 Hi, welcome to CUBE Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon.com, here at the Wikibon Studio in Marlboro, Massachusetts. As part of our ongoing promotion of what's happening in the VMware ecosystem, I'm really excited to have a company coming out of stealth, clear sky data, joining me for this segment are Ellen Rubin and Laz Veccherides. Thank you so much for coming out to the office. I know you've been doing a ton of work getting ready. I mean not just for big event that all of us spend so much time on, but launching the company. So Ellen, it's your first time on the CUBE. Why don't you give our audience a little bit of background about yourself and what brought you to clear sky? Definitely. And thanks for having us and good to see you. So I'm Ellen Rubin and co-founder here at Clear Sky Data. And I'm really excited because we are in launch mode and coming out and spending time at VMworld as well. So it's a big time for us. I am, you know, personally a third time entrepreneur. So this is very exciting. Each time is always different. Most recently, I started a company called Cloud Switch back in the early days of cloud computing. And I know we're going to talk a lot about cloud today. We were part of that early hybrid cloud, had a connect enterprise data centers out to the public cloud. We were bought a few years in by Verizon and became part of the TerraMark business unit and spent a lot of time in data centers with cloud people. And, you know, prior to that at a company called Natesa in data warehousing systems. Awesome. Yep. We know those well. So Laz, you've been on the CUBE before. You're stranger to the VMware ecosystem and everything. But tell us what brought you to Clear Sky. Well, so as you know, I spent about 11 years in the in the equal logic, you know, world. So I was part of the core team at equal logic. And we got acquired by Dell in the middle of 2007, 2008. I stayed on at Dell. And a lot of the things that we were doing that were innovative at the time were the VMware integration things. And so I became, you know, kind of associated with all that stuff. When when it was time to do something new, we got introduced to to Ellen through mutual friend, which is actually the founder of equal logic, Paul along. And, you know, we started venturing about various types of ideas. And, you know, we decided that, you know, Clear Sky was going to be a little bit about networking in clouds and not just storage. And, you know, that's sort of like the genesis of what we've more or less built over the last two years. Excellent. All right. So Ellen, maybe start, you know, what why Clear Sky? You throw things like cloud and we've been bantering in the industry as to, you know, where cloud fits in VMware and beyond VMware. But, you know, why did the company get founded? And what's the vision for the company? Definitely. So Laz and I spent a lot of time, you know, a couple of years back talking about where things going. And I think what we realized and sort of the picture we kept drawing for ourselves is this idea of really distributed environments that the cloud has created where stuff is running in data centers and private clouds and public clouds, it could be all over the world. And truth is that when you think about enterprise storage for Fortune 1000 companies, it just hasn't really kept up, you know, things are mostly unchanged in terms of buying gear and standing it up in data centers and having to manage it and all the, you know, pain and suffering and cost that goes with that. And so coming out of the expertise in the background from Laz and the team that we've been building, there's a lot of, I think, opportunity and excitement about creating something that is a managed service that can really stand in the hybrid cloud model and connect enterprise users with the economics, the scalability, the flexibility of the cloud, but still give them everything that a traditional enterprise storage array would be giving them on premise. And that was sort of the founding idea and how to help enterprises really embrace a much more agile and on demand model than they've been able to so far. All right, yeah, Laz, maybe you can take us into a little bit of the architecture, kind of what's the same that you've done before and what's fundamentally different? Well, so the requirements are from a user standpoint, you know, we start with the same thing. So enterprise storage is, you know, a whole just boatload of requirements around availability, performance, capability and integration with the ecosystem, things like, you know, integration with VMware and all of the other application stacks out there. So those are very, very important. And that has to be part of any solution that we actually offer going forward. What's different, though, is this notion that rather than standing up a whole bunch of physical storage in your data centers, what you want is the ability to have location independence, you really want to be able to have the flexibility and the agility to just conjure up storage and any location, whether it's your local data center, whether it's in the cloud, attach various forms of compute to it in various locations and not have to worry about standing up storage at every single place where you need to actually access this data. And so we're looking at all sorts of models right now where you have hybrid models where you have islands of compute that are distributed across metros and across, you know, even regional boundaries. You know, what we did at Clear Sky is we decided early on that this has to be a metro based service. In order to meet the requirements for latency, you can't reach across the internet and go into the cloud, you know, across several hundred miles or several thousand miles. The latency is not going to allow, the speed of light is actually something that's more or less inviolate. We're not going to be able to change the speed of light as much as we try. So what Clear Sky has done is to build a technology model that's based on technology stacks, living in highly connected points of presence in major metros. And by building those out, we're able to control the latency and the overall experience of the users that are within that metro. So if you're, for example, in Boston, if you're within a hundred miles or so of the Boston area, we're able to offer you very, very low latency high speed connectivity into our network and you get more or less a primary storage experience without any of the cross country latency issues. So, you know, the main model is really this model of having these points of presence everywhere where the people are. And then we're leveraging the cloud for something that it's really good for. The cloud is amazing durability, amazing scalability. It's a solved problem. We're not going to try and go out and build a cloud. What we're going to do is we're going to leverage that through more high speed connectivity. And hence we've built this global storage network where you get the durability and the scalability of the cloud, but some very, very clever caching and networking technology in the middle to make it appear as though all that storage is very close to you. Okay. So just want to clarify, we've had a number of solutions in the marketplace that have kind of promised kind of mobility. So there's some things that work and some things that don't. So lots of companies, of course, are going mobile and I need to have access to my data a lot to places. There's SaaS applications that are putting this globally dispersing it. But I think about things like long distance VMotion, which the big challenge always has been there is I can't just move my storage easily or having my information available at low latency, which means do I replicate copies of it all over the place? So maybe we'll talk a little bit about the use case and what you actually do and what don't you do? Okay. Sure. Well, I'll just make a quick comment about our customers and the kinds of situations that they're sort of addressing in their infrastructure. So a sort of traditional enterprise that would be building kind of large applications and managing them with storage underneath would be running things that are both structured on databases from SQL and Oracle and lots of unstructured data, log file data, big file production data. And very typically, they'll have these running in data centers that could be distributed across the country or around the world. And today, what's essentially happening, as Les was describing is you really have to kind of keep standing the storage up and then you've got to have DR and back up and all the usual things that you would do. And we've really taken the entire life cycle of the data and managed it completely with our service. So we're handling the primary data and especially the hot production data. So it's really close and really high performance. And then we're keeping the stuff that's warm local within the metro area really, really close within a couple of milliseconds. And then we're using the cloud at the back end that we're highly connected to for cold and archival and all the backup in DR scenarios. So we've taken that on holistically. And what that means for the customer, of course, is no managing of infrastructure, no touching it, no expanding their data center footprints and a huge reduction in cost where a third of the cost of what a traditional environment would be. So I think what this is the kind of customer who would be, you know, a clear sky customer is in a hybrid cloud approach right now. They're in a journey to embrace the cloud. 99% of what they're doing still probably resides in a private cloud or a data center that they're managing, you know, could be colocation. But they have at least a foot in the cloud world. And so they've got some workloads running in Amazon. They've got some things going on in SAS. And essentially what we're trying to say is it doesn't really matter because wherever the application is running, we're going to be able to deliver the storage across our network with these points of presence that are interconnected to each other and interconnected to the cloud. And so it gives that mobility and flexibility. Great. So it sounds like, I mean, much more than some of the toe dipping that people have done with test dev or maybe just I put my archive here in the cloud, you know, primary data, backup, DR, fully managed service. The challenge is to give, you know, to Lazar's point, to give the customer the feeling of what primary storage needs to be with hundreds of thousands of IOPS, really low latency, the hot data is really close. It's really performant and to guarantee that that works. And if you can't, and there's unpredictability or access over the internet with, you know, could be a lot of latency, could be less, you know, performance is not always so reliable, you're going to do things like archival and backup on it because that's much lower risk and the requirements are much less. Okay. So it feels a little bit more like traditional type environment. I'd say more like that than it does say just going whole hog into AWS. How do you tie into some of the large public cloud providers? Definitely. So some of the things, you know, obviously, you know, we're a very connectivity leveraged service. So we actually run private connectivity down to where those cloud providers are actually housing their storage. So that is one of the primary tenants of what we do. We need to have very, very low latency. And we have to have dedicated connectivity because we need to guarantee a level of service for our customers that you just don't get over the internet. So that's part of the global storage network is to work with the individual cloud providers. And what you're seeing now, actually, you know, thankfully, all of them are coming around to allowing, you know, guys like us to connect directly into their clouds. So you have ExpressRoute from Azure, you have DirectNec from S3, Google also has a program that's very similar. So it allows us to get dedicated connectivity into the clouds. And, you know, by leveraging those clouds, those clouds generally speaking, you know, they're very good. We're specifically looking at things like object storage as a backing store. So S3, the Google, you know, object cloud, the, you know, the Azure object cloud, all those are really, really great, durable stores that come at a very, very nice price. I think everyone kind of focuses on the price you get for those things. But, you know, the real benefit to us is that you're getting more or less, you know, 11 nines of durability. So it's much better than any kind of a RAID set that you could ever build, you know, inside of your data center. And so when we integrate in, we're basically putting all your data there and leveraging the fact that, you know, we can rely on it to be there, you know, forever. And so, you know, all we need to do is bring a small copy to the location where you want to actually access it. So we don't actually have to protect it across the entire network. So that's one of the key tenets of what we've done. And Steve, if I could just jump in. So one of the key things for a customer who would be using ClearSky. So we're working with, you know, large financial service, healthcare, biopharma, you know, companies that would be very sensitive to security and compliance. I just wanted to comment on that. It is absolutely table stakes for anyone that's in the, you know, managed service model that we're in, to have just the most comprehensive security and controls and discipline in terms of how we run the service. So I just wanted to make a quick comment about how the embracing of the cloud by enterprise has happened because there have been a lot of advances in terms of the backend cloud, things like VPC and other, you know, kind of security models that are out there, but still requires the commitment of a company like ourselves standing in the middle to protect the customer from any type of risk around, you know, encryption, key management, you know, who has access to the data, physical security of where our points of presence are located and making sure that they can maintain their compliance. Yeah. So one of the feedbacks we've gotten from the user community is that that GRC is critical that so need to have very good understanding. It's like, okay, what lives where. So I've got some of it on your stuff here, but some of it goes over the, oh, it's just a metadata or something out. No, no, we need to be really clear as to what lives where, who has access to it, what's the security that I have on it. So multi-factor authentication, background checks, you know, like the whole nine yards. And I think we, you know, certainly I saw this a lot at TerraMark and Verizon, you know, from, from cloud switch days, but I think that the standards that enterprises hold the providers of any cloud services to are higher than anything that possibly has been in the past. And I think that's appropriate. You know, if you're going to take someone and run their primary storage outside of their firewall, they want to know exactly what's going on. We're doing it across a geographically distributed network, and we're managing that with a tremendous amount of intellectual property around what gets cashed where and how the data gets moved around. But in the end, from the customer's perspective, they just want to know where it is and how they get their hands on it if they need it. Okay. So let's step back for a second. Can you give me just kind of the, kind of the speeds and feeds on the company, how many people, what the funding is, how long you've been building this and where the product is, you know, for the launch? Definitely. Okay. So, you know, as, as we're launching, we are about 30 people in downtown Boston. You need to come visit us. It's very fun down there, down near the greenway. It's in South Station. And we've been around for about a year and a half. We raised a series A last year with General Catalyst in Highland Capital. And also Paula Long and Jitsa Xena are on our board and, you know, members of our team here. So it's a tremendous, you know, kind of set of people and advisors to the company. And we've been beta testing for most of this year, very active with a set of customers, you know, from these different backgrounds. We're also announcing two customers today and during our launch, Sentinel Financial and Benefits is a financial services company in Boston and XDM, a managed service provider in Philadelphia and also in Las Vegas. So we're live in those three metro areas, serving those customers as well as a bunch of others and adding very quickly. So, you know, kind of three metros, live up and running and plans to add a lot of metro pops as we grow. Okay. So, yeah, a bunch of areas I want to first, you know, what's the rollout look like? You know, starting North America makes a lot of sense. And that's where the most of the public cloud is. But where do you see us in that adoption in the growth of the company? Yeah. So the, you know, the goal for us is to be everywhere our customers are. And if you look at a map of starting with the United States, but also it's equally true in other parts of the world, you can see where all the major clusters of data centers are that are enterprise class data centers as well as all the fiber in the ground that connects. So when we come into a metro area, not only have we sort of validated that there's, you know, a lot of companies that would potentially be customers for us, but also that the network connectivity that we can access by being in a co-location facility, for example, like in a digital realty co-location facility, which gives us huge carrier neutrality, allows us to connect to pretty much any customer that would be, you know, about a hundred or so miles around us. And that's really how we think about the opportunity. So it's kind of based on the Akamai model of being local and close to the customers. And we can guarantee the latency in the performance, which is really key to us. So, you know, if you think about being across all of the major NFL cities, you know, that's clearly where we're going next. And, you know, have a lot of already engagement with early, you know, sort of PSE customers and partners across the US, but also, you know, we're a global storage network. So next year, the plan is definitely to start moving outside of North America, starting with Europe. And then, you know, I think Asia will have to wait probably until a little further down the path. But the big thing for us is the development of relationships with co-location partners like Digital Realty that we also are announcing as a global partner and some of the carriers who we work with that are mostly regional partners. But it really gives us an opportunity there to also go to market with those partners. So it's an opportunity to engage with the customers who are in their data centers already using some of their network connectivity, as well as MSP partners like XTM who have a lot of, you know, existing customers that might be benefiting from our service. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I love your first two choices of who you're going out with. It makes perfect sense. Financial, you know, check the boxes to, all right, they've got to have security they got to understand. And the service provider really can be, you know, a huge channel for what you're doing. And we've been talking for years about how service providers are going to just become so much of the channel. So when you talk about who funded the company, I think one of the first people you talked to and then invested the company was the founder of storage networks. So, you know, as we said, we don't want to go back too much in history, but we've been banging on the cloud and everything. So, you know, my, you know, the high level takeaway I had from, of course, the dot com, you know, burst didn't help. But, you know, it was limits in the network and limits in the security. And that's the question I've been asking for, you know, since cloud came out. And so it sounds like you've got, you know, a very methodical way to handle the network and working through the security. Right. Well, one of the interesting things that has happened over the last 15 years, that I think, you know, the storage networks guys wished it happened sooner is that, you know, you have an enormous amount of unused connectivity just been buried in the ground now. So pretty much all of the matters that we're looking at expanding into have this this amazing variety of fiber connectivity from a competitive set of carriers and the prices are going down. So it's very, very easy for us to build this type of a network. And we can do it in a private way. So it's a private network where we're building is not the internet. And so this is this is one of the key parts of the puzzle. The other thing that that wasn't available back then is really virtualization. That's one of the big stories of the last decade. So really building a true multi tenant service by virtualizing compute workloads and virtualizing the hardware so that you can create some leverage inside your economic model that has only been available really truly the last few years. And so, you know, we're essentially taking some of the cloud technology that has been out there and the fact that this connectivity is out there and then building something unique that hasn't been done before just because these pieces have never been around to be integrated. Not to mention that the enterprise customers are really clear that they're looking for more of a cloud like model. And that's a big change. So I think at the time, you know, it was more of a, you know, we'll stand stuff up and we'll do managed hosting for you. And that's not a new idea. But to be able to do it in a way that really gets the economics and the agility of what the cloud can offer is a new thing. Yeah. So we've got VMworld coming up. And, you know, I wonder if you can share what you've had the conversation you've been having with customers because that adoption of moving from, you know, it's virtualized to how do I make it like a cloud or use a cloud or, you know, we say hybrid is kind of awful term. I think we all agree because it's I've got lots of applications and some I sassify some I push out in the public cloud some I manage I orchestrate, you know, the vision that many have had of saying I just want a self service portal for IT and I can use it anywhere has, you know, not come to fruition yet. So, you know, I worry when I go to VMworld that, you know, cloud kind of gets shoved off to the side in this discussion. And, you know, we're still having discussion, oh, we need 100% virtualization. And it's like, well, you know, containerization has changed some of it. I've had more discussions on bare metal the last two or three years than I had for years. So, you know, how does that, you know, discussion with the end user go what what's what are they getting excited about what you're doing and how do they move from kind of into that cloud discussion even deeper. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think that in a way for a CIO and the CIOs organization, things are as complicated as they've ever been. So for all the ideas of simplicity and ease of use and all the things that, you know, technology always promises, you know, if you have, you know, VMware, sprawl and virtualization all over the place. And you also have all these other models that you're trying to do and you've got, you know, open stacks sitting in the lab and you've got, you know, all these different flavors of containers, you know, going around in a way it's a lot harder and more confusing. But I think that while the IT teams are trying to figure this out and they're adopting new technologies, they still are living with the realization that at bedrock is your data and that there's just nothing that can really happen until you sort of fundamentally solved the ability to make the storage model be more flexible. And so I feel like we're sort of an underlying piece of the puzzle that helps them get a little bit more confidence that this model is going to work for them while they decide on which other, you know, pieces of the stack they want to adopt. Because I think right now there's just a lot of experimentation going on. And, you know, if you have to buy a new storage array every time you own an experiment with something that is not a flexible model and it's definitely not fast. All right. So Laz, you know, at VMworld, you know, Vvolves will be a hot conversation. You mentioned open stack. And then there's things like Docker and containers. How do those kind of technology, you know, tactical pieces fit into, you know, how you guys build your solution? Well, so, you know, we, you know, obviously we're a startup. And so we have to pick the places where the most adoption has already occurred initially. And VMware, obviously, you know, when we talk about virtualization, VMware is the big gorilla in the market. And so, you know, everyone's got VMware. We haven't found a customer yet that doesn't have it. And so we decided that we're going to be a very, very VMware friendly environment. So we're going to go ahead and implement all of these things. So even in our first release, we have Vvolves, we have the AI, we have a lot of the things that we believe right now are table stakes. If you have virtualized workloads, you probably have VMware, you're probably looking for these things. So that's a set of things that we need to do. You know, but, you know, in the sense, though, you know, these are the table stakes that we need for today. In the future, I think we're going to start to see a whole bunch of different forms of virtualization and containerization. And there's a whole set of discussions that we're having right now about, you know, how does storage play in those worlds? How do you cloudify it? You know, and there's a whole bunch of really interesting ideas that we have that I think, you know, we're not ready to disclose them yet. But we are working on what the next generation application infrastructure stack is going to be and how it should consume storage. And so I think that there's a similar paradigm to what the storage industry has done with VMware that's going to sort of unfold on itself, you know, over the course of the next year or two years. Because what you do with containers fundamentally changes operational aspects of what you do. But your data is still your data. And, you know, there's certain expectations you have about performance and about availability and about durability and so on. And so how to bring that to those environments is still an open question. So it's a pretty exciting time right now. No lack of interesting technology to work with for us. No, it definitely keeps us hopping on what we're doing. So, Ellen, to close out, you threw out a stat that your solution could be 30% cheaper than what you're doing. Is it a price conversation? Are you solving some of that? Trying to simplify IT? What's the core value that ClearSky is trying to bring to the C-suite? Yeah, no, I'm glad to come back to that definitely. So we truly feel that the ability to simplify the entire life cycle is the key thing here. The customer should not have to manage infrastructure. The customer should not have to guess what they need and which data needs to sit on flash and which data needs to be put out to archive. What if things change, it's always dynamic. That's the one thing you can count on. So in fact, we are actually two thirds less expensive, not a third, but I'll just clarify that. But that's never the first part of the conversation. Of course, when you're a new enter into a market like the storage market that's been around for so long, customers want to hear that you have things to offer to them that will help them reduce footprint and cost. But if that were it, that wouldn't be interesting. What's interesting here is that we're really a different paradigm of how to use and consume storage that matches what the customers are trying to do in their overall infrastructure. And that's really the key thing here. Okay. And so in that vein, are you selling to the C-suite? Is the storage person a little bit worried when you come in? What have you been seeing? So very typically at our customers, there's someone who is the head of IT infrastructure. And that person could be a VP, it could be a director, and some smaller companies, it's the CIO. And that person has a team that manages all the infrastructure, including networking and compute. And sometimes security sits under there, but sometimes it doesn't. And truth be told, and most of the customers we're dealing with, even with petabytes of data, they are still working with relatively small teams. So what doesn't people at most? It could be five to 10. And the storage person is pretty stretched right now, because often it's a single person and not even a full-time person in some cases, even for large amounts of storage. And that's a little bit of a surprise to me. It's a little different from things that I've seen in the compute side and certainly back in the Netease-a-days with database administrators. But this is not a situation where you've got a dozen storage people sitting around going, oh, what's going to happen to me now? This is like, I don't want to touch the infrastructure. One of our customers pointed out the window when we were having a meeting said that's my data center I spent all day there. I don't ever want to go there again. Make it go away. And so I think that's our story for these guys. Okay, great. So people want to find out more information. Just give us the website and what we can expect to see from you guys throughout the rest of the year. Definitely. Okay. So it's clairsky.com and follow us on Twitter. I think our clairskydata.com. Thank you, Les. Definitely want to give the right address there. And we'll be at the VMworld show and then actually we'll be out at some other shows later in this year, including Amazon's ReInvent. Excellent. Les and Alan, thanks so much for coming in. I expect I will be seeing you at both those shows that you mentioned. The Cube's going to be there at VMworld and at Amazon ReInvent. So be sure to check out all the research at wikibon.com and the videos, of course, are at siliconangle.tv. Thanks so much for watching this episode of Cube Conversations.