 TheCube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE. Innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Steve Kenniston. Stephen Manley is here. He's the CTO of the D-PAD group, Data Protection. Availability. Look at that. There we go. New games, new faces. Some same old faces, right? Good stuff. So since you've come on to the scene, we have seen certainly new messaging, new vision put forth, and we're seeing the results of that stake that you put in the ground. Obviously, Guy has handed that as well, and a big team. So you've got to feel good about that. No, no. It's always cool, right? One of the challenges, or one of the interesting things when you go to, let's face it, a larger company. People say, well, are you going to be able to innovate inside a large company? The counter to that, of course, is if you can innovate in a large company, the impact you have on the market is tremendous. So I feel like we've done a really good job of getting a lot of new stuff out there, really driving a new message, really changing the way customers behave, so that, yeah, I guess when I go home from work at the end of the day, you feel like you haven't just made an impact to one or two customers, but really, frankly, thousands, which is really cool. So we were talking in the last segment, we had Jason Buffington on from ESG and Steve Kenniston that we're talking that, and we had Frank Slupin on last week at ServiceNow. He said to say, hi to everybody. But the reason I brought it up is because the disk-based backup market or the purpose-built backup market, all of you want to describe it, is bigger than the tape market that it ostensibly replaced, which maybe surprises some people. It's somewhat surprised me because you've got lower cost, similar use case, backup, pretty clear, but yet the market's bigger. Why is that? You've found new ways to use disk-based backup, new use cases? I think that's a lot of it, really, is that when you come down to it, I think the backup market as a whole is evolving. So when data domain came on the scene, one of the things that we talked about was really disk-replacing tape, and the old tape-socks move-on motto that data domain had. But the vision inside data domain and then inside backup recovery systems at EMC and now the data protection availability division is not just that we want to replace tape, but really that backup as a whole in the traditional backup mindset really needs to evolve into this more data protection as a service mindset. And so I think what we're seeing is not just a one-for-one swap out of everything tape can do, data domain and backup to disk can do, but more. So there's more value getting pushed into that part of the stack from the point of view of disaster recovery, of archival, as well as the operational recovery you get out of backup. And so it actually makes sense that the market's gotten bigger because, frankly, we're doing way more than tape is ever able to do. And you mentioned services, of course, you know, Silicon Valley, the big terms, cloudification, or sassification, so everything's becoming as a service. And we talk in theCUBE a lot about IT alignment and the role of the CIO. One of the biggest challenges that people tell us in the Wikibon community of going to IT as a service is aligning with the business requirements. So what are you seeing in terms of data protection as a service as potentially leading some of that portfolio? I think it speaks to something that we talk about a lot internally, which is, you know, as much as we love the technology, as much as we love getting in to validate the value and return on investment and all the things we do, when you come down to it, this is still a people business. And one of the things that we're very cognizant of is that the role of the backup administrator is changing. And really, I think it's a much more vibrant career path than it was a decade ago. And what I mean by that is, for a long time, the backup admin's role was you wake up and your first thing to do is to look at the set of failed backups and then you spend all day triaging them, kind of hoping that nothing goes wrong during the day where you have to run a recovery and then you go to bed and you know what, you know what you're going to wake up and do tomorrow? The same exact thing. Probably different servers are going to fail their backups, but it's the same job. What we've told backup teams is, as we move more and more of the, I'd say the protection flow into the infrastructure, what we've done with the VMware integration, what we've done with the integration with applications like Oracle and SAP and SQL, is that it frees up the backup team from that daily grind into what higher level business services can you offer. And this is really being able to connect to the business I can do a lot better job now of really understanding and driving what are our retention requirements really for compliance purposes, for best practices? How can I help the business get more agile and accelerate? How can I really help find the information people need so we can get the right data in the right place on the right kind of device to the right individuals? And that's a conversation that a backup admin a decade ago wouldn't have even considered having. We've got protection administrators who are connecting with lines of business and connecting with chief security officers and compliance officers and playing a vibrant role in the business that, again, I think really speaks well for the kind of, frankly, the people that I spend a lot of time with. Yeah, so that's pretty interesting. And you talk about how the software has actually gotten a lot more intelligent in working closer with the application. And I've seen over my career, right, this notion of I think as you get data protection closer to where the data is actually being created, it drives a whole new paradigm. Are you seeing some of that? It kind of conjures up this whole copy data servicing which I know you've talked a little bit about before. So what's your kind of take on that? Yeah, so I think there's two parts to go with it. One is, yeah, you want to, and I often tell this to people that one of the challenges that any backup agent has, no matter how brilliant it is, is that once a day it's waking up and it sees this vast ocean of data and it looks and says, all right, time to start root forcing my way through this. Whereas the layers of my infrastructure, my storage systems, or my hypervisors, or my applications, because they're in the data path, they know what to backup, they know what to recover. So they can have a degree of scalability that's an order of magnitude 20 times, 30 times faster than anything a backup agent can do. And the second thing that comes with it is, and they will tend to keep the data in the native format rather than bundling it up in the traditional proprietary tar ball. So really freeing you up to do more with the data. But I think the other part that sometimes get lost, when people look at copy data services and hybrid clouds and all these sorts of things, they say, all right, I want to be able to leverage my data more. Where I see a lot more productivity happening in environments right now is leveraging the metadata more. It's the information about the information. And as we all know, this must be a really key thing because the NSA is busy trying to get all of it. So when you think about it though, the metadata lets me understand where data growth is happening. It lets me understand, oh, certain data is leaking to servers or environments where it's not supposed to be getting to. The metadata helps me understand where the growth is coming from a geographical standpoint or a certain application or a group. So we see a lot more people saying, I've got this vast treasure trove of metadata that's stuck in my backup catalog. If I could unlock that and unleash that, again, I can move myself from just being I'm here as the insurance policy in case something goes wrong too. Every day I can go to other parts of the business and say, did you know this is happening? And the customers we've worked with that have done that. I mean, they're rock stars inside their environment. I met a CIO who said, my backup guy comes to me once a day with, did you know this is happening on your network or did you know this server suddenly is losing all its data? Turns out it was a virus attack. He said, this was something I never thought I'd hear from my backup team. They're proactively managing my environment. It's all about the metadata. I think you've actually hit on something that I talked a little bit about in a blog post and not a very popular blog, but I still think that there's, you almost take that whole copy data services thing and it's bifurcated. There's the copy data services, it's the heavy lifting, it's the deduplication, it's the data movement, it's all the things you come to expect from a protection product. There's also copy data management, right? And that's where the metadata comes in and understanding what do I have, where is it, what can I do with it, what should I be doing with it. You know, a lot of people say, oh, this copy data is going to be great, I can have one copy of my data. You know what, people don't have one copy today because they don't want one copy, they want a few copies. So how do I best understand how many should I have, right? Exactly, exactly. And you know, it's interesting for me that I had a customer and it was one of those meetings where we were talking about, hey look, we're going to replicate this number of copies and we're going to get your data there and it's going to be really efficient. And the first thing the customer said to me is if you don't have some sort of catalog that helps me understand what's inside those copies, all you've made is a really shiny fancy bucket of bits. Now I'm, nothing against buckets, but if you can't tell me what the heck's actually going on, I'm not really willing to pay that much for the bucket. And so what really tied it together is we said, right and we can help you do the granular recovery you're going to need for your objects. And we can tell you exactly what's going on in terms of where your unstructured data is. That's when that customer said, bingo. Okay, now that's a solution because it really is all around, you're now helping me manage my data. So like you said, it's not just create a service that gets versions of data stored somewhere. It's give me a service that helps me manage that data. And when you get to that, then you got something. So Stephen, we've talked a lot on theCUBE with you about the whole vision of data protection as a service. So where are we in that vision, in that journey and specifically what things have you done recently in the portfolio to advance that vision? So there's a couple things. There's the structural thing that we did at the beginning of the year, which was we shifted from the backup recovery system division to the data protection and availability division. And that was a really key shift for us because we brought in specifically RecoverPoint, Vplex, and Data Protection Advisor. And what that really lets us do from the Vplex perspective, really helps us fill out the continuum of protection. And I think Jason talks about it as a spectrum, a continuum, however you want to view it. We had the archive in place, we had the operational recovery in place. With RecoverPoint we used Vplex to recovery. With Vplex we picked up availability. So you can really span across whatever you need. With Data Protection Advisor we pulled in something that says, no matter how you make the copy of data whether it's through our traditional backup software or RecoverPoint or someone else's backup software or someone else's data protection technology this is a tool that's going to treat them all as first class citizens so that I get that metadata management. So even though that wasn't necessarily a development from our existing engineers just bringing them into the division I think shifts the mindset from it's all about a separate product and a separate buying cycle to more and more data protection becomes a service inside your infrastructure. So that's one big chunk that I couldn't be more excited about. I'm on the phone with David Goulden, we need this technology. I didn't actually say it that way because he's David Goulden but mentally I was banging just on the table. It was emphasis. Yeah, exactly. Organically, you've seen a bunch of interesting releases from us this year in terms of what we've been working on. So you've seen, for example the new network release get a lot more involved in terms of again snapshot management, cataloging replication management because again those copies even if the networker isn't the one piping them through a traditional networker agent those are still viable copies that you want to be able and recover from. Similarly, on the Avamar side a lot of work in terms of really connecting in with a lot of the vCloud services and REST based APIs so that again this can be managed at cloud scale and then obviously on the data domain side really enhancing the system so that we can do more than just traditional backups. More and more support, a billion files so that the same system can be used for not just backup, not just disaster recovery but more and more for archive. So again really filling out that portfolio so that the teams that buy into this aren't just offering backup as a service now but they can offer the entire hey let's talk availability, let's talk DR, let's talk operational recovery, let's talk archive and really pull those together as an end-to-end full portfolio service. We're out of time but I've got a question from the crowd. Great, let's do it. Is there anything specific about SAP data protection that we should know about sort of similar philosophy? What's unique about SAP if anything? So I'd say first and foremost as we tend to go through these things we look and we say alright I want to enable the SAP admin to have as much control over their backup and recovery as possible because again saving that one phone call, that one trouble ticket to the backup team, that's a win. So we recently announced that SAP and SAP HANA, we have direct boost support in the data domain so the app admin can drive it him or herself. I think SAP though also opens up a lot of what you're going to see again around this metadata discussion is SAP is not just one thing right, it's databases plus file services it's more indicative of what business applications people have and you're going to see more and more on our side around how do we tie all the technologies together in a broader application sense so that you can really get consistent backups across not just a database but really your entire business app and so I think you're going to see more and more from us there but in the short term I'd look definitely into the SAP and SAP HANA boost integration because we've already seen just tremendous uptake on those products. Awesome, transforming IT, transforming backup into data protection as a service, Stephen Manley it's always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Always great to see you Dave. Alright keep it right there everybody Stephen I'll be back with our next guest right after this.