 From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. Hello everyone, welcome back to the Windy City. We're here with Veritas at the Veritas Solution Day. So you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kevin Bogus is here. He's a senior information engineer at ECECT, a telecommunications company. Kevin, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. So this event, very intimate customer event. I don't know if you were at Veritas Vision last year, big, you know, huge customer band, many thousands of people. So intimate customer band, 50, 75 people. What are your thoughts on, you know, you took time out of your day to come here, why? What's here for you? To get a better understanding of what Veritas can do for my company in terms of backups and stuff. We do use Backup ECECT in my organization. I've been there for four years and understanding what you guys do and everything because we're back when it used to be semantic. Highs and lows with tech support or whatever, but other than that, it's been great. Okay, so talk about ECECT. What's the company do? We are the parent company of NEC out in Japan. We do, in the beginning, we developed telecommunications for companies, you know, used to be Avaya, Cisco, then it came us. Before I started, they gave me some background in terms of how they did stuff. They were absorbed by NECJ. And after that, we went through a reorganization about a year and a half ago. So we have grown from 50 people in a small office in Lincolnshire to having almost four to five offices from all the way out to Washington State, all the way out to Cheshire, Connecticut. And you're a service provider? Not a service provider, we're pretty much a development firm, we're all development. We, they used to do stuff in Lincolnshire that used to sell the stuff before they got absorbed by NECJ, they used to do the sales, they do the development, they did everything out in Lincolnshire before the big dot com bus, which I was told when I got brought on, after the big dot com bus, it was who's gonna take us over. And that became NECJ. When you say development, you're talking about product development, correct? Okay, great. So in your role as senior information engineer, you look after a lot of things, but one of them is of course the data protection strategy, right? So immediately when I hear four or five remote offices and you've got distributed data all over the place, you got to figure out how to protect that. So how do you protect that? I'm really interested in what's changed. You and I were talking before about, remember the virtualization days, we had to rethink everything in terms of data protection because you didn't have as many servers physically. That's, things are changing again. So how have things changed, what's changing, what are the big initiatives you're working on? Paying a picture for us, if you would. Well, in the beginning, we weren't really heavily in virtualization. Now we really have, as it actually has saved us in a couple of positions, we actually had to move our ticket system over to virtualization because the server's about to die. So we did, we took care of it, we moved it over to virtualization. Then we were backing up with Back in the Exact, being able to either file as folders or do the whole virtual. Also we actually did high availability to provide us with more protection, everything else, plus in addition to what Veritas can do for us. Okay, so virtualization relatively new for you guys. Yes. And now what about cloud, do you hear about things like cloud and multi-cloud, are you doing much in cloud? Not that much in cloud. Pretty much it's, if it has to be in the cloud, we have slowly developed going towards the cloud and what I've heard and what I've seen from my manager, but right now we're kind of backing off just a little bit just to see is it approved by the big company or can we go on our own whim and do that sort of thing? Because I just developed something, a clone of Dropbox at the organization because Dropbox is not considered legit at my company so I had to come up with a new idea. Okay, so let's talk about some of the other trends that might be driving your business. DR presumably is one. So everybody talks about, well backup is insurance, I hate buying insurance, I want to get more out of it. Even though disaster recovery is insurance too, it's important insurance and so, are you trying to extend your backup and recovery into disaster recovery? Yes, how are you doing that? As of right now, we are using backup exact. There's a little hiccup here and there that I'm still trying to figure out how to fix, but we do have the DR between two sites in the beginning that my manager won the rollout and we do do files, folders, you name it, even including virtualizations. We do have a secondary server that does the tapes also, which we're trying to transition into the whole DR so we can do files and then after that we can do the whole tape, dump it to tape and then send it off to Iron Mountain. Your hiccup is a technical issue? It's a technical issue, but other than that, it's we're trying to figure out what's causing it because one site will go from perfectly being okay, but when we try to send trillions of data over to the other thing, it's mostly it turns into the network almost. But right now we are trying to figure out is it network-based or is it something else? Well, this is a challenge, right? Because you've got all this distributed data and you've got to make sure it's all consistent. You know, you think about point in time copies. Oh yes. When things are distributed all over the place, well, which is the point in time? So how are you sort of dealing with some of those challenges? With dealing with that is pretty much figuring out, one example of trying to do with that was we had our technical publications people and I got a message on our corporate messenger saying, I kind of screwed up, can you help me? And I go, what did you do? I kind of overwrote this and I would do is go through the thing, go through the management thing with Beck, was that going, what day was it? I went through this thing, how far back do you need to go? Oh, I need to go about a month. Okay, here you go. So it's okay. And so when you do a recovery like that, how do you validate that the data is consistent with what the business user wants? The business user's responsibility presumably, they have to look at it and say, okay, Kevin, thank you. You got me what I needed or can you go back a little further? That has happened too. What I do with my people at work is that, especially with the technical publication people is, I ask them, okay, what happened on this day? Oh, I overwrote this, okay. From that point in the past, what haven't you written over and how far can I go back? Oh, you can go back this far. I'm like, okay, here's your date range. I can give you these two files. Oh, yes, please recover it. And I go, okay, I'm going to put in these files and folders. Here you go. So what are you looking for in a backup software vendor? I did a little preview upfront and the market's exploding. Yes. You're seeing some companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars, obviously Veritas is a leader along with three or four others. They have most of the market. Everybody wants a piece of that action. So I'm sure you're getting knocks on the door every day. You're getting inundated emails, switch to us. So what do you look for in a data protection vendor? Why Veritas, are you sticking with those guys? Are you thinking about switching? Maybe give us some color there. Right now, with Veritas, we have had, before I started, they used to be with Symantec and then Symantec got bought up by Veritas which what happened. So they've been with this company in the past why I would have been told is that they've been with Symantec since back in the 14. Like way before the backup exact 2015 or the latest one that just came out. We've been looking at Veeam. At the time when Veeam was looking at us, oh, all we do is virtuals. Okay, that kind of helps us but our main thing is if something bad happens, can you do files for us? No. And I've been inundated with them through CDW saying, oh, so and so can help me. I'm like, you guys do virtuals. Yeah, so what has changed? I kind of stuck with backup exact just because I've used it over the four years I've been here. I used it before in a previous company so I have some background. But other than that, I've just, I've seen a thing where I've been forced with some of the applications at work, I've had to have gone to open source. I have gone to WinBong too. I've been going to Red Hat Linux Enterprise. And the main concern that I have is, yes, we can do Oracle and everything else for SQL. What about my SQL server? Oh, we don't do that. So I have to do a virtual machine backup on that virtual. So when talking to Veritas technical people, they claim, like test this with a customer, they claim they can do a lot of different use cases. You mentioned my SQL, they talk about being able to do no SQL and other unstructured data, whereas some others might have to partner with a specialist. Do you find that Veritas actually has that kind of hardened stack across a lot of different use cases or do you like them to do more? What's other to do with this? I would like them to do more because I gave them one scenario where we've actually used one of our test clients. We do test client type of stuff called TestRail by Gerrock. And I've asked them multiple times, I have a big SQL database in WinBong too. How can I back that up? And I've been asked multiple times, oh, all we do is Oracle. And I go, I understand my SQL is open source, but I know there's Postgres, Postgres is like my SQL. It's like a fork of it, but at least give me that ability. You mentioned your Red Hat customer as well as others, but what do you think of the IBM acquisition, announced acquisition of Red Hat? Does that make you nervous? It doesn't make me nervous. You're going back to the days of the big IBM. We used to be big and then they started branching out, selling off stuff to Lenovo and all that type of stuff. I just see them going, oh crap, we kind of sold off, get some pieces here, we're gonna come back. Shrink to grow and we're not growing, so. Okay, but as a customer of Red Hat, you're not concerned about it. You feel like Red Hat's gonna be stay pure. If they keep the status quo that they have done and everything, don't mess with anything, anything like that, be able to have consumers play with what there's out there, like Fondora, go right ahead. Do whatever you want to do. If you got the money to burn, go ahead and do more development on stuff. I would love to see IBM do more with Red Hat. So it's awesome to have a practitioner on who knows whether all the skeletons are buried, but you're still sticking with Veritas is from what I'm understanding. I'll give you the last word, final thoughts. Veritas, to me, in a nutshell, if they keep on innovating on what they've been doing and making the product better, what they've been doing through the previous versions that I've dealt with, I think they're gonna, in my opinion, they will probably outbeat for Veeam in terms of backup stuff. Because I know those are the two big players as Veritas and Veeam are doing the backups. And right now, Veeam is probably playing catch up because ever since they told us, oh, we do files instead of just doing virtuals. Well, Kevin, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. You too. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE from Chicago. Right back.