 From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. We're back at the beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City and Central Park. I'm Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days, Veritas Vision, antenna meticulous here. He's an enterprise backup and data protection team leader at Teradine, very experienced practitioner. We love antenna talking to the customers. So thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You're very welcome. So talk about your role as the data protection team leader. What does that entail? Yeah, so basically Teradine has data close to 1.5 terabyte that we protect on a day to day business and a weekly business. And we have 14 different sites that we protect data. So we just do backups and recovery and restoration and all that stuff. So what are the drivers of your business that affect the data protection strategy? So basically data change from day to day business and data growth. And then we have a lot of traits around us that we have to protect the data. So we have to make sure that we are on top of protecting it in a day to day business and archiving it. So. Okay, so one of the challenges obviously is that your data's not just in one box. That's right. You mentioned 14 sites, terabyte and a half. And I presume- No, not terabyte, petabyte. Sorry, petabyte and a half, 1.5 petabytes. Petabyte, that's right. I got a terabyte in my backpack. So, and that presumably occurred over time, sprawled over time. So what kind of challenges did that create in terms of your ability to protect your data and keep up with the backup windows, the RPO and the RTO requirements? Yeah, yeah. So basically the way the backup has been evolving is that originally we had a tape backup where the capacity of each tape is very small and the data is big. And using libraries and tape drives take a long time to do the backup. And also you need people in each location to be able to manage libraries and tapes. And there are so many factors that affect the day to day backup. So in combination all that, when you put all that together, it's very challenging to protect the data. And then slowly to mitigate those kind of problems, then we apply disk-based backup and then cloud-based backup, which makes it easier and easier. So you still use tape, just not for backup, right? Yes, we still use tapes in some locations, but slowly we are growing towards cloud backup and disk-based backup. So because of still using tape, still using libraries, still using managing multiple locations, using people who are on that location to help us out while the team is managing it from a remote site, all that is very challenging and complex. So here at this Veritas Solution Day, CEO was here earlier, when you sit down with the Veritas executives, you're a big customer, what do you tell them? What do you tell them you need? What do you tell them you want? What do you tell them in terms of the direction that you want Veritas to go? Yeah, so basically what we want is simplicity on our tape backup, on our backup strategy. And then also, shouldn't be too expensive to protect data. So now the cost of storage is getting cheaper and slowly it's getting cheaper to put data on the cloud. But we want to see simplicity on the one, we want to see user-friendly softwares and applications to be able to help us manage the data and visibility to the data that we're managing so that we understand what's dark data and what's live data. And we want to be able to see all our environment from a single platform instead of multiple platform. So the conference today is showing us that kind of roadmap that things are getting integrated and the visibility is coming and the cost is coming down much, much better. So down the road, we can see that we're going to be able to manage it much better than how we've been managing it so far. So Antenna, you're one of Veritas's 50,000 customers. As you well know, there's a lot of startups in this business, there's a lot of competition, it's a big market, a lot of money pouring in. So you must be, the vendors must be knocking down your door to try to win your business. So how do you evaluate that? You come to a session like this, you hear some roadmap items. We were talking to a customer earlier and he was saying they don't really want to migrate if they don't have to, you have an affinity with Veritas, but what kinds of things do you evaluate? Are you thinking about changing your backup approach or even your backup vendor? How do you evaluate those decisions? Yeah, I mean obviously we always have to check and see where we should go in terms of protecting our data and we have to evaluate our strategy. So far Veritas has been one of the great companies that we've been working with and we don't see any plan of moving away from Veritas but there are so many other companies that are coming that are simpler and that provide much better flexibility. So if those companies work out, we'll see how it goes but as of today, Veritas has been very good for us and we've been working with Veritas for a long time, at least as long as I've been working with Teradine. So we'll see how it goes. So the promise of 8.1.2 is to deliver to you the simplicity that you're demanding. Where are you today in terms of release? Yeah, so right now we are on 8.1.1. So what I have heard on 8.1.2 is incredible. Basically it's gonna give us a lot of capabilities that we are doing outside of 8.1.1 which is manual, like upgrading our clients and being able to see all our clients and master servers from one location, all that integration is coming. So I'm very excited about 8.1.2 and I can't wait to go back and start using it. When you have to go from 8.1.1 to 8.1.2, can you describe what that's like, what the planning is like, what you have to do to get there? How much is involved? Yeah, so you're gonna have to go and deploy 8.1.2 on the master server and that is going to give you the capability to be able to push it to other servers as well. But before 8.1.1, then we have to go to each master server and push it, which was very time consuming. And also we have over 400 clients that we have to use something else outside of NetBackup to be able to upgrade. But now we can be able to use 8.1.2 to be able to upgrade all those clients from 8.1.2. And you referenced earlier cloud, do you use multiple clouds I presume like most companies and SaaS is in there as well? Yeah, so we just started using cloud. We still are using the old fashioned way which is tape and disk on some, most of our locations. But right now we just deployed Azure cloud using NetBackup catalyst server. And that's working out very well. It's working out very well and it's making our life much simpler and much better. So we see ourselves moving towards that direction. You like the cloud, okay, so we joke. Do you get your weekends back? Yeah, actually the people who support it from the field offices, now they get their weekend back. Because they are the one who helped us out while we are supporting it from Boston. So you use an Azure, you said. Do you a Microsoft shop predominantly or? No, this is just a beginning. But we are open on AWS and other cloud providers as well. Okay, so it's not, Azure wasn't selected because you had a big Microsoft install base. It was more for the capabilities of the infrastructure that you went. Yes, yes, but we are very flexible and we were open to see other providers as well. And NetBackup provides, gives us the capability to use other providers as well. So traditionally the backup admin was somebody to whom pretty much anybody had to go, the application guys had to go, the database people, the lines of business, if they wanted to protect their data, that sort of group or that individual would really be the gatekeeper, if you will. With the cloud, there's a move toward self-service. Now, what do you think about that and how does that fit with your strategy? Is that something that you're aggressively promoting? How do you protect the corporation from anomalous behavior or non-compliance and things like that? Talk about the trend towards self-service and how that role of the backup admin is evolving. Yeah, so the role of the backup admin is very complex even before. But now, because of self-serving, self-service is available. Then the database admins or the virtual team can be able to manage their own backups from their site. But still backup admins have to be able to manage it in a way that fits according to the strategy that we want the organization to run the backups. So still the role of the backup admins is now more complex and it's not only in one place doing one thing, but in multiple, working with multiple team, allowing other people to have the visibility and the control while the backup admins manage it. So you've been with Teradine almost two decades and so you remember the days when backup was always an afterthought. It still isn't a lot of applications, by the way. But increasingly with things like DevOps, the application developers are getting more involved and essentially making infrastructure programmable of building in security, building in data protection. Have you seen that trend hit your company and where do you see that going? Yeah, so say it again. Yeah, so specifically with regard to building data protection in from the beginning as opposed to bolting it on at the end. Yeah, yeah. Is that something that you guys are able to do with your developers and your DevOps teams? Yes, yes. So right now, I mean, protecting the data is very strategic and the approach is not just, you know, taking the data and putting it somewhere and forgetting it about it, forget about it. But with a plan and a purpose, you know. So anything here today that you saw that was exciting? What did you think of the event? Yeah, the event was great and I was glad to be here. And the last couple of years, I was in Vegas with Veritas Conference as well and it was very good to be able to talk to other peers and good to get the roadmap from Veritas as to where they are heading going forward. And so we can be able to align our roadmap with their roadmap as well. It's good to get a big picture and it's good to have conversations and discussions. Just now, we just came out of so many detailed, technical discussions. I'm excited to be here. So you saw Richard Branson last year. That's right. That was pretty cool, wasn't it? That's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was great too. He's a great guy and he's an admirer and seeing him up close and explaining his experiences and all that stuff was great. It's always good to see Bill, you know, just giving back and I mean that sincerely. That's right. Santana, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your experience and your knowledge. You really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, we're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solution Days at Central Park, Tavern on the Green. Right back.