have always had the keys to the king. You go back to IT, you go back 20 years. If you were a network guy, you ran the show. And you had storage guys came in, they became, you know, in the same kind of tier, but the network was running everything. Everything was sacred. Couldn't let the network go down. Ran offices, ran branches. And then when the cloud came, the network now with cloud native and some of the stuff going on up at the stack makes networking skills. People who think like a networking guy really valuable because the data needs to be networked. So, the data is now at the application. That's where the security is. So, as you guys have your Veeam, you have needs, you're moving data around. You need more in Cisco. You're going to be better for him. So this is a nice dynamic. Yeah, and we're certainly trying to instrument it so we understand what their needs are. I mean, if you look at app dynamics, if you look at Tetration, all these things give us more and more visibility to make the right decisions. And hopefully those will all be automated down the road so we can move as fast as the business wants. Well, I think of things, people talk about air gaps for ransomware, but you need more than air gaps. You need analytics to identify anomalous behavior and the corpus of backup data has all the data there. And if you can figure out how to analyze it, you're going to have a leg up. And as you said, that's actually a good point because ransomware and all that stuff like Tendration, your project to analyze the network traffic and making sure. If I actually get informed or I take an action once I identify ransomware attacks, that's something we can partner up with because it would literally mean if Cisco identifies an attack, right, they can trigger automatically a backup or a snapshot backup of the data so to make sure we actually have a backup right before the attack happened, right? So you can see like a chain of activities and potential new products or go to market ways in the next couple of months and years because there is a lot of stuff and a lot of potential behind those technologies. And this clear visibility from a customer standpoint that we've reported here in theCUBE that's look at nanosex and things like that nature where at the application, whether it's a VMAP or other things, security and data has to be centric around the app and decouples from the network so you're not bumping into each other, you're helping each other, you're more effective. You help them, you guys help each other. This is the new DAC model. This is the way it's going. I would say that's all what Alliance is about, right? It's why we have Alliance business, right? Because no one made the Cisco nor us, we could do it our own. We always need a partner to do that, right? Well guys, thanks for coming on, sharing the partnership news. I really think, and Alan Cohen, our CUBE guest this week, said partnerships used to be a tennis match now, it's like soccer, a lot of things going on, multiple players, certainly you know that Cisco's been doing a lot of that for a while. Great stuff, thanks for coming on. Final question for you guys, big takeaways from VMworld 2018 this year. Comment, what's your thoughts third day now, looking back, what's the theme here, what's the big story that people need to know about? Well, I mean, just from my experience, I've had a lot of conversations around security, and bringing it to our solutions, more embedded within, you know, I'm part of the Validated Design Program, and they're asking, at least the conversations I've had on the floor here, has really been about showcasing some of the other aspects, you know, of Cisco, what we can bring from a security perspective to protect the data, so you know, I'm certainly bringing that home. Awesome, and what are you seeing? Yeah, I just can't continue what he said, because the most conversations I had is around scalability and still the data growth, right? So we've been talking about that the last couple of years, but the more data you have and the more VMs you have, the more challenging it is to protect it, so it's all about scalability and making sure you can really cover and fulfill your needs. That's- Well congratulations on your success as being the numbers don't lie, you guys are doing very well. Thank you. Congratulations on Cisco, you guys have a clear line of sight on what you guys want to do with the network. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Thank you. Cube coverage here live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us, more day three coverage after this short break.