 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is, we've actually reached the end of theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, hard to believe 11 years. We've done lots of interviews here, it's been great to be able to engage with the audience, talk to the executives, talk to some customers, but save in one more for you. So I'm happy to welcome to the program, he's the first time on theCUBE, but we've been talking to him since they came out of stealth, so I have the co-founder and CEO of MinIO, and that is Anand Babu, Harry Asami. A.B., so nice to see you, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu, thank you for hiring me on the show. All right, so we love when we get to talk to the founders of companies, we're going to dig into your company, but before we do, just frame for us, you're really high performance, I.O., I.O. is in the name of your company. Min might make me think that there's some miniaturization, but give us the VMware connection. Obviously VMware's talked a lot about cloud this week, they've talked about going deep into AI and computing, so we know this ecosystem has changed a lot in the 11 years that we've been covering it, tell us how you and your company pie in. Sounds good, yeah, so Min in MinIO stands for minimalism, right, somehow in the enterprise, like it has always been like shiny, heavy, complex things, find complex solutions to simple problems and charge them a lot, that has been the trend in the past, right? That's what cloud has reset in the enterprise and MinIO is actually about solving that data storage problem at very large scale, and the solution is like find simple solutions to complex problem, and we grew in the cloud, in the both in the public and private cloud, and we are now the fastest-growing object storage for the private cloud, and now VMware coming into the Kubernetes territory, we actually see VMware is set to lead the Kubernetes race, and in the Kubernetes, if you look for an object storage, pretty much MinIO is the standard, and this is where we bring our ecosystem to VMware, and VMware brings the enterprise market to cloud, and this is the start of the private cloud, in the long run, I think public and private cloud will look alike, Yeah, absolutely, we've been writing about this for many years, AB, we saw the enterprises taking on more of the characteristics of the hyperscalers, the hyperscalers, of course, are coming more to the enterprise, a lot of discussion about hybrid and multi-cloud these days, but what you'd explain a little bit, when your company was formed, you talk about doing these Kubernetes environments, you do partner with AWS and Azure, but a lot of what you do is on-premises, and that strikes people as a little bit unconventional in the thinking for definitely 2017 and even for 2020, so help us understand what it is exactly that the technology you bring and why you think it's the fit for, as you extend making private cloud on par with public. Yeah, it's not surprising to us at all, but it made no sense when we started to the rest of the world, right? Even the investors, like not our investors, but the typical venture community to the rest of the world, they thought that an object storage, if it is not useful inside AWS, there is no use for an object storage at all, and our question was very simple, right? The amount of data the world will produce in the next 10 years, bulk of the data, where is it going to be, right? And it's not going to be in the public cloud, and it didn't sound obvious back then, right? And we saw that in the long run, public and private cloud will look alike, but bulk of the data, if it's going to be generated outside AWS, while AWS S3 sets the standard, the rest of the world, what are they going to do? So, Minivo was a race to be the S3 for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is the biggest market. And back then, there was no private cloud. There was public cloud, and public cloud meant only AWS, right? And this was not so long ago. We are talking like five, six years, right? And then soon, multi-cloud came from multi-cloud, private cloud came. What really accelerated this is basically Kubernetes and containers, right? In fact, containers started the trend, and then Kubernetes accelerated it further. Nowadays, if you see why it's no longer a dream or a faith-based model, right? It's actually, we are talking about like a 540,000 Docker, actually 540,000 Docker per day, right? And like 412 million or so Docker pools in aggregate, that shows that the entire industry has changed. And it's already, the Kubernetes, even public or private cloud, it is the one hybrid infrastructure layer. And now it has, now it's no longer private cloud is the question, right? And customers are now able to move between public and private cloud. The trend is hybrid cloud. I think it's irreversible. All right, you talked about Docker pools and the code there. So let's make sure our audience understand exactly what you are. Sounds like your software, sounds like open sources piece of it, help us understand how you fit with, because if we're talking about object storage, there's got to be some infrastructure underneath that. What does Minio provide and where do you turn to the partners? Yeah, so just like serverless means that it's not like there is no server, right? It's about a software problem. Similarly, storage, right? When object storage is containerized, we still need drives, right? That is where VMware vSAN comes. vSAN's job is to virtualize the physical layer to the basically container layer. But end of the day, if you see it is a software problem. And what Minio would did, just like a database would solve the metadata data store problem, Minio solves the block data problem. And in the public cloud, object storage is the foundational piece. It is the primary storage, but we saw this as a software problem. And when customers started building these applications, they actually containerized their application and use Kubernetes to roll out their application infrastructure. And when they do that, they cannot possibly buy a hardware appliance on the public cloud. And even on the private cloud, they, when they completely orchestrate two containers, they cannot roll out hardware appliances. This is where the industry, the cloud native community always saw this as a software problem. It was obvious to them. For the enterprise IT, it was not so clear. And the storage industry giants, if you see every one of them is a hardware appliance play and they are in for a total shock. And VMware basically has a reset with their 7.2 update one, right? There's a lot of interesting things to come. All right, so if I understand here, you sit from a VMware environment, I've got VSAN underneath, I've got Tanzu above, and you're providing that object service in between. So for our friends in the channel market, and when they're thinking about gear, anything that VSAN can sit on, you just can come along for the ride. Do I have that right? Yeah, so underneath VSAN is basically a bunch of JBords, right? These are like Dell and HP servers with the drives in them. And this is not a hardware appliance anymore, right? If you look at the storage market, it is SAN or NAS appliance. That is how the enterprise IT operated, not in the cloud world. And as VMware moves into the cloud world, everything looks cloud native. And in this case, the SAN NAS appliance have no role to play. Even the object storage hardware appliance has no role to play because VMware becomes, VMware VSAN becomes the new block storage layer. And then they have positioned object storage database, everything as a data store or a data persistence layer. So only the software that is containerized gets to play on top of VMware in the new world, including the storage itself. And there is no appliance here. All right, so your solution is listed as Kubernetes native. So now you mentioned VCR7, VCR7 update one, now has full Kubernetes support. I'm assuming then you can plug into Tanzu, you can plug into Amazon, Azure, other Kubernetes options out there. Is that the case? Yeah, so from a customer point of view, right? If you are on the enterprise IT environment, now from an IT administrator point of view, nothing changes much other than from the vCenter console itself, you now get to see Minai in the persistent data services. You click and deploy entirely as a software without even learning to spell Kubernetes, you can build a private cloud storage, multi-tenant, exactly like how public cloud storage operates. And that is from the private cloud point of view, right? And it's purely software, you're not waiting for six months for the hardware to arrive and long procurement cycles and provisioning all that, is now provisioned as a software container. In just five minutes, you can actually set up a private cloud infrastructure. That's for the private cloud, right? But the reason why customers want this to be a software problem is they roll out their software on the private cloud, on the public cloud for burst workloads and sustained workloads on private cloud, burst workloads on public cloud, non-critical jobs or anything that needs fast moving and convenience-based, they push it to public cloud. Customers do want to have one leg here and one leg there. And nowadays, even the edge and decentralized, like from the telco space to video and other areas, even the edge is now growing. So they want a pure software solution. The entire data center software is now containerized. They can roll out public cloud or private cloud or on the edge. And with Minayo, we solve the data side. The compute side, VMware already has done a wonderful job on the networking side, they've done it. And on the storage side, they did the physical to container layer through VStand. Now the data storage part is what we solve. Now, what does this do to the end user? Now they can build software and truly deploy on public, private or edge without any modification and entirely it is a software problem this time. Great, what do you find are some of the more prevalent use cases, sitting on top? What applications are the key ones that people are applying your solution for? Yeah, so in the public cloud, if you see that's actually a good place to start. If you see in the public cloud, starting from even simple static website hosting to AML, big data workloads to even the modern databases like Snowflake, for example, is built on objects storage. In the public cloud, it has become a truly horizontal play and that is how it started, right? AWS started with S3 and then came everything else. And now that trend is beginning to percolate into the enterprise. And surprisingly, we found that the enterprise was explosion of data growth is actually not about cat videos, right? What are they storing mostly? We found that bulk of the data that is drowning the enterprises machine generated data. And these are basically like some kind of log data, event data, data streams that are continuously produced and that actually can grow from 10 terabytes to 10 petabytes in a very short time. This is where clearly object storage has become the right choice just like in the public cloud but customers are now adopting object storage as the primary storage and now multiple applications whether it is the cloud native application like Tom's application service, like Spring Boot and like all the cloud foundry stack from there to all the AML big data workloads, pretty much everybody is converging to object storage as their foundation. Yeah, and absolutely, we've seen some of those use cases very prevalent here in the VMware community. I heard you talking about it. I was expecting to hear you talk about Splunk, data protection, something that's been a big topic of conversation in the last few years. Obviously VMware has a number of key partners. So I'm assuming many of those are who you're also working with. Splunk itself, good, you brought Splunk. Splunk itself is actually is an important move for what we did recently with VMware. Finally, we can run Splunk natively on VMware at large scale and without any performance penalty and at a price point that it becomes really attractive. Now comparing Splunk cloud versus Splunk on-prem, we can actually show like at least like one third of what it would cost to run on Splunk cloud. So I don't know, Splunk themselves would like it, but I think Splunk as a company would like what customers like, right? And this is where Splunk actually now can sit on Minio. Minio has all that are their data stores. They call it smart store underneath Minio. Now, in the previous original VSAN incarnation, we couldn't actually store huge amounts of data. But now with the VSAN Direct, they actually have access to the local drives and you can attach as many drives as you want. Then if you want more capacity, more number of servers, so you can pack thousands and thousands of drives at a price point that even public cloud cannot be anywhere closer. And this is actually an important requirement for the Splunk customers because for them, not only the cost, right? Even the data is sensitive for them. They cannot really push it to the public cloud. Data is generated outside of the public cloud. If data is generated inside public cloud, probably Amazon has their own solution and Splunk cloud makes sense. But when data is produced outside, these are sensitive data and it's huge volume and they produce on an average, like the kind of users we see is 10 terabytes a day. And then it's only growing at an accelerated pace. And this is where the VSAN Direct and Minio, you can now bring that workload onto VMware. Finally, the IT can control the Splunk deployments. This is something important for IT, right? In the past, if you see big data workloads always ran on bare metal and silos, something IT hated, right? This time, it is fixable. It's not just fixable, it actually gets better. Well, it sure sounds like the technology maturation has finally caught up on the VMware standpoint with the vision that you and the team had. So give us a little look forward. Now that you've got Kubernetes really being embraced by VMware and starting to see maturation in this space, where do we go from here? So VMware, actually, if you see what they brought to the table this time, they didn't actually catch up with the others, right? Typically the innovation in the recent times happened in the open source space and then the large vendors will come and innovate, right? The startups and open source started the innovation, large vendors come in later. But this time around VMware actually did the innovation part and VSAN Direct is actually a big step forward in the Kubernetes CSI space. And the reason why it's a big step is CSI that traditionally is designed for the Sand NAS vendors and using the same CSI model, VMware was able to bring in large workloads and that allowed entirely to use the local drive possibility, right? Now, moving forward, what we are said to see is the cloud native workload actually ran as a silo in the enterprise, right? There was big data workload, there was the applications team that ran Kubernetes and containers on their own and they ran their own DevOps shop and enterprise IT ran the IT infrastructure. These three were not connected. And finally, this time around by bringing Kubernetes native into the IT infrastructure, there is going to be a convergence. You will not, the silos will get eliminated. Big data workloads, AML workloads on bare metal will now come to the MinIo, VMware type, the Kubernetes combination. And you will see the cloud native application space, they will hand over the physical layer infrastructure onto the VMware IT. And everybody coming together, I think it's the best big step forward. Well, AB, I sure hope you were right. We would love to see the breaking down of silos, things coming together. We've been a little bit concerned over the last few years that we are rebuilding the silos in the cloud. We've got different skill sets different there, but we always love some good tech optimism here to say that we're going to move these sorts. So thank you so much, great to catch up with you and definitely look forward to hearing more from you and your customers in the future. Thank you Stu, it was wonderful to be on the issue. All right, we want to thank everybody for joining VMworld 2020, for Dave Vellante, John Furrier, big thanks to the whole production team and of course VMware and our sponsors for helping us to bring this content to you. As always, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for joining us on the Q.