 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 19, brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here at Moscone Center, Google Cloud Next 2019, hashtag Google Next 19. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman, this is day two for us. Anthony Lai is here, Senior Vice President General Manager of the Cloud Data Services Business Unit at NetApp, CUBE Alarm, and Lewis Verzi, who's a Senior Cloud Engineer at Cloud Health. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. I'm sorry, Cardinal Health. I got cloud in the brain. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. Lewis, let's start with you. A little bit about Cardinal Health, what you guys are all about. Tell us about the business. Sure. Cardinal Health is a global supply chain, medical product services company. We service hospitals, pharmacies throughout the world. Where our drivers are delivering cost-effective solutions to patients right throughout the world. Awesome, and we're going to get into that. Anthony, you've been on theCUBE a couple of times here. Almost a year since we last at this show, it's grown quite a bit. Good thing Moscone is new and improved. He's got all these new customers here. Give us the update on what's, look back a year, what's transpired, what are the highlights for you? Oh, for NetApp, we've achieved a tremendous amount. I mean, we were a Google partner of the year, which was quite nice to receive an award for the hard work. We have a very special relationship with Google. We actually engineer directly into the Google console, our services, the products that are sold by Google, which gives us a very unique value proposition. We just keep adding. We add more services and we add more regions, and we continue to sort of differentiate the basic services that customers are now using for secondary workloads and increasingly very large primary workloads. We're going to get into it and learn more about the partnership, but thinking about what's going on at Cardinal Health. Question for you, Lewis, is what are the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy and how you're dealing with those? Sure, there's a few things, and I'm sure this is the same in many industries, right? We're facing cost pressures. We need to deliver solutions at a lower cost than we have been in the past. We need to move faster. We need to have agility to be able to respond to changes in the marketplace. So, on-prem didn't give us a lot of that flexibility to turn those levers in any of those three areas. Those three things have really driven our push into the cloud. All right, Lewis, let's dig into that a little bit. You can kind of, do you still have on-prem as part of your solution? We still have some, so we've been working over the past two years to migrate workloads out of our data center into the cloud. We're about 80% of the way there. There's going to be some workloads. iSeries doesn't run in the cloud very well. You know, we've got some... We were just joking about that earlier today. Yes, yes, yes, lots of things, but in the back corner somewhere, I've got that iSeries running under the main frame. Are you working on that, Anthony? Trying to, trying to. We're blessed, we're blessed. Lewis is a customer of ours, and we enable him to run some pretty heavy on-prem workloads that required NFS can now run production on Google Cloud. Yeah, and you're basically trying to make that experience seamless, right? As much as you can. I mean, talk about that partnership with Google. What are the challenges that you guys are trying to tackle? I mean, just going to refer to one. That's a great question. I mean, you know, what we see is that there's a sort of a pivot with the cloud, that traditional IT people thought horizontally, and they try and sort of, you had a storage team, and you had a security team, and you had a networking team. In the cloud, it sort of pivots 90 degrees, and you have people that own workloads. And the workload people aren't experts in every single thing, and so they go to the cloud, assuming that the cloud itself will take care of a lot of that problem for it. So we worked with Google, and we built a service. We didn't build it for a storage guy to configure and undo the bolts and nuts. We built it like dial tone, that there is, the NFS is always on in Google Cloud, and you come and provision an endpoint, and you just tell us how much capacity you want, and how much performance, and that's it. It takes about eight seconds to establish a volume in Google Cloud that may take through trouble tickets and IT capital purchases about six months to do. Yeah, Anthony, actually one of my favorite interviews last year is I talked to Dave Hitz at your event, and he talked about when we first started building it, we built something that storage people would love, and you shot him down and said, no, no, no, this needs to be a cloud first cloud solution. Louis, I want to poke at, you actually said price is a main driver for cloud agility, absolutely, but bring this inside a little bit. I know you're speaking at the show a year, people always say, it's like, hey, cloud, is it easy? Is it cheap? Well, devil's in the details there, so would love to hear your experience there, and how less expensive translates in your world. Sure, so when we were looking for something, we tried to get away from NAS when we were moving to the cloud, and we just can't do it, right? There's, we have a lot of COTS applications, a lot of processes that you just have to have NAS, right? And we were looking for something, as Anthony described, that with a click of a button, our developers can spin up their own storage. The price point was lower than frankly, you could get just provisioning the type of disk that you'd need in the cloud, and that was acceptable for most of our workloads. The ability to tier, right? There's three classes of storage in the cloud volume services. Most of our workloads are running on the standard tier, but we've got some workloads where they've got higher performance, and we provision them right on the standard, and when they are doing their testing, they're like, hey, we need a little bit more. With a click of a button, they're at a higher tier of storage. No downtime, no restarting, no moving storage. It just works. So the cost, the agility, we're getting all of that out of the solution. How do you manage those SLAs? Is that sort of an automated way, or are you sort of monitoring things, and what's the process for managing which SLAs? The SLAs on the different tiers of storage. We provide them. Yeah, we're not monitoring that. We're on the whole floor. So it's all automated? Yeah, we run it, and we stand by SLA guarantees, throughput guarantees, and we take the pain away. So it's like to say, what people want to do in the public cloud is innovate, not administrate. And generally, when people say cloud's cheaper, it's because I think they've decided that their better use of the dollar is in application development data science, and then they can retire IT people and put application developers into the business. So what Google does, I think, incredibly well is it has infrastructure to remove sort of the legacy barrier and the traditional stuff, and then it has this wonderful new innovation that maybe a few companies in the world could use it, but most people couldn't afford to put TPUs or GPUs in their data centers. So they hit you with really two very strong value propositions. And maybe what they're saying is, when they say the cloud is cheaper, maybe it's better ROI. I'm spending money elsewhere that's giving me a better return. Yeah, I mean, do things that make you different and not the same, right? Right, right, so storage strategy, I mean, I'm sure there should be such a thing anymore. There's workload strategy. Back in the day, when you used to work at EMC, it was I buy EMC for block, NetApp for file. Things have changed in terms of how you run a strategy and think about your business. So what is your strategy when you think about infrastructure and storage and workloads? So we really don't want to have to focus on an infrastructure strategy, right? Right now, we're mostly running traditional workloads in the cloud, running on VMs. We're working towards getting a lot of workloads into GKE, using that service in Google Cloud Platform. Can you just step us back for a second? How'd you end up on Google? Why'd you choose them versus some of the alternatives out there? So we started our cloud journey a couple of years ago, started out with really the main cloud player in town like most people have. And about a year in, not all of our needs were being met. That company decided to enter our business segment. So it starts asking some questions, people start asking some questions there. So that prompted us to do an RFP to try to see, technologically really were we on the right cloud platform? And we compared the top three cloud providers and ended up on GCP from a technological decision, not just a business decision. Gave us the ability to have a top level organization where we could provision projects to application teams. They could work autonomously within those projects, but we still had a shared VPC, a shared network where we could put enterprise guardrails in place to protect the company. But Dominic Price was on earlier, he's with Google and he was saying some nice things about NetApp. But I'd like to hear your perspective is why NetApp, what's unique about NetApp, what's so special about NetApp in the cloud? Sure, a few of the things that Anthony talked about were really differentiators for us. We didn't have to go sign a PO with another company. We didn't need to commit to a certain amount of storage. We didn't need to build our own infrastructure, even in the cloud. The service was just there. You do a little bit of upfront setup to connect your networking. And we can provision storage whenever we want. We can change the speed, the throughput that we're getting on that storage at any point in time. We can grow that storage with no downtime. Those are all things that were really different in other solutions that were out there. I mean, it's interesting infrastructure was really still even in the cloud. It's kind of like a bunch of Lego blocks. And what we always said was, people want to buy the pirate ship. They don't want to like have to dig in all these bins. And so we sort of said, let's build storage kind of like a pirate ship, that you just know that the end result is a pirate ship. And I don't have to understand how to pick all those pieces. Someone's done that for me. So, you know, we're really trying to sort of, I would say we like to create easy buttons. You know, people just hit the easy button and go, someone else is going to make sure it's there. Someone else is going to make sure it performs. I am just a consumer of it. So Anthony, we've talked to you and NetApp. You play across all the major cloud providers out there. And you've got an opinion when it comes to Kubernetes. Help give us the, you know, where, what you think about what you've heard this week at Google and how they differentiate themselves in the market. You know, I think it's great, you know, that Google, I think, open sourced Kubernetes. I think that was an industry changing event. And you know, I think Kubernetes really starts to redefine application development. I think portability is obviously a big thing with it. But for an application developer, the VM was something that somebody added afterwards. And it was sort of like, oh no, we overbought infrastructure. So now we'll virtualize it. But the cost of virtualizing things was so expensive. You know, you put an OS in the VM and Kubernetes was built and was sort of attracted to the developer. And so the developers are coding and refactoring. And I just, you just look around now and you just see the groundswell on Kubernetes. CNCF is here. And the contributions that are being made to Kubernetes are astonishing. It's reached a scale way bigger than Linux. The amount of innovation that's going into Kubernetes, I think is unstoppable now. It's going to be the standard if it isn't already. Well, Lewis, I'd love you to expand. You said, it sounded like you moved to the cloud first, but now you're going down that application modernization. You know, how does Kubernetes fit into that and what other pieces? Because it's changing the application to typically be the long pole in the tent and modernization. Yep, so Cardinal took the approach of we need to get everything into the cloud and then we can begin modernizing our applications because if we tried to modernize everything up front, it would take us 10 to 15 years to get to the cloud and we couldn't afford to do that. So lifting and shifting machines was about 70 to 80% of our migration to the cloud. What we're looking at now is modernizing some of our applications. Our e-commerce solution will be running on Kubernetes very shortly and we'll be taking other workloads there in the future. That's definitely the next step, the next evolution. Okay, unicloud or multi-cloud? That is the question. We are multi-cloud. There are certain needs that can only be met in certain clouds, right? So Google Cloud is our primary cloud provider, but we're also using Amazon for specific workloads. And you use NetApp across those clouds? Correct. Okay, so what's that like? Is the NetApp experience across clouds sort of still coming together? Is it sort of highly similar? What's that experience like? So it's using NetApp in both solutions is the same. I think there's some stuff that we're looking forward to that where things will be tied together a little bit more. So it brings me to the roadmap question. That's presumably, got your best people working on that? Oh yeah, no, no. I mean, so look, I think storage is that sort of wonderful business because data is heavy. It's hard. It doesn't like to be moved and it needs to be managed. It's the primary asset of your business these days. So we have, you know, we release continuously new features onto the service. So, you know, we've got full SMB NFS support. We're adding NFS V4 support. We're adding a backup service. We're integrating NFS into Kubernetes, which is a very frequently asked response. A lot of Kubernetes developers want to build stateful apps and block has a real problem when the container fails. NFS doesn't. So we're almost seeing a renaissance with Kubernetes and NFS. So, you know, we just, we subscribe to that constant innovation and we'll just continue to build out more and more services that allow I think cloud customers to, as I said, to sort of spend their time innovating while we take care of the administration for them. 2006, Stu, Floria and I wrote a manifesto on storage as a service. I didn't know it would take this long, but I'm glad you got there. Last question, Lewis, cool stuff you're working on, fun projects, what's floating your boat these days? My time these days is the cloud. As I said, we went to the cloud for cost savings. You can spend more money than you anticipate in the cloud. I know it's a shocker. So that's one of the things that I'm focusing our efforts on right now is making sure that we, we keep those costs under control, still deliver the speed and agility, but keep an eye on those things. Anthony, put a bow on Google Next 2019, partner of the year. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. You know, I would say, you know, to put on a bow on it, it's great to see Thomas again. You know, I worked for Thomas at Oracle for about six and a half years. He's an incredibly bright man and I think he's going to do a lot of really good things for Google. As you know, I worked for his twin brother, George, and they are insanely bright people and really fun to work with. So for me, it was great to come up here and see Thomas and I shook hands when we won the award. And it was kind of surreal. It'd be both like, you know, we're both at a Google event. So it was fun. I got to make an observation. I was saying to a student in the keynote today, say we're both Patriots fans. So Bill Belichick, he has progeny, coaches leave, they try to be him. And it just doesn't work. Thomas Curian is not trying to be Larry. I'm not sure they, you know, share a lot of the same technical philosophies but he's got his own way of doing things and his own style. So I really appreciate that. It's a great hive of Google, a great hive. Really is. All right, guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, John Furrier is also in the house. We're here at Google Next 2019, Google Cloud Next. We'll be right back right after this short break.