 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's presentation of DockerCon 2017. I'm Stu Miniman, trying by Jim Kobielus. Happy to have on the program. My next guest is Chad Thibodeau, who is the principal product manager with Veritas. Of course, we know Veritas on the Wikibon side. Back Veritas before the semantic acquisition back out. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right, so tell us a little bit about kind of your role, what you do at Veritas. Sure, so I'm a product manager at Veritas. Responsible for a new product offering called Hyperscale for Containers. So it's a software-defined storage solution. We actually just are announcing our beta at this conference. And again, our inaugural first time exhibiting at DockerCon, so very excited to be here. And Chad, one of the questions coming into the show is storage seems to be the thing that is going to take the longest to mature when it comes to containers. So first couple of years watching, everything was stateless. It's the Google 2 billion containers, the average lifespan of the containers. I think they call those, oh gosh, I forget the analogy. It was like, is it the nap that lives for a couple of hours or is it the dinosaur that might live for years? Like when we think of storage, we're like that stuff I stuck in my data center for years. So do we have stateful usage of storage? Can storage be used in production? So bring us up to speed as to how your product fits and what that means in that whole development. Yeah, so I myself have been actually working with containers for probably about the past two years at different capacity, first within the CTO org at Veritas. Like you said, about two years ago, I would agree with you there was a lot of contemplating are you ever going to really need persistent storage? I would say now what we're finding is, not only is it needed, but it's probably one of the biggest challenges. So with our product, the key is, is it provides storage persistence, but it also provides quality of service. And I think the combination of that is actually something that really is challenging a lot of these companies that want to run them in production. All right, talk to us a little bit about your customers, what are they asking for, what are those use cases that your product's going to fit? So a lot of customers that we're talking with are looking at kind of a container initiative, if you will, so they're trying to figure out, do I actually take a legacy app, put it in containers, or do I only limit this to new developments? We're kind of seeing a mix of both, I would say, in terms of what they're talking about is they're facing the same challenges that a lot of people face with virtual machines, which is how do I get that data protection for my container? Again, how do I get that guaranteed performance? And then I want to have a storage provider that I can actually trust, because it's my data at the end of the day, so we kind of feel like we fit all three of those bills. Okay, so your software-defined storage, can you walk us through the stack a little, Docker is a partner there, who else are you working with to put the whole solution together? Yeah, so it's a software-defined storage play. What's unique and without a visual, but I'll just explain it, is you have a concept of two planes. You have a compute plane, a data plane. And so in the compute plane, you're going to have basically direct attached storage nodes. We would then attach container volumes there to service the application, so you have highest performance, it's right there. And then in the data plane, that's where all your data management services are, so snapshots, replication, eventually a backup integration. Sharding. Could do sharding, could do erasure coding, right. All of that encryption, all of that would happen down there in the ideas, so you don't have any impact to the compute plane. You have this kind of clear separation. So in other words, think of the opposite of hyperconverge, right, is hyperscale, you're purposely trying to separate those two. So I think again, with customers, they like that concept, and I think that they are starting to come around to where everything, I mean, I've seen the transition from direct attached to NAS to SAN, now it seems to be going back again to direct attached so that they can really isolate the storage that's needed for the application. Well, in terms, we have a Wikibon, we have a category we call server SAN. Or yeah, exactly. Hyperconverged infrastructure. We really don't see that that software layer is really what drives a lot of those solutions, so it's not necessarily that HCI can't do this, but it's how do we really build storage services with the disaggregated architecture, it's distributed systems, and therefore, it's not about the appliance, it's about those new models of doing it. We're not going to do it the old way, right? I mean, I date myself, I remember back when we tried to do network storage, the reason we called it server SAN is we're going to build it in the server, but it's going to give us all those features and functions and value proposition that the external SAN did. So that's why we love that. Actually, I love the idea of server SAN because one of the things we're doing is we are virtualizing that storage within the server so that you could have different tiers, all of it gets virtualized, it's all now a logical right storage pool that you can use, so yeah, I like that. We thought about it from the guy that lives with storage, what you say DAS, and that takes me back 15, 20 years, so we know that not we're new, but when we start getting into some really cool new applications, whether you're talking some of the edge applications like IoT, talking about analytics and big data stuff that Jim loves, we need some of these more distributed architectures to be able to build on. How would you containerize it by volumes, by storage drives or whatever? Well, so when you say containerize, are you talking about- The storage. At what level of animicity? Sure, so to be real clear first, I think the other thing that's unique is this is completely delivered as container images, so the hyperscales for containers, it consists of basically five different images, right? One is a plug-in, one is IO services, one is your RESTful API services, et cetera. So what we are then doing is we are basically provisioning container volumes that will get then attached or assigned to the container applications, that makes sense? So you are installing us both on the compute nodes as well as on the data nodes, and that way, again, we kind of control both. And then between, there's a network layer, right, that would be required to have the communication. Good. Anything with those kind of interesting new use cases that you see is, what use cases are you starting with and where do you see this going in the future? Yeah, you ask a very interesting question because it's kind of like, I don't think there's a silver bullet, in other words, as I talk to customers and I talk to analysts and I go to conferences, I'm trying to find out the same thing, is there specific use cases that are better than others? What I can tell you is new applications, so whether you call them cloud native, whether you call them the web scale, those applications are really highly designed for container environments, and that's where they're going to still need the persistent storage. But on the flip side, we have customers that are actually taking legacy monolithic apps and they're sticking them in containers. And a great example for you to think of is, so you're familiar with Veritas NetBackup, our product, we've containerized NetBackup. You can actually put the entire NetBackup into a container image. We haven't refactored, per se, and split it into different services. It's basically being delivered that way just for an easier way to consume it, so. The other thing when we're talking about containers is, how this fits into the whole cloud picture. What does cloud mean for your customers at Veritas? How do your products fit in the worlds of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the like? Yeah, so we've done some recent announcements. So we're definitely very heavily focused on supporting cloud workloads or applications running in the cloud, whether it's on-premise cloud or private cloud, a hybrid or public. So we have working relationships with Amazon, with Microsoft, with Google. What we see is we're starting to see customers take more of a hybrid approach, so they like to possibly start with public cloud providers, and then they may want to bring some of that on-premise for security, resiliency, what have you. And then there's the other way around, but I think we're finding more and more are starting their journey in the public cloud and then kind of bringing it to more of a hybrid approach. But yeah, but we're very committed. I guess bottom line is we're committed to cloud. How should people be thinking of Veritas now as a standalone company? You're not one of the corporate supposed people, but as people think, what do they tell you from a branding standpoint? I see the red shirts, I see the logo, something I've known for most of my career. So we're, so we are repositioning ourselves as truly a data management company. So if you look at our portfolio products, it spans from backup to resiliency to archive to storage. All of that taking a 360 view, we're saying it's 360 data management. So we want to be really that single provider to the customer that manages all of their, all aspects of their data, whether it's again protection, resiliency, et cetera. So is data the new oil? Is it the new gold? Is it the new money? I was going to say it's kind of, yeah. Data's, what's in? Right, data's the new thing. And I think the other thing just to leave you with is we really are, we jokingly say right, we're a multi-billion dollar startup. I mean, when we split off from Symantec, we had the ability to really refocus the company. And so that is where we're now focused is it's all around data management. We want to be that provider, so yeah. Think of us, what's old is now new again. If it is the new oil, then containers are the new barrels of oil. There you go. There you go. Absolutely, distributed oil everywhere. That's something like that. All right, tap the video. Really appreciate you giving us all the updates on Veritas. Congratulations on the announcements you're making. Thank you very much. And we'll be back with more coverage here from DockerCon 2017. You're watching theCUBE.