 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio. And this is a special CUBE Conversation. Have a special announcement from our friends at Commvault. So welcome back to the program. We have two of our CUBE alumni. First we have Manoj Nair. He's actually the general manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture, first time Manoj on the program in your role with Commvault. Welcome back. And also welcome him back. Ranga, Roger Gopalan, who's the vice president of products at Commvault. Ranga caught up with you recently at the Future Ready event that we had over the summer. Thanks so much for joining us again. Sure. All right. So Manoj, let's start. Metallic obviously was the standout thing that everybody talked about last year at Commvault Go, really helping to put Commvault clearly into the SaaS marketplace out there, talking about how all the wonderful features are managing my data in a cloud environment. So there's an expansion to the portfolio that we're announcing today. Why don't you share the news? Yeah, absolutely Stu. It's great to be back here with all of you. And Metallic has come a long way from the launch just less than a year ago. We announced the creation of Metallic, multiple different offerings, whether it's protecting SaaS workloads like O365, remote endpoints and hybrid cloud workloads. The context that we're getting from our customers, especially in the last six months, increased cloud adoption and remote working, collaboration suites being adopted, all of that has been a great accelerator for adoption of SaaS data protection, is really what Metallic is offering. We have gone to global countries and expanded to our Commvault customer base who is using both Commvault software and Metallic now. One of the key things that we're now, today's announcement is focused on Metallic Cloud Storage Service that is a new service available for Commvault customers who are looking to get a fully managed, secure cloud-based target for protecting all of the data as an air gap copy. And this is more relevant than ever. So Mino, using the cloud for data protection for backup, isn't new Rengar, help us understand, I heard in there air gap, I heard leveraging the cloud, absolutely we've seen a huge tailwind for cloud adoption, but there's that gap for making sure customers protect their data, secure their data. Do they have the skill set to be able to leverage that? So help us drill in and understand what's different about this new service. You're right Stu, cloud is absolutely not new, but what is really unique about today's announcement with Metallic Cloud Storage Service is that we are bringing cloud even closer to our Commvault customers. So thinking from a data management perspective, our customers want to more easily and securely get the benefits of cloud storage. What we are doing today is integrating Metallic Cloud Storage Service as a cloud storage target into our Commvault software, as well as our Hyperscale X appliance. And that lets our customers seamlessly use cloud storage for their data protection backup and archival use cases without needing to understand a lot about the cloud, without needing to get through any of the complexities, think of it as the easy button that is now introduced into the Commvault software and Hyperscale X. All right, so if I heard you're right, that this is a managed service that Commvault is offering. Did I get that right? That's correct, so it's a managed service. It's public cloud storage. It's, as Ranga said, the easy button to be able to create your air gap copies in the cloud. And with everything that we keep hearing about ransomware, we believe this is one of the most important steps in ransomware readiness. A lot of our customers are already doing it by bringing their own cloud storage on all the clouds we protect, but it's still not easy. And there's a skills gap, the procurement process and all of that, the management of the credentials, the setting up of the networkings, all of that is encapsulated. So now it's just, it's like a built-in feature. Just plug it in and now you've got an on-ramp to the cloud, make sure you have your air gap copy. Yeah, maybe it would help. Talk about the easy button. Give us a little compare contrast, because, right, I could go, I could spin up instance of the cloud, but who has access? What are the security settings? There's a whole litany of things that I need to make sure I've got the right identity management. It's kind of easy, but not necessarily simple to be able to do that. So from what you're describing, I don't even need to really think, yes, it's in the cloud. I'm leveraging all the wonderful things of the cloud, but I don't have to have that ramp up of skill set if I don't already have that in-house. Is it right, guys? Sounds like I'm understanding that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're perfectly understanding it as always, too. And let me expand on the easy button, right? For us, simplicity is end-to-end customer experience. So I'm going to break this down from a customer lifecycle perspective. Think of a Commworld customer who's backing up pretty much all the workloads at the data center. The first question they have is, for security reasons for PCO, because I'm in a transformation project, I need to start using cloud storage. So the first complexity they would face is understanding which cloud provider to use, what kind of cloud profile to use, go through that cloud purchasing model, which is very different from how they normally procure their hardware and software. So that's really the first dimension of simplicity that through this metallic cloud storage service offer, our customers can procure that cloud storage along with any other Commworld software and hardware, just like they would do any other Commworld software. So that's the first level of simplicity. The second one is, how do I bring that into my data management lifecycle? There again, as I mentioned before, MCSS is fully integrated into Commworld software. So through the simplicity of Command Center, which is the one UI that brings all our products together, customers can just click to the cloud storage target and start backing up moving copies, archiving, doing all the data management use cases, the second dimension of simplicity. And the third one really is the predictability. Cloud is beautiful, it brings a lot of flexibility, but it also brings in a lot of new terms. What are my egress charges? What does ingress mean? What does egress mean? What happens when I have to restore? What happens when I have to recover? So all that complexity is taken away, we handle all of that in the back end from the customer's perspective, just like they use disk, now they can use cloud. We handle all the egress and all those kind of stuff in the back end. From the customer's perspective, they get a simple predictable price point. So from the time of choosing it, procuring it, using it and continuously getting the best benefits out of it, the easy button extends across that entire dimension. And the beauty in all of this is customers getting all the benefits of cloud without having to really understand much about cloud. So that's really the benefit we bring to the table with NCSS. Yeah, Minoche, Commvault has a long history of being able to live on various infrastructures that customers have. Are you able to share? I'm assuming there's a cloud partner for part of this. So who is the underlying IaaS? Yeah, so Stu, in the end of June, we announced a next phase of our strategic partnership with Microsoft. So this is one of the first big new things that is coming out of the giant partnership between Commvault and Microsoft around Metallic and Microsoft Azure. There's a lot of things that we're jointly doing that are unique that make all of the simplicity Ranga just mentioned come to life. And that's power of the end, as I call it. It's Commvault and Metallic and Microsoft coming together to make this really easy for our customers to start getting the value out of leveraging cloud for their data protection. Well, Minoche, it seems a natural extension of what you've already talked about for what Metallic can protect. Of course, you've got the business suite from Microsoft. Can you help frame it for us? Were this new MCSS fits in the Metallic portfolio today? Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at, I'll give you a customer journey and what's been happening. If you are not a Commvault customer today and you're looking at what's my best O365 data protection option, you'll go to Microsoft.com, you'll actually find Metallic in there as they recommended offer. And they might start the journey there or you're an existing Commvault customer and you start rapidly adopting teams and O365 post-COVID, Metallic is the default option. So it doesn't matter how you enter and you're now getting a full SAS actual backup as a service, no storage costs, no egress costs. And so our Commvault customers have been asking, we love that part of it. Why not make that available for all of the other data that is being protected by Commvault, either appliance or software on-prem? And in a very simple way, it's the best things are driven by customers. And in this case, our customers came to us and so we love the simple button, not just what's included in the Metallic service. We would like that to be available even for the existing software you're protecting on-prem for the air gap copy use case is kind of the biggest one. And all the things that Ranga said in terms of simplicity now comes to bear. And it's something that we were including inside the Metallic SAS offerings, now it's available for software and appliance customers. Yeah, definitely I've heard of the industry now. Microsoft seems a little bit more amenable to, you know, NART charging for egress with some of their partners when they put together these solutions. Ranga, Manoj has mentioned air gap a couple of times. Can you help us frame, you know, what that means today? You know, I even think back, you know, tape that most people are familiar with even I think about, you know, Google, you know, use tape for many years, even in the public cloud to give that air gap. Of course we've talked to your customers lots about how to protect against ransomware. So how does this fit in the new solution? You know, unfortunately it's too today. It's an important reality for us to discuss ransomware readiness, number of attacks are going up depending on, you know, whichever source you're listening to. So security is a very important concern in top of our customers' minds. Now MCSS is cloud storage, so it is offsite storage. So it comes with all the natural layered security that it has built in, that is built into cloud storage. Additionally, Commvault brings a complete ransomware detection protection and recovery framework which becomes inherently available with MCSS. Let me explain that in a few very simple points. Now, the entire journey from on-prem to the cloud storage is completely encrypted. So that's, you know, a very important part of the overall security mechanism, but here is where it really becomes cool. Commvault software is managing the cloud credentials, the cloud keys. So the entire access to MCSS as a cloud storage target is managed by Commvault. So there isn't an independent cloud admin accessing that storage which opens it up for any kind of unintentional or unintentional access. Anything can happen when you have that access. So Commvault completely manages that access. The keys are owned by the customer, but managed by Commvault. So it's a really ad-gap security layered security mechanism that you get in combination with the entire framework of air gap isolation, anomaly detection, the core is authentication, everything that is built into the Commvault framework. So when you bring in the simplicity that we talked about earlier, you can apply that to the security angle as well here. Instead of making the customer manage yet another piece in that jigsaw, we are managing it for them. So from their perspective, it is a seamless extension to their data management strategy while it also adds an extra layer of security and readiness to be covered from ransomware attacks. While it's being launched today, we already have customers that have, well, we have accelerated into adoption of MCSS and it's coming exactly for the scenarios Ranga just said. They have a requirement for a cloud copy. We've seen that on the metallic SaaS side that some of the customers might be in pilot mode. And because they were in pilot mode, they were quickly able to recover from attacks that happened, unfortunately, those things are reality. And we have had customers who after the attack, go and say, I want to make sure it's much more easier to recover from that. And so we already have our first customers who are starting to adopt the service even as we launch it today. Well, I'm so glad you brought up the customer examples. Manoj, give us a little bit, just the high level view, you talked about the growth and adoption of metallic overall, Ranga just talked about the kind of the single management. You got any set for us? How much data do you have in the cloud now and what's the growth looking like? And talk a little bit about what we can expect going forward from this portfolio. Yeah, I don't know how many people disclosed this or not, but we have disclosed it in the past. We have over an exabyte of data today in the cloud that customers are either using metallic or bringing their own cloud with Commvault and writing to the cloud. So that's probably a best in class out there. What we are also seeing is the acceleration of that. So we look at it, it's exponential growth over a hundred percent, we're seeing that that rise and leverage. Yet it's something that when you look at the overall industry percentages depends on whose stats you use, it's probably only 5% to maybe 10% that are leveraging the cloud for anything, whether it's in this case it's cloud data as a secondary target. So there's a lot of untapped potential and the things that Ranga said, I think really are the ones our customers are telling us as we tested this out, those are the biggest reasons, cost, I'm concerned about it, I've heard that it's unpredictable, it goes up, people start spinning up other things that they shouldn't be. And so I want predictable costs, security and the whole model around it, the governance of the keys. And finally the skills, everyone's busy, no one's trying to not be upping their cloud skills. Yet it's not something that is very easy for most people to become an expert. And if you're not an expert while you're protecting your data, that's not something you want to do. So you kind of hold back. And I think this is really the biggest thing that customers are looking at, like our cloud expertise packaged in and offering, solving all those things. And Stu, we discussed this at Future Ready of how the COMBORT portfolio, it continues to come closer and closer together in order to deliver that increased value to our customers. In July when we were having a similar conversation, we saw how Hedwig came in as the scale out storage in our Hyperscale X integrated data protection uplands. Now you can see that we have metallic cloud storage servers coming in as a cloud extension to our software, as well as Hyperscale X. So it's kind of bringing the best of both worlds. Customers who want to continue to stay on-prem, protect their on-prem workloads with non-prem footprint, you have Hyperscale X as a very nice scale out integrated uplands. And as the capacity needs increased, as the security needs increased, you have MCSS now as a managed storage extension bringing together those pieces of the portfolio. Another thing that is now available already as of September 15th is our ability to manage metallic as part of Command Center. So while you want that SaaS flexibility and you're using metallic to protect the SaaS workloads, let's also realize that there are a bunch of other workloads that you might be protecting using COMBORT software or through Hyperscale. We can now bring all of them together into the simplicity of Command Center. So it again takes away another point of complexity for the customer. Just one UI, go ahead to protect the workloads the way you want with the form factor, you want SaaS software or uplands and we bring it all together into a single management framework for you. So you're going to continue seeing the portfolio coming closer and closer together because our mantra is to provide flexibility of choice to customers. Flexibility of choice in so many different ways. You can use software, uplands or SaaS. You can bring your own on-prem storage, cloud storage. Or if you want to hit the simple button, use metallic cloud storage service. So you're going to see that happen as we move forward. Well, Manoj, Ranga, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch. Love little tagline leading it. We're making the cloud just a little bit closer to us. It is, it is a lot closer. Thank you, thank you, Stu, for your time. Thank you. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.