 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. We're on day three. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. My co-host is John Troyer and we're very excited to be welcoming a CUBE alumni, the CEO of Zidara Storage, Nelson Nahum. Welcome back to theCUBE, Nelson. Hi, thank you, Lisa, how are you? Good, good to have you here. So, Nelson, from your website, you say scalable, elastic, cost-effective enterprise storage as a service. What is this? How does this make Zidara unique? Yeah, we are unique because of what we provide is a cloud storage solution that has all the capabilities of enterprise storage, you know, the security, performance, isolation, fully management by the customer, block, file, object storage. All this as a service at the customer side. So, we are the only one company that can send all the equipment to the customer that the center, the customer, don't pay for anything only for what they use. If we ship 200 drives and they start using 10, they pay for 10 and then they start using another 10, they will pay for 20. And if they want at some point to shrink, they shrink. So, it's totally elastic in the sense of the agility for the provisioning, but at the same time it's elastic in the price, so the customer pay only for what they use. So, this is your fifth or sixth time at VMworld with Zidara. You guys have a booth here on your website, you're inviting people, hey, come by your booth, talk to us about the Zidara storage cloud. What is the Zidara storage cloud? How do VMworld users benefit from it? Yeah, so VMworld users, as you know, they use a lot of storage and enterprise storage capabilities, performance is very important, reliability is very important. This show is the most popular storage show, I would say, because of the need of enterprise storage in VMworld environment. But the reason why are coming to our booths is because they want to move to an OPEX model even if they want to have this in their own data center and we provide that. It's not only OPEX model, it's not only the financing of the equipment, it's also the fact that we manage the equipment remotely. So, the customer don't need to use their own engineer to manage and learn new equipment and so on. If there is a failure, we have a DevOps team that can do everything remotely and immediately act on an issue. As well, one of the important thing that happened with this new model is that customers are not locked with the technology. We as a service provider have the incentive to have the best technology, best price performance for the customer at any time. Well, let me jump in there and let's talk about hardware for a second, right? The one thing about storage is it keeps advancing, keeps getting cheaper, a lot of people out there still running spinning disks, Flash and now NVMe, the generations are changing, the densities are getting higher. You have to invest now to get the next generation of performance out of it for your workloads. Talk a little bit about how you as this service provider who basically provides the hardware you have to take on the hardware costs, how are you looking at this, where we are on the curve? Are there shortages in production? What is that doing to pricing? And what's the risk model both for you and for the enterprise then in this equation as we move more to Flash now, say? Yeah, really good question. So actually this is basically we take out from the customer, not only the risk, the fact that very quickly the system becomes obsolete. So Flash is a good example, right? There is all the time new innovations around Flash. People predicted a few years ago that Flash will be extremely cheap. Actually it's going up the price. So people that buy today are all Flash array and they calculate the ROA over five to seven years, they are overspending because at some point the Flash will go down and there is the new technology and the higher capacity drives, et cetera, et cetera that they are paying today for what is the cost today. So our customer, for example, rely on us. So they say, okay, Zadara is my storage expert and this storage outsourcing. And what we do is we provide, because we are as a service and our incentive is to have the customer forever with us. It's not a three-year lease or four-year lease, it's a day-to-day working together with the customer and be the provider forever. So we have the incentive to provide the best technology at the right price to the customer. A good example I can tell you last year at our company summit, we used to have a SAS 10K RPM drive that were the enterprise drives. And people that have our systems with those drives may start it two years ago, may start it one year ago, maybe six months ago, or even three months ago. At some point we say, you know what, we will provide Flash at lower cost per gigabyte that's spinning this, okay? And not only that, we will do that migration online. The customer will not feel anything. And at the end of the migration, the customer will have higher performance Flash. And guess what, the invoice, the next invoice will go down. And this is the kind of thing that we do that when you buy CapEx, you cannot do. Well, Nelson, talk a little bit maybe about to the customers, this consumption model, right? As a service, OpEx, that translates very well to the cloud, cloud consumption models. You partner with all the major clouds, you can have data up there as well. Your customer base, do you see people adopting the hybrid model? Where are we in that journey to the public cloud? Where are people keeping their eggs and in which basket these days? So, yeah, as you know, our system can be on premise and can be consumed from the major public cloud, Amazon, Azure, Google, we will announce next month another one that- There are more than just the three? Yeah, yeah. There's another one. So, they can consume us in both. I will say until two years ago, the market was divided in the people that want to be all cloud or private cloud or inside our data center. Today, 100% of our customers have both, basically. Except for the very small start that may start in the cloud. Even the one that after they're getting bigger, they have multiple environments. So, I will say today, the landscape is that people have both because there are things that it's better to do in the public cloud for bursting and for scalability, but there are things that it's better to do on premise. So, it's no longer a private versus public, it's hybrid, I guess. And speaking of that, and you mentioned that Zodara partners with some big cloud providers, Amazon, Google, Azure, and then there's a to be announced soon, what have the announcements that you've heard at VMworld this year, what have this meant to you with the VCF on AWS, that was announced Monday, then we heard yesterday about the pivotal container service with Google. What does that signify to you in terms of the market trends? Is it in line with what you expected? Yeah, so actually we were, I guess, the first company to partner with Amazon and cross connect to Amazon, first storage company. Okay, they're not the first company, first storage company. And people will say, why you will do that, it's better to sell the box and things like that. So, our product was built with cross connectivity and integration with Amazon and Google and the major cloud immediately, right? So, we are multi-tenants that is necessary for the cloud but the main thing that we do is that we do a really good job of separating the tenants between them that is unique and this is why enterprises prefer to use our storage even in the cloud. So, customer of us has dedicated drive, they have dedicated controller, they get the networking even and can attach the cloud storage solution to their own Active Directory and have all these capabilities that they will have on premise. So, we started in this way and I think that now we see more and more, even VMware and NetApp and those that they were classical on premise going to in the same direction. It's actually very good for us. I'm a little interested in the container story here, right? A lot of talk about containers here at the show. On prem, even the hyper-converged story, talk about containers, you're running workloads and storage, containers, super useful for that. Obviously in the cloud, what's the Zidara service with containers and how does that work? Yeah, definitely. So, we launched two years ago a very unique service that allow a customer to run a Linux container inside the storage. So, inside the cloud storage solution, they can run their own code. Why we did that, there were many customers that have millions of files and they're reading and writing from a VM outside the storage, introduce latency. One of our customers had billion files. And billion files, if every time you cut one millisecond it's translating in a long period of time. The other thing that is interesting with our service is that storage, by definition, you can write or read data. You cannot get a synchronous notification, hey, a file was changed. But if you run the application in a Linux container inside the storage, then we can provide this type of notification and say, hey, each time that a new file JPEG come to the file system, we will notify the Linux container and the customer can trigger many application or many service that will do something with the data, at zero latency. So, zero latency, nothing to manage. They don't need external VMs. And also, they get the capability of notifications from inside the file system. Nice. I'm the container front. I'm glad you brought that up, John. Are you seeing any industries in particular that are early adopters of this or that are coming to Zara saying, hey, we want to go the container direction. We need some advice here. You talked about a customer with billions of files. Are you seeing this, any sort of industry specificity or is it more size of company where container technologies are going to be meeting? Most of our customers that use container, they use for a specific service. They will not run a full blown application in a container. They still run VMs. But there are some services that benefit from zero latency and from having this notification that they can run in our side. So, I think it's not per industry, but more per type of service within the industry that they need to do. Okay. Another thing I saw on your website was that Zara was chosen as a 2017 red herring top 100 North American winner. You joined fellow winners, Google, Skype, Twitter, innovation, it's a really hot topic. So, I'm sure that that was pretty cool. Michael Dell talked about innovation yesterday and how important it is to innovate with customers. Tell us a little bit as we close up here about how Zara is innovating together with your customers. Yeah, great question. So, we started, I mean, I am an engineer from my background. So, I like to innovate and have a new product. I also am a firm believer that especially a company like us that is not the big companies, we need a really differentiated product. We don't want to compete on the cheapest thing and with Amazon, for example, we need to provide really high value. So, in order to provide high value, we need to innovate. I believe that as the time goes on, there's more and more opportunities for innovation and this is what you keep seeing new startups coming along because it's a non-stop journey and getting the best value for the customer and nothing is more rewarding when you have an idea and people, we start developing that and then suddenly customers are using and they like that. This is the best reward that we can have. And it's probably rewarding for them, I would imagine that they are able to be influencing to you. In our case, because we are a smaller company, we do summits every year, we invite customers a little bit lower among the VM world, but we invite customers and we have the interaction with the customers and they can strongly influence the roadmap. We typically ask about what are the main issues and we try to innovate in this way. It's a good thing to have a really good roster of, we have worldwide customers today and everywhere in the world and when you put everybody together, it's a really good experience. So as we wrap here, where can folks go? I imagine the Zadara website to learn more in about a month of this new announcement that Zadara's going to be making. Yeah, ZadaraStorage.com is the place. And we offer free trials and the nice thing about our service is that it's very easy to try. You just go register and there's no moving parts. It's, we have a one week free trial and you like, you stay, you don't like, you don't stay. Fantastic, well Nelson, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE and sharing with us some of the great things that are going on. Thank you very much, it was a pleasure again. And we'll be watching to see what comes out in about a month's time at ZadaraStorage.com. Definitely, it will be very important. All right, you heard it here first. All right, from my co-host, John Troyer for our guest Nelson Nahum. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back.