 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our first day of coverage of VeeamON 2017. The first year, Stu, we've ever done VeeamON, and we love the customer segments. We have a great one coming up now. Martin Hood is the IS manager of Hologic, and Chris Van Asselberg is the manager of ServerOps, also at Hologic. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. Give us the setup on Hologic. What do you guys do? What's your shtick? Sure, Hologic is a developer, manufacturer, and supplier of diagnostic, surgical, and breast imaging equipment, all in the medical field. So what's happening in the business that affects IT? Like, what's the conversation like from the business? Sure, so the good stuff. Yeah, conversation the last couple of years has all been cloud, cloud, cloud. You know, a very, very interesting topic, but this year, it's all about digital transformation, IoT, and probably most importantly, to Martin and I, is availability. Well, when you think about IoT, it just changes everything. It scares the life out of you with security and always being watched. And then availability, obviously, is they're like two sides of the same coin. So when you guys sit down and the business moves fast, I mean, generally speaking, don't hate me for saying this, but the business oftentimes moves faster than IT can move. But is that changing in your organization? How are you changing it, and what are you doing to change it? I think we're using better tools. We haven't the stuff like many IT departments, so we have to adapt by using the best tools that are available. And about 12 to 15 months ago, we explored Veeam as an opportunity, and it's clearly made a difference. Staff have a lot more time to dedicate to things that will make a positive difference to the business, rather than fixing problems. So those problems were taking up an awful lot of time in the past, not so much on now. So maybe paint a picture of what your environment looks like, you know, apps that you're servicing, what the infrastructure looks like, virtualization, maybe components of that, major vendors. So our core infrastructure is foundation on Cisco UCS, EMC storage, and backups using obviously, extricate storage, and then Veeam is our availability platform. From an internal IT organization, we run everything from Oracle to Salesforce to Hadoop, you know, Icelon storage with, you know, petabytes of image data, et cetera. So lots and lots of applications. Obviously no downtime expected from anybody. But we have a pretty good, you know, infrastructure to run all that on. And what is your sort of strategy and architecture around availability, backup, availability, is sort of morphing together? Yeah, well, we live in a world where everybody wants things instantly, and it's no different when it comes to restoring fails, for example. How logic have gone on a heavy recruitment drive for top talent, and obviously that top talent has high expectations. So we have to deliver on those expectations. So no longer can we wait a week to restore a file, even a few days is too long, so we need the right tools to get that job done quickly. Yeah, and to be honest, availability is not, you know, not out of our grasp anymore with the technology available today. It's actually very easy to do it. We have data centers around the world we're able to replicate real time over a gigabit plus, you know, connections, five gig connections, 10 gig connections if need be, replicate data real time, fail over between data centers, and also even between on-prem and the cloud, you know, that is all possible today to achieve, you know, superior uptime. And when you sit down with the business, I mean, well, first of all, do you do charge backs? We do not do charge back, we do show back. It's important for people to understand what something costs, but obviously charge back is a different model that we don't use. So when you do, when you have a conversation with the business about backup, I mean, in the old days it was a, maybe not so old days, it was one size fits all. Here you go, you get the bronze level of service, everybody gets it. Are you able to tune the granularity of your service offering? Absolutely, I mean, there are systems that we want to back up and, you know, we, for example, back up, you know, our East Coast data center to an Exogrid, we replicate that to San Diego. And for DR purposes, the acceptance is that it's okay that it might take a day, a week, or even up to a month to be able to restore that data to become back online. We also have the option to restore to Microsoft Azure if we want to, but we also have systems where it's not a backup issue. It's, yes, we need the backups, we need them every 15 minutes to disk, replicated off site as soon as possible. But they also want us to replicate the data real time from data center to data center, provide real time monitoring and real time failover. And is the Enable, sorry, Stu, I'm going to let you jump in, is the Enable or their Veeam, is it stuff that you've architected yourself, some kind of combination? Veeam's our primary system for backups. It's obviously phenomenal, works great, goes to an Exogrid, replicates real time Exogrid to Exogrid East Coast to West Coast. Veeam availability also has a replication, which we've pursued on many core VMs that require it. System integration tools that are not really on-prem, they're tools that exist on-prem, but their purpose is to pull data from the sales forces of the world, interface with business systems that might also be off site, and we replicate them from the East Coast to the West Coast real time. You mentioned that from on top, you were hearing the cloud, cloud, cloud message. How do you, is cloud a strategic initiative now? How do you put together the pieces and where does Veeam fit in that discussion? I think it's been looked at, it's quite an expensive option for us to go down. And I think we have the resources. You're saying public cloud would be expensive? For us, yes, yes, we have the resources ourselves, we have multiple data centers globally, and we have the stuff with the skill set to deliver. So it's not really been a financially viable option at the moment. Do you have Azure you're doing some things with? We actually do business with Azure and vCloud Air. We actually want to VMware's first customer is a vCloud Air, and we also do business in AWS. The important thing about a cloud strategy is to understand its strengths and its weaknesses. The idea of the cloud for Hologic is not to put a virtual machine up in the cloud. We can run those virtual machines on-prem less expensive than we can run them on the cloud. Now, on the flip side, if you look at some SaaS applications like email, Skype for Business, IoT, et cetera, where the cost isn't the compute memory storage, et cetera, it's really in the whole package of maintaining these systems, patching these systems, the skill sets to maintain it, et cetera. It sometimes makes sense for the SaaS apps to host it in the public cloud, but for the virtual machines that exist as legacy systems to host them on-prem. How has that ride for vCloud Air been for you? They recently kind of moved, I believe it's OVH is taking over management of that. What's your experience been? It's been interesting. A lot of promises, strong VMware partnership, we have always been an EMC partner, obviously that continued when they acquired VMware, and unfortunately we started in their Texas Data Center. They offered to move us to Japan seamlessly. It wasn't the most seamless thing, but it worked well overall. They then asked us to move out of their Japan Data Center because they closed it on March 31st, I believe. So we had to move out of that, so they're no longer one of our key public clouds. We have a Germany Data Center that we replicate, exchange real time using DAG replication in front of it with load balancers. One of the data centers that we're utilizing is a vCloud instance in Germany that will also go away shortly, so. And what brings both of you to Veeam on what your expectations coming in, how's the experience been so far? I mean a lot of the things we saw this morning, the new innovations, these are all things that we've been on our wish list if you want for some time, particularly things like continuous replication. That's a huge, huge thing for us. It's sort of phase two, we've rolled up Veeam. Now we're looking for the next step and that's the continuous replication of RVMs. So that was a real boon to hear such news coming soon. Some of the other priorities, obviously, we really want to hear about the new technology. As Martin just said, the replication piece is working well today, but the continuous replication, the method where we're no longer snapshot based, and instead there's a driver within the VMware tools or some other methodology to allow that real-time OS replication is a benefit to us. But we are looking at lots of SaaS apps. Obviously, SharePoint for our whole logic is in Office 365. We don't want to go back to five years ago where it was five different backups products depending on what system we're looking at. We want to use Veeam to back up our SharePoint environment. We want to use Veeam to back up our exchange environment whether it's on-prem or Office 365. In long-term, we want to back up AWS or Office Azure as well to make sure that we have one system to back it all up. You want Veeam to be your single backup platform and it is today or it's becoming today? Veeam is our only backup product today that we have when we sent SharePoint to the cloud, we put a halt on the second phase, which is to move our team sites, which is where our data is. And it is literally waiting for the Veeam SharePoint backup technology to become available and then the rest of it will move up there seamlessly to make sure that whole logic is protected. The business value and benefit of having that simple, single architecture is worth the wait. Yeah, I mean if you look at VMware, the reason they've been successful isn't just their technology is amazing. It's also their certification program. They brought a bunch of IT people in. Companies everywhere have VCPs or even higher nowadays. So you have talented people working on a stable platform with Veeam. We send three of our guys off to get their VMCs and that's been hugely successful. They're very competent with the system. They're able to do everything we need to quickly. They're not guessing, they're not Googling. They just know how to use the system. Going to other platforms will be a complete failure because now when someone wants something, you're in the hot seat, something's down, you need to bring it back up, but you don't use it every day. So what do you do? Pull out the manual and Google. What's the coolest thing you guys have seen here or anything that really excites you? Good question. It's experienced great hospitality outside of these four walls, of course, but it's been superb. We've been well looked after and looking forward to further experiences tomorrow as well. We're on stage tomorrow as well, so a little nervous about that. The CDPs, interesting to you. It's extremely interesting. We are actually looking at other solutions to purchase in the next year to take it to the next level to provide the more real-time replication of systems that really have to stay up rather than be restored. And the driver there is just to minimize RP, get as close to RPO zero as possible? Absolutely, if you look at an exchange environment, for example, their typical design is to build four servers in a DAG cluster so that you can do active passive, but instantaneous failure or a failover. But the problem with that comes in licensing. If you do Oracle, it's the same thing. It doesn't cost a license if a system goes down to then restore that system someplace else. So do you want to pay twice as much licensing and build environments twice as big? Or do you want to be able to just instantaneously failover which one costs more money? And which one meets the business needs? They both meet the business needs, and one costs a lot less, which means more money to do other things for the business. It's fantastic. I always love the practitioner perspective. Thanks guys for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thanks. No problem. You're welcome. All right, keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE we're live from Veeamon 2017. We'll be right back.