 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to VeeamON 2018 in Chicago, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Carl Rottenstrock is here. Carl Rottenstrock, senior program manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft. Carl, thanks for coming on. Hey, it's a pleasure, guys. Thank you for having me. You got a beautiful picture of your family. You got three boys at home? Three boys, three boys. They keep me out of trouble. They get into it, they keep me out of it. I'm one of three boys. My mom, you know, kept us going. You must have a strong moment at home. She is a saint. So, at any rate, thanks for coming on. We love talking Microsoft, Azure, Cloud and Storage. Let's start with your role. Sure. What do you do at Microsoft? Absolutely, so for the last year, I've been a program manager with the storage team and I have kind of a unique role. You know, usually you see program managers who focus on features, right? You are championing a new feature in your service, your platform. For me, I get to work with our partner ecosystem. So, I spend a lot of time with our great partners like Veeam and our channel partners like SHI, CDW, Soft Choice, Insight. I mean, just, I'll tell you, I've got the best job in the business. I can't complain. I get to work with great, smart people every day. So, is your role sort of transferring knowledge to those partners, assisting those partners, acting as a catalyst, gathering information from them and feeding it back to the product in years? Yeah, really, you know, all of the above, helping to make sure that we've got a combined solution, an end-to-end solution, that's the best thing for our customers. So, everything from upfront assessment, through implementation, through health check afterwards. You know, our goal is to have the happiest customers in the public cloud and we can't do that without our partners. How do you, how should we think about your, the Azure storage portfolio? Can you paint a picture for us? Oh boy, it has grown drastically. I mean, just in the last couple of months. So, not only do we have our first-party offerings in the disk, so a traditional VM disk, as we all know it, you're going to attach to a server. We have hosted file infrastructures where we provide file shares that don't require a server to manage. Our partnership with NetApp, where we are going to be operating NetApp systems in our data centers and offering their native services. And we just continue to expand with big data solutions, with Avere, our new acquisition that is really aimed at high-performance compute environments like we see in genomics and media and entertainment. It's just a portfolio that continues to grow and we all joke that storage is boring, right? Nobody cares about storage, but honestly, it's one of the most interesting and fastest-growing and evolving platforms in Azure. We joke sometimes we call it snorage, but me and Stu and I are kind of boring people, so we love talking about it. I like that. So you've got file, you've got object, you've got block, you've got big data solutions, you've got high-performance file solutions. Okay, like you say, this expanding portfolio. Carl, I look back at my career and Microsoft's had a long partnership, not only with the compute side, but really on the storage side, maybe isn't as well known as shipping on every PC and server out there. A lot has changed when you talk about Azure and Azure Stack coming out. Maybe explain a little bit, I believe you called it kind of the first party versus the second party, how that Microsoft does it versus Microsoft partners, how those met together. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll tell you, so I joined the company about five years ago and I've been on the storage team for the last year. I was a field specialist, a subject matter expert before that, working very, very closely with customers. And what I love that I've seen over this period through the Satya Nadella era is just this open Microsoft that says, we don't have to do everything, right? We don't have to try to provide everything to the customer. We're really believe in and I think we just effuse that best of breed attitude going forward and our partners feel that, whether we're working with Veeam in Azure Public Cloud as a target or them offering protection of VMs in public cloud, which is necessary, by the way. I think that's a huge fallacy in the industry that you place your app, you place your machine in a public cloud and it's magically protected by Pixies. It's not. That backup and security are in a concern wherever you put it, right? Absolutely, wherever they are. So we rely on our partners like Veeam to provide that and really where Azure Stack comes in is providing that consistent experience not just to our customers, but also to our partners. So Veeam is able to protect Azure Public Assets in the same manner they're able to protect Azure Private, let's see, for Azure Stack resources. So really it's just offering customers choice to use best of breed solutions and allowing our partners to have an easy means to support both on-premises and public cloud. So the second service catalog that you guys offer and then you advise customers or they pick and choose what they want, how's that all work? Yeah, so really what we do and that's a great way to put it. So we have what we call the Azure Marketplace that's present in the Azure Public Cloud and we extend that to Azure Stack. So if I'm a customer who wants to deploy Veeam per se in either infrastructure, I go to this catalog of apps. I mean, it literally is a catalog of apps. Search for Veeam, there it is and I can single click deploy in either Azure Stack or Azure Public. Microsoft is unique in the sense of its hybrid strategy in terms of what you have in the cloud, you have on-prem. You're trying to wherever possible make it identical. I mean, really Microsoft and Oracle are really the only two companies who sort of have a stated strategy to do that. Let's talk about Microsoft in terms of where you're at in terms of getting that substantially similar capability in basically on-prem and in the public cloud. Yeah, absolutely and that's a great, great topic to discuss. So Azure Stack, I always like to tell folks, hey, full disclosure and we don't try to hide this at all. That's not who we are, but it will always lag a little bit behind Azure Public. When you think about the controls in customers data centers for rolling out code updates and new versions of software new capabilities, there's always an adoption curve, right? You have folks who are a little more hesitant to release quickly and adopt quickly. So Azure Stack offers them the capability to defer some of those updates for a period of time. So there will be lag. We have to qualify for multiple vendor platforms. We've chosen to go to market in a hyper-converged model with our partners like Dell EMC, HPE, Lenovo and Cisco. Whereas Azure Public, that's a completely controlled infrastructure and we're able to deploy very quickly. And we do, we're constantly iterating and releasing new features. So I think that's the biggest difference between the two. All right, so Carl, you give a session here at the show called migrating to Azure. That whole move is pretty challenging. Oh, yes. Am I lift and shifting, am I transforming, am I building new? What are you hearing from customers and give our audience a taste of some of the kind of key takeaways that you were talking about. Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the biggest concerns that we've had over the last couple of years. As I said earlier, we want the happiest customers in public cloud and no cloud regret or remorse, right? So what we talked about in our session was a tool that we released recently called Azure Migrate that is all about assessing and setting expectations for customers around what can and cannot migrate, how much it will cost to run that infrastructure in public cloud, either as is or optimized and then suggestions for optimizing their infrastructure to get the best bang for their buck. So there are great opportunities to save cost when platforms are adopted like Azure SQL, platform as a service offerings. When I've got kind of that time sharing concept, when I take away maintenance activities around operating systems and software releases, there are significant cost savings versus a lift and shift, which can quite honestly be more expensive than what that customer is doing on premises today. So Azure Migrate is meant to help customers avoid that no regrets. I guess there's, I wonder what you're hearing from customers because there's some concern, well maybe I should just do infrastructure as a service. If I get into those platform as a service, am I locked in? I mean, Microsoft is used for lots of business critical applications. I see Microsoft strongly in the Kubernetes ecosystem, getting into the functions as a service, which those things are trying to give me a little bit more portability and flexibility. So maybe discuss some of those. Yeah, that's great. And I'm glad you brought that back around. So there is, there's always that concern about the cloud hotel California, right? That's what I like to jokingly refer, half jokingly refer to it as you get in, you can never leave. And there is that jeopardy with any provider that if you're using some proprietary platform that you can be locked in. And really we try to promote the use of containers extensively with those customers who have that concern. And even with our hosted analytics and hosted database infrastructures, we make sure to provide those portable cross cloud platforms like Postgres, MySQL, our analytics is all Hadoop based. You know, really we don't want that lock in to be there. We don't want that to be a concern. So continuing support for open platforms and ecosystems is really something we're committed to. I mean, lock in, it's a spectrum. Absolutely. I've been in this business for a long time and Unix used to be the open system, right? I mean, today you can't get more locked in than you know, a Unix platform. So I feel as though, and I wonder if you guys could comment, the cloud has transparent pricing and transparent billing. And so, you know, lock in is about, okay, if I have a customer and they're trying to move and they're up for a contract renewal or something or a maintenance or I'm going to jack their maintenance. But you can't just do that across the board if you have transparent billing. So there's the pricing aspect. There's certainly a lock in with the processes and procedures that you choose. But no matter what you choose, whether it's open source, a cloud provider like Amazon and on-prem provider, like the many that we know out there, you're going to be locked into your processes and procedures. So it's a matter of degree. I personally see it as, because of the cloud, a lot less onerous than it used to be. Do you guys agree with that? I mean, Dave, it's that application is the long pole in the 10 from what I see. What I've been using, and if I go to something new, if I go build it, this new architecture, cloud neighbor, whatever, that's a pretty big bet. So, you know, depending on how deep and tight that is to a specific platform, even if I'm choosing a database, migrating databases aren't easy. So- But that's the issue. It's the bet that you're making. It's more so than the lock in because lock in, you're going to be locked into whatever bet you make. So you've got to make the right bet. To me, it's a way for consultants to sort of act like an advocate for the customer. What's more important, in my view, is negotiation strategies, how you place that bet, how you architect your cloud strategy. And I mean, Dave, just to- Absolutely. I remember four years ago, you and I interviewed Brad Anderson with Microsoft and we were poking him on licensing. I don't hear that discussion about Microsoft as much. Of course, they always want it cheaper and everything like that, but Microsoft's done a great job in the cloud communities. They're known as being participating in those communities and giving customers- Well, that's our take. What's your take? Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. And I think what I'm seeing is customers are hedging their bets, right? So you do, and it is a bet. You do have to not go all in with somebody, with any cloud provider, but you got to put your chips with some proprietary platforms. And what I'm seeing is that multi-cloud that we're all talking about is really becoming the reality. I can think of very few customers that I've worked with who have had Azure as their single public cloud. And really, that's how they avoid out of that Z-Series down the road, right? Where you're locked in, you've got one provider, that platform, they're saying, look, I'm going to deploy on the best service in the best public cloud for that application instance, as Stu mentioned. That's happening. As they say in England. Yeah, there you go. So we're here at VeeamON, your relationship with Veeam, they've obviously partnered up with you guys in a big way, your thoughts on the partnership? Yeah, I love working with these guys. I mean, I'm very fortunate in that I get to work with some of the best that we have and everything from the relationship that we have at a marketing level, an engineering level, a field level, they're really ingrained in our ecosystem at all levels. And just a very, very easy partner to work with, very responsive to their customer needs. And that's what we look for. We want to work with the partners that customers love. So I'm just thrilled to be part of this relationship. Carl, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I think you embody the new open Microsoft and you guys are making great progress. Congratulations and thanks so much for coming on. Thank you, Dave, it was a pleasure. Stu, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, and we'll be back with our next guest. Veeamon, live from Chicago, you're watching theCUBE.