 Hi everybody, welcome to CUBE Conversations. This is Dave Vellante and we're here at Wikibon headquarters. CUBE Conversations is a CUBE series that we run bringing in IT practitioners and other industry experts to have conversations about how they're applying technology to solve a business problem. And over the past several months we've been talking to a number of EMC data storage practitioners generally and specifically drilling in to backup. Bill Erman is here. He's the senior manager of data storage at CBTS. Bill, welcome to the CUBE. Appreciate you coming on. Why don't you start by talking a little bit about CBTS and your role there? Sure. CBTS is a part of Cincinnati Bell where Godarm starts in the late 1800s as the local phone company. So we've been around for over 140 years and in the 80s or 90s kind of figured out that information technology was here to stay. So we got into the hardware resale business and started selling servers and storage such that it existed and networking. From there we built that business out into a very successful data center business, wound up in the end having nearly a million square feet of data center space, which we IPO'd and spun off as Cyrus won. So we're still a large owner in that organization. Another area of business that we got into was really in the managed services. So our customers said, hey, you're selling this stuff. You've given us a place to put it, but we don't have the time or the bandwidth to manage it. So we got into the managed services business, everything from a router stuck in the closet in a remote office somewhere all the way up to being your entire IT department from architecture, build, run, design, the entire process. We've kind of found lately that in the last couple of years that customers were really determining that they want to acquire their IT in sort of a different model and instead of purchasing it and paying somebody else to manage it, they'd like to bring things on as a utility, do things as a managed service. So infrastructure as a service has really become an important part of our business here recently. What we're doing, things like backup as a service, storage as a service, networking as a service, telephony as a service, really all of your IT infrastructure together as a service. My role in all that here at CBTS is really to head up the storage architecture group. So when customers come to us with new business problems, I look at all the different products and services in our portfolio at CBTS and how we can apply those whether it's a product that a customer were to buy or whether it's a service that we have to offer from a backup service all the way to selling them a new storage array. I help, my team helps to architect that and solve their business problems. You guys, you got a lot going on, right? You've got this whole cloud meme happening. You're both a consumer of information technology and a provider of information technology services. So I wonder if you could dial back a few years to the environment that a lot of people tell us as well, everything was stovepipe, our network needed to be upgraded. And I'm presuming you went through kind of a similar transition. You mentioned storage as a service and backup as a service. I wonder if specifically you could talk about backup or what were some of the things that were sort of challenging you, keeping you up at night as it were if you dial back some period of time. Sure, we had a really, I would say a pretty successful backup as a service practice, it was really kind of the first in terms of storage type things. It was really the first as a service thing that we really got into. We were using IBM's TSM as the backup server. We had actually some NetApp VTLs as our backup target and then we had some regular tape libraries that we were writing long-term retention to. And it worked fairly well, but of course it was kind of our own worst enemy there and then it was very successful and the business grew and of course the capacity grew and we ran into a situation where that VTL couldn't really be expanded anymore. It wasn't really working at its best. NetApp had actually come in and essentially orphaned the product and said, hey, we bought this company, we started selling their VTLs as our own product and now we don't see a future in that, so we're getting out of that business. And really we had some pretty serious problems in terms of just trying to keep that business working on a day-to-day basis and really more importantly trying to grow it and bring in new customers. We couldn't upgrade those arrays. There was no upgrade path. It was we had to get rid of it. It wasn't going to be supported anymore. We couldn't put any more disk into it. We had to replace it and had to do something else in terms of backups. We also had another problem in that the TSM environment worked great for those customers that were in our own data center, but we had customers and we tried some beta programs to some customers that were willing to give us a shot. We tried to build out a outside of our walls service. We realized that we couldn't just be a managed service provider to those people who happen to be co-located with us. We had to be able to provide for all of our customers wherever they might be. So we tried several different products for a outside the data center outside our walls service and cloud backup service. Before it was called a cloud backup service, we had a product that I think Seagate wound up purchasing and it worked OK, but it was incredibly expensive in terms of licensing costs and incredibly complex in terms of building out appliances to put on site. And then we also tried through another acquisition that we made of another company. They had a managed backup offering built on a Seagra and that worked. It's at a small scale, didn't really scale up too well. And the other problem was that the entire infrastructure, both the vault that lived in our data center and the appliances that would go out on site to customers was all kind of white box, quite frankly, junk that we had to build ourselves and try to maintain ourselves. And the cost point just wasn't there. If we were to go out and buy brand new HP or Dell or Cisco servers and try to integrate on that, the cost was just kind of outrageous and kind of put us out of that market from cost perspective. We look at some of the other purpose built backup appliance vendors that were out there. So we were kind of stuck with this and really hard to justify cost wise customers didn't work so well. And on top of that was kind of built on a fairly shaky architecture. So you had had the dead end problem going on and you had a lot of different choices. So what did you end up doing? Well, we decided that we couldn't really take both environments and convergent into one single solution for everybody. It's obviously the first thing we wanted to do. We looked at all the different products out in the marketplace. We looked at Commvault, we talked to Symantec. We looked at Data Domain. We looked at Avamar. We looked at basically everything we could get our hands on. In the end, after doing some proofs of concept and after doing quite a lot of investigative work and talking to customers that both our customers and EMC customers, we rebuilt our in data center backup product. We kept TSM because we had such a huge install base and some of the licensing worked out pretty well for us. But we got rid of those NetApp BTLs and we replaced them with Data Domain DD-890s or excuse me DD-990s. This enabled us to scale that that entire platform way past where we had been locked in before. And it also really gave us a cost point that we were able to go in and go to some of our customers who were saying, hey, you know, your backup service is great, but, you know, wow, it's really expensive. You're way out of line with the rest of the industry and we're going to take this somewhere else. We were able to go back and say, hey, you know what? You were right. You know, our costs were kind of high. We were able to reduce our costs. We'll get fantastic DD-890s even with TSM on the Data Domain appliances. So now we can come back to you, Mr. Customers and say, hey, we can drop, we're dropping our prices to you, both for what you already have and anything that you're bringing in new. And not only that, but we're able to get much more consistent backups. We don't have the same problems with, you know, the BTLs, failing backup jobs constantly. You know, we're getting really good success rates and we've got, you know, the ability to monitor those things for growth and capacity and how well they're operating by using DPA, EMC's Data Protection Advisor, as a management platform. So it really becomes something that honestly, we don't really have to worry about at this point other than how much capacity do we have on the Data Domains and when will it be time to refresh them? Those are really the only two metrics we need to watch. On top of that, EMC was also able to work with us to get us a, you know, a utility pricing model since we're part of EMC's service provider program. So that also enabled us to be able to bring that in at a cost model that, you know, again, lowered our costs which meant we could lower our costs to our customers and provide them with a much more attractive option from a pricing standpoint. So your pricing that you're getting from the vendor is aligned with the way in which you're actually providing it to your customers? Right, right, you know, our customers are coming in and one of the great things about backup as a service is I don't have to go out as a customer and buy what I think I'm gonna need three years from now, right, I just say, hey, I need four terabytes of backup capacity today, so I'll buy four terabytes of backup capacity today and if I need more tomorrow, I'll buy more tomorrow. That's the whole point of a cloud model and as a service provider, if I'm going out and trying to use, knowing that my customers are using me like that and I try to say, all right, I need to then buy what I need, how do I account for that and how do I manage that risk? Being able to use a utility program from EMC means that I don't necessarily have to manage that risk. I can basically buy what I need today and then I can buy what I need tomorrow when I need it. So you've got pricing that better matches your business model, it's pay as you go, pay by the drink, so to speak. I'm looking for other specifics that you can give us in terms of you mentioned consistency of backups and the like. Can you share with us any details, any metrics, whatever you're comfortable sharing, proof points that you look at when you're running that business? Well, to be honest with you, while I don't have any firm numbers, what I can tell you is that we really just don't have to manage that business at this point, other than going out and acquiring new customers. We had constant backup failures previously, we had constant, essentially it was almost a 24 by seven repair job, break fix work from the managed services engineers that were responsible for the previous environment. It was constantly, how do we shoehorn more stuff into this orphan platform? Where we really, I think had our biggest wins really came in the fact that we were able to essentially carve out a new business for ourselves in terms of looking outside the walls of our data center. We took and, hey, again, as a service provider, I can't just go out and build some new service and hope I find customers. So I got to look and see, hey, who's gonna be my anchor tenant, if you will, so I can build this out. We looked at what we were doing with those two, with the Seagra and the Seagate products. We said, all right, what products can we bring in to solve that problem? And that's where Avamar really shined for us. So we were able to take those customers that were on those older deprecated platforms and we use those in aggregate as our anchor customers for our Avamar backup as a service. We call it the CBTS data protection services. We offered three different models for our customer and it's an offer, quite frankly, that we had absolutely no way to provide before. And we built it up as actually a very successful business where we can go out to a customer and say, if you just want pure cloud backup, no hardware on your site, no cost to you other than a monthly sense per gig backed up charge, we've got that with using Avamar today, a grid in one of our data centers, we can come out, put the Avamar client on your system and back it up and you're done, right? So for some of our smaller customers, it works great. It puts us into that market where before all we could do was say, well, call Carbonite or call, you know, Mosey or call somebody who's basically not me, I can't help you. It also allows us to go out into that market, you know, where we were trying with the Segra, you know, to say, hey, you know what? You've got enough data on site that if you have a failure, how do you restore that? You're gonna restore, you know, 10 terabytes of database data over the internet. I don't think you want to do that. You need a local copy. So rather than having to build some white box thing and try to support that ourselves, we can put an Avamar node on site in your location as a utility and allow you to backup locally and then replicate that back to my cloud. And that gives you kind of the best of both worlds. You get your off-site data protection and you get your local copy. And again, it's a model that we had no way to support before, you know, the other options we were looking at really designed for small, medium business. They lacked a lot of integration into databases and a lot of Unix operating systems were challenging. And having a local copy of your data was basically impossible, unless I wanted to put something out there that I had to try to support. And the other thing we can do is it's very easy. And again, this has a lot to do with EMC's deployment model and EMC service provider model, you know, for me, but I can take that same hardware and I can say, you know what? I can give you a public cloud option and put you in a shared infrastructure and a 16 node grid that I'm sharing with other customers or if you've got something, you know, or you don't need to share your data or you've got enough data to justify it, I can put you in your own, basically a private cloud. So I can put your own grid on site, I can put your own grid in my data center and provide that to you as a service as well. And again, with the Seagate product, with the Seagate product, we did not have that capability. And with PSN, there was no way we were able to stretch that outside of the data center. So, you know, because we were able to do that, we had a whole bunch of customers that we converted, but just looking at net new customers, you know, we've been able to onboard dozens of very large customers and bring them into our, you know, basically bring them into our main service and become their backup provider. And, you know, backup's great. What do you do in terms of restoring it? You know, one of our other offerings that we have is what we call virtual data center and that allows a customer to spin up VMs. Our AMR grid that they're backing up to it, they're using our service, that happens to live essentially on the same local network in our data center as the virtual data center. You know, because all our data centers are all connected. So we can do what are essentially local restores from your data that you've backed up to our grid. We can do those restores to our virtual data center. We can spin up a virtual machine on demand when you need it and restore your system to that virtual machine, bring it online, give you access to it. And I can take you from basically having absolutely no disaster recovery whatsoever to maybe not quite all the way to a warm site, but it's certainly a lot better than a cold site in terms of your recoverability. Okay, so obviously this had revenue impacts, renewal rate impacts, customer satisfaction, and competitively it now allows you to compete with the public cloud generally and specifically AWS. How do you differentiate, for example, from the public cloud guys? You know, that's I think something that's been a big challenge. You do have some customers, I think, that are gonna purchase and they're going to shop and they're going to look purely at price and they're not gonna look anywhere past, hey, I can get storage for 2.6 cents a gigabyte from Google's on, right? And you're not gonna be able to compete with that as a regional provider, and we're a fairly large organization, but we're not at their scale and we can't compete with that. But what Google and Amazon can't compete with us on is the fact that we have managed services to wrap around that, SLAs to wrap around it, and the ability to customize that, right? So you go to Google's on and you get your 2.7 cents a gig. Well, how fast is that gonna be? Is that gonna be, you're gonna run an Oracle database on that? Are you gonna run large queries on that? Is that gonna be a good SharePoint candidate? How are you gonna make that work for you? What we're able to do is leverage, not just the backup side to it, but even the production storage side and say, we'll build for you exactly what you need and then come up with a cost model on top of that that says, hey, if you're spending up an application and you say, this is tier one application, great. Here's what tier one cloud looks like and we've all kind of shook hands and agreed that that means it's gonna be maybe flash drives, maybe high speed, say S drives or whatever that is. And it's gonna be a dedicated environment where we can guarantee your performance. Most of your public cloud providers really just don't have that ability. And they also really, in a lot of cases, lack a lot of the support that we can bring. We've got in our Mason, Ohio, Enoch, which is a Northern Cincinnati suburb, we've got a 24 by 17 of people that sit up there to run our managed services. So, your environment has a hiccup. Obviously, the monitoring that you can call them, they're there to repair it, to fix it, to manage it for you. It's not just, I get four terabytes of cloud storage that then I have to try to figure out how to use. All right, Bill, we have to leave it there. That's great discussion. Thank you for your candor and the insights in your business, quite a transformation, congratulations. Well, thank you very much, I appreciate it. All right, Bill Armit, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante and this is CUBE Conversations. We'll see you next time.