 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022, Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Brian Schwarz is here. We're going to stay on cloud. He's the director of product management at Google Cloud. The world's biggest cloud I contend. Brian, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. Long time infrastructure as a service background. Worked at Pure, worked at Cisco, Silicon Valley guy, Techie, so we're going to get into it here. I love it. I was saying before off camera, we used to go to Google Cloud next every year. It was an awesome show. Guys built a big, big set for us. You joined right as the pandemic hit. So we've been out of touch a little bit. It's hard to, you know, you got one eye on the virtual event, but give us the update on Google Cloud. What's happening generally and specifically within storage? Yeah, so obviously the cloud got a big boost during the pandemic because a lot of work went online. You know, more things, you know, kind of being digitally transformed as people keep trying to innovate. So obviously the growth of Google Cloud, you know, it's got a big tailwind to it. So, you know, business has been really good. Lots R&D investment. We obviously have an incredible set of technology already, but still huge investments in new technologies that we've been bringing out over the past couple of years. It's great to get back out to events to talk to people about them. Been a little hard the last couple of years to give people some of the insights. You know, when I think about storage, you know, huge investments, one of the things that some people know, but I think it's probably underappreciated is we use the same infrastructure for Google Cloud that is used for Google consumer products. So search and photos and, you know, all the public, you know, kind of things that most people are familiar with, maps, et cetera. Same infrastructure at the same time is also used for Google Cloud. So we just have this tremendous capability of infrastructure. Google's got nine products that have a billion users, you know, most of which many people know. So we're pretty good at storage, pretty good at compute, pretty good at networking. You know, obviously a lot of that kind of shines through on Google Cloud for enterprises to bring their applications, you know, lift and shift and or modernize, build new stuff in the cloud with containers and things like that. Yeah, hence my contention that Google has the biggest cloud in the world. Like I said before, doesn't have the most I-ass revenue because that's a different business. I've got, you can't comment, but I've got Google Cloud running at $12 billion a year, run rate. So a lot of times people go, oh yeah, Google, they're, you know, third place going for the pros and cons. But that is a huge business. There aren't a lot of $10, $12 billion, you know, infrastructure companies. Rapidly growing market. And if you, you know, do some, you know, back in napkin math, whatever, give me 10, 15, that's called 15% of that to storage. That's a big, got a big storage business. I know you can't tell us how big, but it's big. And if you add in all the stuff that's not in GCP, that's, you do a lot of storage. So you know storage. You understand the technology. So where is, what is the state of technology? You came, you were background in Cisco, nearly networking company. They used to do some storage stuff sort of on the side. And we used to say they're going to buy NetApp. Of course that never happened. That would have made no sense. Pure storage, obviously no storage, but they were, you know, disqueray company, essentially. Cloud storage different. What's different about it? What's the, what's different in the technology? How does Google think about it? I always like to tell people there's some things that are the same and familiar to you. And there's some things that are different. If I start with some of the differences, object storage in the cloud, like just fundamentally different, you know, object storage on prem, it's been around for a while, often used as kind of like a third tier of storage, you know, maybe a backup target, compliance, something like that. You know, in the cloud, object storage is tier one storage, you know, public reference for us, Spotify. Okay, you know, use object storage for all the songs out there. You know, and increasingly we see a lot of growth in. Well, how are you, how are you defining tier one storage in that record? Spot, again, you're thinking streaming service. Okay, fine. Autify goes down, I'm pissed. Yeah, this is true. That's how you're done. Not just you, maybe a few million other people too. One is importance, business importance. Okay, tier one applications, like critical to the business, like, you know, business down type stuff. But even if you look at it for performance, for capabilities, you know, object storage in the cloud, it's just, it's a different thing. Because of the architecture that you're developing? Yeah, yeah, and the applications that we see running on it. Obviously, huge growth in our business in AI and analytics. Obviously, Google's pretty well known in both spaces, big query, obviously on the analytics side, big, massive data warehouses. And obviously. It gets very high marks. Yeah, yeah, very, very well regarded, super successful, super popular with our customers in Google Cloud. And then obviously AI as well. A lot of AI is about getting structure from unstructured data. You know, autonomous vehicles, getting pictures and videos around the world, speech recognition, you know, audio is a fundamentally analog signal. You're trying to train computers to basically deal with analog things. And it's all stored in object storage, machine learning on top of it, creating all the insights and frankly, things that computers can deal with, you know, getting structure out of the unstructured data. So you just see performance, capabilities, you know, importance as it's really a tier one storage. Much like File on Block is, where, you know, have kind of always. Depending on, right, the importance. So there's a fair question, right? Because we're used to thinking, oh, you're running your Oracle transaction database on block storage, you know, that's tier one, but Spotify's a pretty important business. And again, on BigQuery, it is a cloud native born in the cloud database. A lot of the cloud databases aren't, right? And that's one of the reasons why the BigQuery is- And Google's really had a lot of success taking technologies that were built for some of the consumer services that we build and turning them into cloud native Google Cloud. Like, you know, HDFS, we were talking about open source technologies, came originally from the Google file system. Now we have a new version of it called where we run internally called Colossus. You know, incredible technologies that are cloud-scale technologies that you can use to build things like Google Cloud Storage. I remember one of the early Hadoop worlds, I was talking to a Google engineer and saying, wow, that's so cool that Hadoop came. You guys kind of, you know, were the mainspring of that. He goes, oh, we're way past Hadoop now. So this is the early days of Hadoop. It's funny whenever Google says consumer services. Usually, you know, consumer indicates, you know, just for me. But no, a consumer service for Google is at a scale that almost no business needs at a point in time. So you're not taking something and scaling it up. They're tier one services. Exactly, exactly. You're more often pairing it down so that a Fortune 10 company can leverage it. So let's dig into data protection in the cloud, disaster recovery in the cloud, ransomware protection, and then let's get into why Google. Maybe you could give us the trends that you're seeing, how you guys approach it, and why Google. Yeah, one of the things I always tell people, there's certain best practices and principles from on-prem that are just still applicable in the cloud. And one of them is just fundamentals around recovery point objective and recovery time objective. You should know for your apps what you need. You should tier your apps, get best practices around them, and think about those in the cloud as well. They don't imagine the concept of RPO and RTO don't just magically go away just because you're running in the cloud. You should think about these things. And it's one of the reasons we're here at the VeeamON event. It's important, obviously they have a tremendous skill in technology about helping customers implement the right RPO and RTO for their different applications. And they also help do that in Google Cloud. So we have great partnership with them, two main offerings that they offer in Google. One is integration for their on-prem things to use basically Google as a backup target or DR target. And then cloud native backups, they have some technologies being backup for Google. And obviously they also bought Castin a while ago because they also got excited about the container trend. And obviously great technologies for them, those customers to use those in Google Cloud as well. So RPO and RTO is kind of IT terms, right? But we think of them as sort of the business requirement. Here's the business language. How much data are you willing to lose in the business versus what? I don't want to lose any data. Oh, how big is your budget? Oh, okay. And then RTO, how fast do you, that's RPO. RTO is how fast do you want to get it back. How fast do you want to get it back if there's an outage? Instantly, how much money do you want to spend on that? Oh, okay. And then your application value will determine that. Okay, so that's what RPO and RTO is for those you may not know that. Sometimes we get into the acronym too much. Okay, why Google Cloud? Yeah, when I think about some of the infrastructure Google has, why does it matter to a customer of Google Cloud? The first couple of things I usually talk about is networking and storage. Compute's awesome, we can talk about containers and Kubernetes in a little bit. But if you just think about kind of core infrastructure, you know, networking, Google's got one of the biggest networks in the world, obviously, to service all these consumer applications. Two things that I often tell people about the Google network, one, just tremendous backbone bandwidth across the regions. One of the things to think about with data protection, it's a large data set. When you're going to do recoveries, you're pushing lots of terabytes often. And big pipes matter. Like it helps you hit the right recovery time objective because I want to do a restore across the country. You need good networks. And obviously Google has a tremendous network. I think 20 subsea cables that we've built underneath the world's oceans to connect the world to the internet. The other thing that I think is really underappreciated about the Google network is how quickly you get into it. One of the reasons all the consumer apps have such good response time is there's a local access point data into the Google network somewhere close to you. Almost anywhere in the world. I'm sure you can find some obscure place where we don't have an access point. But look, search and photos and maps and workspace, they all work so well because you get in the Google network fast, local access points, and then we can control the quality service. And that underlying substrate is the same substrate we have in Google Cloud. So the network is number one. Second one in storage, we have some really incredible capabilities in cloud storage, particularly around our dual region and multi region buckets. The multi region bucket, the way I describe it to people, it's a continent size bucket. Single bucket name, strongly consistent that basically spans a continent. It's in some sense is a little bit of the nirvana of storage. No more DR failover, right? In a lot of places, traditionally on-prem, but even in other clouds, two buckets failover, right? Orchestration set up, whenever you do orchestration, the DR is a lot more complicated. You got to do more fire drills, make sure it works. We have this capability of a single namespace that spans regions and it has strong read after write consistency. Everything you drop into it, you can read back immediately. So I say I'm on the West Coast and I have a little bit of an on-premises data center still and I'm using Veeam to back something up and I'm using storage within GCP. Trace out exactly what you mean by that in terms of a continent size bucket. Updates going to the recovery volume for lack of a better term in GCP. Where is that physically? If I'm on the West Coast, what does that look like? Two main options. It depends again on what your business goals are. First option is you pick a regional bucket. Multiple zones within a Google Cloud region are going to store your data. It's resilient because there's three zones in the region but it's all in one region. And then your second option is this multi-region bucket where we're basically taking a set of the Google Cloud regions from around North America and storing your data basically in the continent, multiple copies of your data. And that's great because if you wanna protect yourself from a regional outage, right? Earthquake, natural disaster of some sort, this multi-region, it basically gives you this DR protection for free and it's not free because you have to pay for it of course but it's free from a failover perspective. Single name space, your app doesn't need to know. You restart the app on the East Coast, same bucket name, read and write instantly out of the bucket. Cool, what do you do with Veeam? You know, so we have this great partnership obviously for data protection and DR. And I really often segment the conversation into two pieces. One is for traditional on-prem customers who essentially wanna use the cloud as either a backup or a DR target. And traditional Veeam backup and replication supports Google Cloud targets. You can write to cloud storage. Some of these advantages I mentioned are archive storage, really cheap. We just actually lower the price of archive storage quite significantly, roughly a third of what you find in some of the other competitive clouds. If you look at the capabilities, are archive class storage fast recovery time, right? Fast latency, no hours to kind of rehydrate. Good, storage in the cloud is overpriced. It is, it is historically overpriced despite all the rhetoric. Good, I didn't know that. I'm glad to hear. Yeah, so the archive class storage, you essentially read and write into this bucket and restore, so it's often, you know, one of the things I joke with people about, I live in Silicon Valley, I still see the tape truck driving around. You know, I really think people can really modernize these environments and use the cloud as a backup target. Get a copy or get an off-prem. Won't you guys use tape? Well, we don't talk a lot about all the Veeam. No comment, no comment. Okay. And just to be clear. When he says cloud storage is overpriced, he thinks that a postage stamp is overpriced. Right? If I give you 50 cents, are you going to deliver a letter across country? No. Cloud storage is, it's not overpriced. Okay, we're going to have that conversation. I think it's historically overpriced. I don't, I think it could be more attractive relative to the cost of the underlying technology. So good for you guys pushing prices. Yeah, so this archive class storage is one great area. The second area we really work with Veeam is protecting cloud native workloads. So increasingly customers are running workloads in the cloud. They run VMware in the cloud. They run normal VMs. They run containers. Veeam has two offerings in Google that essentially help customers protect that data, hit their RPO, RTO objectives. Another thing that is not different in the cloud is the need to meet your compliance regulations. Right? So having a product like Veeam that is easy to show back to your auditor, to your regulator to make sure that you have copies of your data that you can hit an appropriate recovery time objective if you're in finance or healthcare or energy. So there's some really good Veeam technologies that work in Google Cloud to protect applications that actually run in Google Cloud all in. And to your point about the tape truck, I was kind of tongue in cheek, but I know you guys use tape. But the point is, you shouldn't have to call the tape truck, you should go to Google and say, okay, I need my data back. Now having said that, sometimes the highest bandwidth in the world is putting all this stuff on the truck. Is there an option for that? You know, again, it gets back to this networking capability that I mentioned. Yes, people do like to joke about, okay, trucks and trains and things can have a lot of bandwidth. Big networks can push a lot of data around. Obviously. And you've got a big network. We've got a huge network. So, you know, if you want to push, you know, I've seen statistics, you can do terabits a second to a single Google Cloud storage bucket. There is super computing type performance inside Google Cloud, which, you know, from a scale perspective, whether it be network, compute, you know, these are things scale. If there's one thing that Google is really, really good at, it's really high scale. If your companies can't afford it. Yeah, if you're that sensitive, avoid moving the data altogether. If you're that sensitive, have your recovery capability be in GCP. Yeah, well, and again. So that when you're recovering, you're not having to move data. It's approximately, yeah. That's a great point. Fail over your VMware cluster. Exactly. And use the cloud as a DRR target. We got very little time, but can you just give us a rundown of your portfolio? Yeah. In storage. Yeah, so storage, cloud storage for object storage. Got a bunch of regional options and classes of storage. Like I mentioned, archive storage. Our first party offerings in the file area or file store, basic enterprise and high scale, which is really for highly concurrent, you know, kind of paralyzed applications. Persistent disk is our block storage offering. We also have a very high performance cash block storage offering and local SSD. So that's the main kind of food groups of storage, you know, block file and object. Increasingly doing a lot of work in data protection and in transfer and distributed cloud environments where, you know, the edge of the cloud is kind of pushing out outside the cloud regions themselves. But those are our products. Also, you know, we spend a lot of time with our partners because Google's really good at building and open sourcing and partnering at the same time, hence with Veeam and obviously with File. We partner with NetApp and Dell and a bunch of folks. So there's a lot of partnerships we have that are important to us as well. Yeah, you know, we didn't get it to Kubernetes. A great example of open source, Istio, Anthos, you know, we didn't talk about the on-prem stuff. So Brian, we'll have to have you back and chat about those things. I look forward to it. To quote my friend Matt Baker, that it's not a zero sum game out there and it's great to see Google pushing the technology. Thanks so much for coming on. All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Our next guest will be up shortly. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at Veeam on 2022 and we'll be right back.