 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Vijay Ramachandran joins me next, VP of Product Management at VMware. Vijay, welcome back to the program. Thank you Lisa, good to be here again. We're going to be talking about disaster recovery, VMware Cloud DR. We've had a lot of challenges with respect to cybersecurity that the world has in the last 18 months. I'd like to get your thoughts on the disaster recovery as a service, the DRes market. What are some of the key trends, anything that you've noticed of particular interest in the last year and a half? Yeah, actually, you're right. I mean, then the last one year since the pandemic hit, you know, the whole lot of industries want to deploy DR systems and want to protect themselves against ransomware and other areas. The analysts are predicting that the disaster recovery as a service market is going to reach about $10 billion by 2025. And so we at VMware, we introduced VMware Cloud disaster recovery at, you know, the last VMware with that acquisition of a company called Datrium. And since then, we've had tremendous success and it was largely driven by two key trends that we see in the market. One is that a lot of our customers have regulatory and mandates to do, have a DR plan in place. And second is ransomware. I know that we're going to talk about ransomware a lot more in this interview, but ransomware is top of mind for a lot of customers. So these two combined together is really making a huge push to protect all the data against disasters. What type of customers and any particular industries that you see that are really keenly adopting VMware Cloud DR and DRAS, anything that you think is interesting? Yeah, it's actually interesting, Lisa. It's actually not a single vertical or a size of a customer. Yeah, what we have, again, what we're finding is that a lot of the regulated industries have a mandate to do DR, but that existing DR and data protection systems are extremely complex and not cost-effective. So customers are asked to do more with less. And so a lot of those customers are asking for, looking for a cost-effective way to protect all the data. And ransomware is not something that impacts any single vertical or any single size of customer. It impacts everyone. So we're seeing interests from all different verticals, different size of customers across the VMware cell base. Yeah, you're right. Ransomware is a universal problem. And as we saw in the last few months, a problem that is really one of national public health and safety and security concerns. So you mentioned that customers from a regulatory perspective, those that need to implement DR ransomware, as we talked about, are there, and then you also mentioned that legacy solutions are kind of costly, complex. Talk to me about some of the challenges with respect to those legacy solutions that you're helping customers to address with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. So yeah, there are a few trends that are emerging in the whole data production space. One is customers want to do more with the data. And so with legacy systems, what we're finding is that customers are able to replicate but the data is just sitting idle, not being used. And that's very expensive for our customers, number one. And secondly, from an operational standpoint, backup and DR is kind of merging into a single solution. And ransomware protection is becoming a critical use case as we just talked about for that. So customers are not looking to deploy different systems for different types of protection. They're looking for a single solution that lowers the cost and gives them enough protection across all these different use cases. And so where VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery comes into play is that we are able to use the data that we protect for other uses such as ransomware recovery, such as data protection, such as disaster recovery. So single copy of data that's being put to use the multiple use cases, number one. And secondly, it's a very expensive proposition to have on-prem to on-prem, having two pre-provision capacity just sitting idle. And so where BCDR comes into play is that we're able to use, protect the data into cloud, store it in a cost-effective manner and then just use the data when it's required, either during failover, during disasters, during ransomware recovery and so on. And that's where we're able to win in the market today. Dig through some of those differentiators, if you will, one by one, because there's so much choice out there. There's a lot of backup solutions, some that are providing backup only, some that are doing also DR, depending on how customers have deployed and how they're using the technology. But when you're in customer conversations, one of the three things that you articulate about VMware Cloud DR that really help it stand out above the pack. Yeah, number one is the cost, right? We're able to bring down the cost of a disaster protection by 65%. And that's one big value proposition that we highlight with our solution. Number two, a lot of our customers are also becoming environmentally friendly and environmentally conscious, I should say. And so because we're able to store the data in a more cost-effective manner and a more efficient manner of the cloud, we're able to bring down the carbon footprint by 80% compared to regular, your legacy disaster recovery and data production solution. And the third sort of major value proposition from the VMware side is that, we're able to integrate the VCDR solution, the disaster recovery and the data production solution so well into our, into the VMware ecosystem such that a VMware administrator can easily, operationally easily recover data into a VMware cloud. So for the VMware ecosystem, it just becomes a natural logical extension of their tool set. That's huge. Having a console that you're familiar with, the whole point of backing up data and the need to recover from a disaster is to be able to restore the data in a timely fashion. I talked with a lot of customers who were using legacy technologies and that was one of the biggest challenges backup windows weren't completing or they simply couldn't recover data that was either lost in a ransomware attack or accidentally lost that recovery is what it's all about, right? That's exactly right. And so at this VMware, we're introducing key enhancements and features that specifically speak to that pain point that we just mentioned. We are bringing down the replication time to 30 minutes. So in other words, your delcast is at a 30 minute interval now compared to all of us in a traditional backup system. And number two, we are extending VM level recovery, recovery which we always have with single file recovery. And so especially for the ransomware use case, customers are quickly able to figure out which file needs to be restored and they're able to restore those files individually rather than restoring the entire VM or the entire data center. And so it becomes a critical use case for a critical functionality, I should say, for ransomware recovery. And the other huge announcement that we may announce announcement, but the major announcement that we made at this VM world is the integration into the VMware cloud in such a way that customers who move of migrating data into the VMware cloud on AWS can have the opportunity to protect the data easily with BCDR and VMware cloud disaster covers. Got it. I'd love to get an example of a customer that you helped recover from ransomware. As we mentioned, it's on the rise. But I was looking at cybersecurity data in the last few weeks and it's the first half of 2021 calendar. It was up nearly 11 acts. And obviously the hockey stick list looking like it's going to continue to go up and to the right. So give me an example of a customer that you helped recover after they were hit with ransomware. Yeah, yeah, I'll do that. In fact, before I do that, I'll give you one statistic that I just saw recently. Every 11 seconds, apparently across the world, there's some ransomware attack in the world. And so it is a big, it is a huge, huge top of mind for a lot of the CIOs across the globe. Now, I'll just give you an example of one customer that we helped protect the data against ransomware. Merrick is the customer name. It's a public reference. It's in the VMware website. And they had legacy systems just like we talked about before. They had legacy systems for protecting the data. And they had backup systems and they had disaster recovery systems. And the big pain point was that, they knew that they needed to protect against ransomware. And, but they had two different systems backup disaster recovery and their cost was high because they were replicating the live data of production data across two different sites. And so they were looking for a, to lower the cost of disaster recovery. But more importantly, they were looking to protect themselves against potential ransomware threats. And they were able to deploy VCDR and have those multiple points in time in VMware Cloud that allows them to go to any point after a ransomware attack and record from it. And as I said, the single file recovery was a huge benefit for them because they could then figure out exactly which of those files got put up or which of the files required recovery. And so they were able to lower the cost and protect and at the same time, meet the regulatory requirements and mandates to have API protection in place. So to the women all over the place. As you said, the data show one ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. And of course we only hear about the ones that make the news, right? For the most part, our customers talk about, hey, we've had this problem. So it is no longer a, if we get hit with ransomware for every industry like you were saying before, no industry is blind to this. It's when we get hit, we've got to be able to recover the data. It sounds like what you're talking about from a recovery perspective is that it's very granular. So folks can go in and find exactly what they're looking for. Like they don't have to restore an entire VM. They can go down to the file level. That's exactly right. And you need the granular recovery because you want to be able to quickly restore, your data and get back in the business. And so we provide that granular recovery at the file level so that you can quickly scan your data, figure out which file needs to be recovered and recover just those files. Of course, you can also recover. We also provide orchestration for the whole data center, for the whole VM and all the VMs in the data center. But customers when they hit the ransomware, they want to be able to quickly get back in production for those files that they critically need. And so that's, it's a critical functionality for them. So is this whole entire solution in the cloud or is there anything that the customer needs to have on-premise? So all the data is stored in the cloud in an efficient way. Again, this is another sort of IP that we have, which is it's easy to just store data in the cloud in a downed way. But what we do is we efficiently store the data so that you can know the cost of your storage in the cloud. And so, VCD or a VM in the cloud disaster recovery stores data in the cloud and the data repositories in the cloud. And you can either recover data back to where you need to recover or we allow failover, we orchestrate automatically failover of workloads into VM in the cloud on AWS. Again, operational consistent because it's a VM software that's running on-prem, VM software that's running on VM in the cloud on AWS and you can failover and bring the data onto VM in the cloud on AWS. So it's a, and it's all available to SaaS, a customer doesn't have to really manage anything on-prem if you will. Which must have been a huge advantage in the last year and a half when it was so hard to get to the on-prem locations, right? That's exactly right. And this is one of the clear differentiators against with compared to legacy systems because in legacy backup and disaster recovery systems you need to manage your, not just your target storage but also the agents and all the stuff that all the software that goes around with data protection and a disaster recovery solution. And imagine upgrades and patches and so on. And so what we do with the SaaS based approaches take away that burden away from customers so we deliver this entire service as a SaaS first as a cloud service first delivery mechanism. So customers don't have to worry about any of those things. And that's critical especially as we've seen in the last 18 months with what's been going on, the challenge of getting to locations but also what's been happening as we talked about in the cybersecurity space and the increase, the massive increase in ransomware. Talk to me a little bit about, I want to dig in before we go about some of the ways that you've simplified and integrated the way to backup VMware Cloud on AWS. Talk to me a little bit more about some of those enhancements specifically. Yeah, so a lot of customers as you know, are have a dual-pronged approach where they have some workloads running on prem and they have some workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS. And for VMs that are running on VMware Cloud on AWS now they have a choice of protecting the data and the VMs very simply using VMware Cloud on VMware Cloud disaster recovery. And what that means is that they don't need to have the full-band DR solution but they can simply protect the data and automatically and restore and recover data if there's a corruption or something goes wrong with their VMs, they can simply restore the data without going through an entire failover process. And so we provide a simplified way for customers to automatically protect data and VMs that are running on VMware Cloud on AWS. And that's a, and it's fully integrated with our VMware Cloud on AWS, you know, workflows and so that's a great win for anyone who's migrating data and workloads into VMC. Is the primary objective of that to deliver business resiliency, DR, both? Both, actually that's a great part about this. The solution is that customers don't have to choose between DR and business resiliency, they get both with a single solution. They can start off with just business resiliency and protecting the data, but if they choose to they can then add DR as well to those workflows. And so it's not either or, it's both. Excellent, got it. Any other enhancements that you guys are announcing at VMworld this year? Yeah, I just want to reiterate the announcements and the key enhancements that they've been making, making, you know, they've been announcing at VMworld. The first one, as I said, is 30 minute RPO. So, you know, customers that have business critical workloads can now protect the data and be guaranteed that they're, you know, the amount of data that they, you know, that they, that they lag behind. It's in the 30 minute range and not in the other screens like with other legacy backup solutions. That's one. The second is the integration is all the enhancements that I just talked about for ransom recovery, single file, single file restore. We always had, you know, number of snapshots and, you know, failure was and so on, but single file ratio was a key enhancement that they've been making for ransom recovery. And the third one is the integration with VMworld natively and so it's a fully integrated solution and provides a simple, you know, sort of plug and play solution for any workload that's running in VMTW. Those are the three key announcements. There's a lot more in the world. So you'll see that in the coming weeks and months, but these are the three that we're announcing at VMworld. A lot of enhancements to a solution that was launched just about a year ago. Vijay, thank you for sharing with us what's new with VMware Cloud DR, the enhancements, what are you doing and also how it's enabling customers to recover from that ever pressing, increasing threat of ransomware. We appreciate your thoughts. Thank you Lisa, wonderful talk to you. Likewise for Vijay Ramachandra and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021.