 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco at VMworld 2019. We are in the hall of Moscone North. A lot of stuff going on here. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Dave, our 10 years covering VMworld has been quite a ride. Seeing from 2010 to 20th day, lots changed. But still DR, backup and recovery still is always a big thing, our next two guests is already CTO co-founder of Datrium and Igor Zika, director of IT Ascensiva. Thanks for coming on, you're an early customer. Since 1.0, you're on the journey with Datrium. Congratulations, it's been a wild ride, good ride. Tell us. Thank you, it's been a journey. It's been a good relationship. We've been using Datrium for three years. Started with 1.0, we're now in 5.3, I believe. It's been really good. It's been innovative. It's been challenging from us working in the space where we have to think about what the next step is and working towards the data transformation internally in order to get to the cloud. But we're almost there. So we are pretty excited about the opportunity as well. And they built a great product. They got some new news. So I'll talk about the new news you got going on here. You got your core product. Now you got some new stuff, share the news. We kind of finished the journey and we started off. The idea was to make recovery be better for everybody else. As you know, DR is really mostly a disaster for everybody. So what we have done is that we are able to offer cloud disaster recovery as a service. Idea is that you can have backups in the cloud, in Amazon, and when you push a button, you can fail over and bring up your VMware servers on demand. So you can run your workloads right away. And then when you push a button, you will bring it down and bring data back to your on-prem. So we're calling it CloudDR as a service to VMware, Cloud, and Amazon. And it's specific to Amazon. Specific to VMware, Cloud, and Amazon. Right, okay. Yeah, one of the early instantiations of leveraging that platform. I think people are, they misunderstand Atrium. I mean, you guys have been around now for a while, but in the early days, it wasn't clear that you guys are really kind of changing the way in which people approach storage. Maybe that's what interested you at the beginning. But both primary and secondary storage, high performance yet low cost. That's right. So it's kind of like magic sauce that you've... Ultimately, DR finishes the story because really, if you look at any data center, the reason why DR doesn't work is because you end up with five different products. One is primary, one is backup, one is DR orchestration, and some other things like encryption, line optimization, you buy all these products for you manage your data in one data center, and then you replicate the same five things on your second data center. Now, if that's not Morphy's law, I don't know what it is. You push the button one day when there's a disaster, everybody's watching the IT person to actually do this. It's very fragile. It's very scary for a lot of people, which is why it doesn't really work. No customer, as I've ever met, I've said it's amazing that the DR works for them. Nobody's ever seen that. Well, most customers, almost all customers say they can't test DR because it's too dangerous. They can test portions of it. They can test failover but not failback. Can you explain sort of your approach in DR and how this potentially could change it? Yeah, in my experience, DR is challenging for a variety of reasons. Major reasons, yes, you can actually fully test the DR. You have to put a lot of efforts, a lot of thoughts, and develop a really strong game plan in order to execute DR flawlessly. And a lot of times, you have a chance, very short windows to perform these tests. And in order to deliver, you have to do a lot of homework and you have to do a really good design of your infrastructure and extensive design in order to have a successful outcome. So in my experience, I mean, what we hope in, again, I mean, we are joining towards the Daytrim DR solution is to actually have a solution that's going to be baked in that we can press a button and have our vision of DR and meet our objectives, meet our TOs, execute it. So let's hit the escape key a little bit. So Sencebo, Sen, Filippo, what are you guys all about? We are one of the largest California north-based accounting firm. We deal with accounting and finance and compliance and assurance services. So our focus is to provide clients with peace of mind, knowing that their financial data is, you know, they're basically accurate. That is correct. So paint a picture of your technology infrastructure. So you're obviously presuming inferring VMware customers. We are VMware customer. We are also a true customer. Give us an idea of what it looks like. We are basically operating out of a single location. We are multi office, you know, company but we operate our single location. We are VMware based. We also VDI based. So everybody works from a digital workspace. Our strong focus has been to provide robust and high performance digital workspace for our employees so they can have a peace of mind and work anytime they want. Was that the first use case for Datrium? Was VDI or? Datrium was our foundation to build a robust VDI platform. Okay, so give us a before and after. What prompted you to go with Datrium? What was it like before? What was the problem you were trying to solve? The challenge of the VDI is we have to provide a very robust platform so people feel they work on their local machines. So highly responsive systems like highly responsive storage systems, foundations, right besides having a very high optimized bandwidth we need to make sure that our bottlenecks are not focused on the storage. So our challenges were provisioning VDI machines within a timeframe that we actually with the KPIs that we designed. So our challenge was deploying all the master images, deploying provisional services and it's taken a very long period of time which basically was putting us towards inability for IT guys to do their job. So we were deploying virtual machine master images that took an hour and a half to deploy. Every time we have a change, every time we make a change in our environment it took a tremendous amount of time in order to apply those changes. So Datrium changed that. That was an infrastructure issue, I mean a storage infrastructure issue. Now it's a storage infrastructure issue. How did Datrium change that and maybe Sazal you can follow up with the tech behind it? The, go ahead. Well, if you look at most people end users get about latency. IOPS is one thing but latency is what matters to end users. Indeed. So having our architecture, having the local flash and the software running at the local host for you, that's what really provides the end user experience which is kind of what we hear from a lot of our customers. End users tell the IT folks that hey, something has changed for me. That was our fundamental design architecture we chose from. So that was primary storage and how do you make that high performance, low latency workloads for everybody? And that's what we have done. So the technology is basically local flash, software and host and that's what gives you the low latency. And so your experience as we went from, what do you say, an hour and a half? To 15 minutes. So that was pretty dramatic moment of truth when we deployed Datrium and we started the imaging process and it was finished and to be honest, I thought that it's broken. But it actually was that fast. So gave us a tremendous amount of, I mean ability to deploy and manage and do the work during the workday instead of working after hours. And what were you doing for data protection before Datrium? We use variety of different solutions, backups, disk to tape and variety of services that actually backed up our data. You still do? No, we've given that all up. You swept the floor of all the legacy stuff. You got rid of that. Did you have to change your processes or what was that like? Was it painful? We have to get rid of a lot of process that were focused on backup, focused on a time that it took to manage backup with Datrium. Datrium didn't have the backup from the day one. This is something that they've designed, I think a second year and that was very different to see the company that deals with storage, creating such an innovative vision for developing all the, I mean developing a roadmap that was actually coming true with every iteration of the software deployment. So the second tier that we provisioned was the snapshots. And the snapshots that were incredibly fast that didn't take a lot of space that was, you know, gave us ability to restore almost instantly gave us a huge amount of, you know, focus on not focusing on the storage anymore. But when you and Brian and Hugo got together and said, okay, we're going to do this, you must have been thinking about backup, obviously, right? It's mostly not so much backup, but about data, how to make data recovery faster for people, you know, that's not backup, I've been in the business for a long time, backup, but you do backup, it's very taxing. It's about recovery and we made recovery fast. So the DR finishes the story of recovery to be in the cloud. It essentially eliminate the need for a separate sort of backup mindset, right? That was the vision. You can't recover from a backup device as you do. Right, right, right. So where do you go from here? That's a good question. We're hoping to go into a fully orchestrated DR solution, so we don't have to think about it. I mean, my thing is like, I don't want to worry about DR. I want to make sure it's there. I want to be able to prove to business owners and our clients that we have a viable, orchestrated, automated DR solution. So you gave us some metrics in terms of hour and a half to 15 minutes for deployment. But what about like the staff, you know, not talking about getting rid of staff, but redeploying staff, or maybe you got rid of staff, I don't know, but what are the people that were spending all that time, you know, the hour and a half before, what are they doing now? Have you sort of reallocated them to some, you know, other higher value initiatives and if you could add some color there. Using VMware and Integrated Solutions allows us to have a pretty small profile in IT Group. We're actually operating with the three people, believe it or not, supporting over 250 users and systems. So we can focus, I mean, our main focus instead of troubleshooting technology systems and problems with the storage and problems with, you know, networking, we are focused on looking for the next best thing, providing high level of customer support, focusing on performance, looking for innovations and, you know, so it's definitely better used than troubleshooting, for sure. And looking for the best solution. What's it like working with a entrepreneurial hot startup? Very cool, very fresh, very good feeling of knowing that you can call in and you have a almost in-house IT relationship and the vendor is extremely valuable to us. And bringing an innovative approach that makes it go fast, I mean, and making it easier. I mean, talk about the industry, you go back, I mean, the industry's changed so much. We've been doing theCUBE for 10 years. I mean, so much has changed in IT, but in product size, that's where the spiral happens. Your point. I think so, if you look at that, and iPhone changed everything, right? So, you know, look at iPhone, iCloud, that's what we wanted with our DR service as well. I think the world has changed. You expect those same experiences in your off IT and on IT. The people that want a similar experience is basically what you want to do. This is Cloud 2.0, this is Enterprise Cloud. The innovation is a clean sheet of paper, you built it from the ground up, solves a lot of problems, sweep the floor with the other guys. As an observer of the storage business, right, you kind of look at it, there's two companies now that are over a billion dollars in revenue that are independent storage companies. And I was always surprised, the year I met Brian, we had him on theCUBE several years ago, and, you know, he was kind of, you know, coy about what actually you guys are doing, because it was a secret. And so, and at the time we were thinking, wow, the store's amazing, the industry's consolidating, but money keeps flowing into storage because it's still a hard problem to solve. So, what are your thoughts about that, about the industry, its structure, as an independent, you know, pure play storage company? What do you want to do with this company? You want to grow it? So, we're not a pure play storage company in the sense that we focus on data management as well, so it's not just a pure play storage only. So, that's just a dumb storage, you're not going to go anywhere. What you need to do is move a level up and provide customer level, you know, higher level functionality so that they can make their lives easier. Dumb storage doesn't sell anymore, just LUNSAN anymore. So, that says essentially that, and I would agree with you by the way, essentially that old thinking about the storage model is dead. That's why the industry's consolidating. You mentioned data management, certainly you're seeing a lot of the next generation data protection companies use that term, because that term means a lot of things to a lot of different people. What does it mean to you guys? Okay, I'll tell you what it means to us. So, for me, at any CIO, they say cloud force strategy. What they mean is that they want to be able to run their workloads anywhere they want to, push a button, move from place to place. That's all they care about. So, what we are building is a platform, a multi-cloud data plane where we can run in any cloud you want to. We get the same server data services. You push a button, it'll take you to any place you want to. That's what we're really aiming for, and it's just, we believe VMware is there everywhere, and Kubernetes is the other one. So, if you put VMware and Kubernetes on top, and Datrium on the bottom, you can move to any cloud you want to, and you cannot tell the difference. And you guys are software. Software, yes. It's a subscription model. And it's also a SaaS model in the cloud. It's no deployment of software, it's all like new model of doing SaaS. Right, which is, so new architecture, Cloud 2.0. Cloud 2 is my point, it's Cloud 2.0, right. People want that kind of stuff. People don't want to install, and if you're going to go to the cloud and doing the same things you were doing before, that's not how people want to operate anymore. People don't have time and patience, let it be. A lot of people are handcuffed to their old stuff, and they want to just get the shackles free. You're liberating people from complexity. Yeah, he's there, case study. Well, you were nimble enough. You had a good team. You could do it harder for the bigger guys. It was hard doing it without them. This is all I and the team presenting your vision for the product. This is exactly the kind of stories we'd love to talk about. Thanks for coming on, sharing the insight. Thank you very much. Cloud 2.0, this is a great example of innovation. VMware, Kubernetes, statement of the covers. All good, it's a cube. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.