 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Activio 2019, Data Driven. Brought to you by Activio. Here we are in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE at the special, at Data Driven 19, Activio's user event. Happy to bring on a CUBE alum who's a partner of Activio, Phil Buckaloo, who's General Manager of IBM Cloud Object Storage. Phil, thanks for coming back. Great, great to be here Stu. All right, so object storage, why don't you give us first just kind of an encapsulation of the kind of the state of your business today? Sure, object storage is really an extremely important business for the industry today, because really it's a new way of accessing data. It's been around obviously for a decade or so, but really it's increasingly important because it's a way to cost effectively store a lot of data to really be able to get access to that data in new and exciting ways. And with the growth in the volume of data, particularly unstructured data, like 103 zettabytes by 2023, I think I heard from the IDC guys, that really kind of shows how important being able to handle that volume of data really is. So Phil, right, I go back, think about 12 years ago, it was like all the technologists in this space were like, the future of storage is object. And I was working at one of the big storage companies and I'm like, wow, we've been doing block and file and there was this big gap out there and kind of quietly objects taken over the world because underneath a lot of the cloud services are there, objects there. So IBM made a big acquisition in the space. Talk about customers that I talk to, it's not like they come out and say, oh geez, I'm buying object storage, I'm thinking about object storage, they've got use cases and services that they're using that happen to have object underneath. Is that what you hear from your users? Yeah, there's a couple of different buying groups that exist in the object storage market today. The historic market is really super large volumes. I mean, we're unique and that the IBM acquired the Cleversafe company back in 2015 and that technology is technology we've expanded upon and it really, it's great because it can go to exabyte scale and beyond and that's really important for certain use cases. So some customers that have high volumes of videos and other unstructured data, that is really a super good fit for those clients. Additionally, clients that really have the need for highly resilient. Because the other thing that's important the way that we built our object storage is to be able to have a lot of resiliency, to be able to run across multiple data centers, to be able to use erasure coding to ensure the data is protected. That's really a large part of the value and because you can do that at scale without having downtime when you upgrade, those are really a lot of core benefits of object storage. That resiliency is kind of built into the way we do it and that was something that was just kind of a mind shift as opposed to, okay I got to have this enterprise mindset with an HA configuration and everything with N plus whatever version of it. Object's going to give you some of that built in. The other thing I always found really interesting is storing data is okay, there's some value there but how do I get leverage out of the data and there's the metadata underneath that helps. You talk about video, you talk about all these kinds of there. If I don't understand what I've got and how I leverage it, it's not nearly as valuable for me and that's something really one of the key topics at this show is how do I become data driven as the show and that I have to believe is something critically important to your customers. Absolutely and really object storage is the foundation for modern cloud native data lakes if you will because it's cost effective enough you can drop any kind of storage in there and then you can really get value from those assets wherever you are and wherever you're accessing the data. We've taken the same technology that was the exabyte scale on premise technology and we put it in the IBM public cloud and so that really allows us to be able to deliver against all kinds of use cases with the data sets that clients want and there's a lot of great innovation that's happening especially on the cloud side. We've got the ability to query that data, any kind of rectangular data with standard ANSI SQL statements and that just really allows clients to unlock the potential of those data sets. So really good innovation going on that space to unlock the value of the data that you put inside of object storage. All right, Phil, let's make the connection active use here, IBM OEMs the solution. So talk about the partnership and what customers are looking for when they're looking at that. Sure, so quite a ways prior to the partnership, our object storage team partnered up with the activity team at a large financial services customer that recognized the growth and the volume of the data that they had that had some unique use cases like cyber resiliency. They get attacked with ransomware attacks, they needed to have a standard way to have those data sets and those databases running in a resilient way against object storage that can still be mounted and used effectively immediately in case of ransomware attacks. And so that plus a lot of other traditional backup use cases is what drew the IBM cloud object storage team and the Actifio team together. Successful deployments at large customers are really where we got our traction. And with that, we also really began to notice the uptick in clients that wanted to use, they wanted to do test data management. They wanted, they needed to be able to have DevOps team that needed to spin up a replica of this database or that database very fast. And what we found was the combination of the Actifio product, which we've OEMed as IBM virtual data pipeline allows us to run those virtual databases extremely cost-effectively backed by object storage versus needing to make full replicas on really expensive block storage that takes a long time. Well, yeah, we'd actually done research on this a number of years ago. Copies are great, but how do I leverage that, right? From the developer team, I want to have something that mirrors what I have in production, not just some test data. So the more I can replicate that, the better. Phil, please go. There's some really important parts of that whole story of being able to get that data flow right to be able to go do point-in-time recoveries of those databases so that the data is accurate, but also being able to mask out that PII or sensitive information, credit card data, or others that you really shouldn't be exposing to your testers and DevOps people. Being able to have the kind of... Shouldn't because there's laws and lawsuits and security and all these things. So, Phil, we're talking a lot about data. You've actually got some new data to share with us, a recent survey that was done, share some of your data with us. Yeah, we did some, we did the ESG guys actually worked with us to build out a piece of research that looked at what would it cost to take a 50 terabyte Oracle 12C database and effectively spin up five copies the way you traditionally would so that different test teams can hammer away against that data set. And we compared that to running the VDP offering with our cloud object storage solution. Distances apart, we had one of the, with the source databases in Dallas and the destination databases in Washington, DC over a 10 gigabyte leak link. And we were able to show that you could set up five replicas of the database in like 90 minutes compared with the two weeks that it would take to do fuller application. Because you were going against object storage which runs about 2.3 cents per gigabyte per month versus block storage fully loaded which runs about 58 cents per gigabyte per month. The economics were below, it would blow away. And the fact that you could even do queries because object storage is interesting. Yes, if you're using, if you have microsecond response times for small queries you've got to run some of that content on block storage. But for traditional queries, we looked at like really big queries that would run against 600 rows. And we were half the time that you would need on traditional block storage. So for those DevOps use cases where you're doing that test and development you can have mass data, five different copies and you can actually point back in time because really the activity of technology is really super and that it could go do point in time, you know, was able to store the right kind of data so the developers can get the most recent current, you know, copies of the data. All in, it was like 80% less than what you would have paid doing it the traditional way. Okay, so Phil, you start to talk a little bit about some of the cloud pieces, you know, Actifio in the last year, once their first SaaS offering, Actifio Go. How much of these solutions are for the cloud versus, you know, on premises these days? Absolutely, so one of the benefits of using a virtual data approach is being able to leverage cloud economics. There's a lot of clients they want to do, you know, they want to be able to do the test and dev which has ups and downs and peaks and valleys when you need to use those resources. The cloud is really an ideal way to do those types of workloads. And so the integration work that we've done with the Actifio team around VDP allows you to, you know, replicate or have virtual copies of those databases in the cloud where you want to do your testing or we can do it in traditional on-prem object storage environments. Really, whatever makes most sense for the client is where, you know, we can stand up those environments. The other thing I wonder if you can stand out a little bit more. You talked about like cloud native deployments and what's happening there. How does that tie into this discussion? Well, obviously modern architectures and ways of agile ways of building things, cloud native with microservices, those are all extremely important but you've got to be able to access the data and it's that core data that no matter how much you do with, you know, putting Kubernetes around all of your existing applications you've still got to be able to access that core data often systems of record data which is sitting on these standard databases of record. And so being able to have the VDP technology be able to replicate those, stand those up like in our public cloud right next to all of our Kubernetes service and all the other technologies gives you kind of the full stack that you need to go do that Tevin test or run production workloads if you prefer, you know, from a public cloud environment without having all of the burdens of running the data centers and maintaining things on your own. Okay, so Phil, you know, everybody here for this two day event you're going to get a nice, you know, jolt of where Actifio fits, you know, lots of orange here at the show. Gives the final word is what, you know, what does it mean with orange and blue coming together? Well, absolutely. We think this is going to be great for our clients. We've got, you know, tons of interested clients in this space because they see the value of being able to take what Actifio has done to be able to virtualize that data, combine it with some of the technologies we've got for object storage or even block storage to be able to serve up those environments in a super cost-effective way, all underlined by one of our core values at IBM, which is really trust and being irresponsible. And so, you know, we often say that there's no AI, which all of this data leads up to without information architecture. And that's really where we specialize is providing that governance, all the masking, all of the things that you need to feel confident that the data you've got is in the right hands, being used the right way to be able to give you maximum advantage for your business. So we're super excited about the partnership. Phil, definitely a theme we heard at IBM think. There is no AI without the IA. So, Phil Buckaloo, thanks so much for joining us, Sharon, all the updates on what IBM is doing here with Actifio. Great, great to be here. All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts at Actifio Data Driven 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE.