 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante from Wikibon and we're live, this is theCUBE Day Three, SiliconANGLE's coverage of VMworld 2012. We're here in the hang space, come by and see us. Check out all the action on siliconangle.tv and youtube.com slash siliconangle. Go to Wikibon for all the research and we're here to talk about data management, data protection, it's been a theme all week here on theCUBE. We're here with two folks that I think you're going to really enjoy this segment. Doug Hazelman is the VP of Product Strategy at Veeam. Those of you who don't know Veeam, they are a smoking hot backup company, really specializing in virtualized backup. We'll learn more about what they're doing, but really a lot of excitement. You go to the Veeamugs, everybody's talking about Veeam. You guys are doing really well, so welcome. Thank you. And my friend Brian Regan, who has just joined Actifio, East Coast Startup, focused on data management. Brian, welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks Dave, great to be here. Good to see you guys, so here we are again, Veeamworld. It is the premier event in our business, isn't it? Yes, it is. I know we are talking about Veeamugs. Doug, you guys spent a lot of time at Veeamugs and this sort of, that's the divide and conquer, but this is where we bring everybody together and all the customers in one place. What's the vibe like out there for you guys? I mean, for us, the vibe on the floor has just been phenomenal. And we really kind of look at it from a core customer approach and really bringing in the community. So we do a lot of the community events here at Veeamworld, you know, and Actifio actually did a flip cup tournament the other night and we were involved in that. Flip cup as in flip the cup? Yeah, as in if you lose, you drink? Yeah, you drinking beer, flipping cups. It was a good event that you guys put on. And the Veeamware interns won, so no surprise to anyone, the college kids won the drinking games. Yeah, and it wasn't fixed, right? It wasn't fixed. No, not at all. We were hoping for a smackdown between us and Samantha, so we didn't have it. Careful what you wish for. Hey, Brian, this is kind of the coming out party, Veeamworld coming out party for Actifio, right? I mean, this is really the first one since coming out of stealth. And so we're going to talk a little bit more about what you guys are doing, but let's start with the whole topic of data management. We'll get into data protection. So Brian, let me start with you. What do you see as the big trends that are affecting your business? What are you guys trying to capitalize on? Obviously, you're a startup, so you better be disrupting something. So talk about what that disruption is and what it means for customers. You know, as we look at the big themes that are emerging over the course of this week, and certainly in our industry, we all see it. I mean, big data, cloud, all of these themes are essentially really putting a spotlight on the fact that just copies of data are growing exponentially inside of the enterprise. And people realize that there has to be a smarter, better way to manage all of these copies inside of my enterprise. And unfortunately, a lot of the tool sets, legacy tool sets, were really instrumented and designed and continue to be built on the premise that there are tapes and there are trucks you put the tapes on and you ship them off site and when you need to recover, you really hope you can and the tapes will come back. And the world doesn't work that way anymore. We need better tools, we need to disrupt that entire paradigm. And I think VMware themselves would admit that as much as we'd love to see a 100% virtualized world, we still live in a physical and virtual world and we need tools that can accommodate both with the same SLA and do it in a much more efficient manner. So you guys have an approach that attacks that copy creep problem, but still provides me data access, is that right? Exactly right. It's all about creating a single gold copy that's available instantaneously for test dev, backup, DR, whatever you need across a physical and a virtual environment and do it a lot cheaper. And in many cases, 90% less costly than the traditional legacy approach. Okay, so when I ask how do you back it up, you're saying you back it up within your system. Really, it's about creating a single gold copy image of your production system in a point in time. It's time machine for the enterprise. And if I need it from last week or last hour or last month or last year, it's available to me. I can mount it and I can run production off of it. So Doug, let's talk about some of the trends in backup. So we always talk about how virtualization breaks storage and it really breaks backup, right? So that coincided, that whole virtualization trend coincided with Veeam's ascendancy in a really good way. Can you talk about the trends that, where do we come from and where are we today? Yeah, I mean, I think, as Brian said, there's a lot of disruption going on and we've been writing that. And the disruption really started with virtualization itself with VMware, right? It disrupted a lot of things in the data center. Everybody's looking at, okay, I can start virtualizing but there's so many times they just kept on with their old approaches. They're running agents inside virtual machines and like you said, that breaks backup, right? Because now you've got everything sharing resources. So we saw the opportunity from a virtualization perspective to really offer something new to the market, something, you know, new ways of doing things and really to drive innovation on what virtualization enables in data protection. So you mentioned, you know, the SmackDown with Symantec, it was good fun and tongue in cheek but there's a lot of inertia around existing installed backup systems. What do you guys see, having said that, we had Jason Buffington on the other day from ESG, I don't know if you know Jason, great analyst. He just did a study and he showed the large proportion, I don't remember the exact numbers, of backup applications were relatively new, less than three years old. So that's probably coincides with virtualization and maybe is a good trend for you guys but there's still a really big entrenched mindset. We don't want to rip and replace our existing backup software. So how do you guys start with you, Brian? How do you deal with that? Yeah, well and just building on that trend, Dave, I mean, one of the things we've certainly seen since about 2009 and I think the data would support this is that people are keeping their copies around for shorter retention periods. Unless it's a government mandated or regulated type of industry where it's healthcare, patient record, lifetime plus seven or seven years for specific industry regs, people are not necessarily shipping their tapes off for infinity anymore. And I think that correlates with the rise in disk based data protection. They realize that in fact, most of the recoveries that I do are based on data that's 24, 48, 72 hours old. Why am I putting tapes away that are two years old and thinking I'm actually gonna be able to recover from that? So a lot of this really comes down to, people are rethinking what they need to do to affect their data protection SLAs. And as a result, they're rethinking the tools. And I think the disruption in the entrenched backup market, I mean, it used to be sort of two big players and then everybody else and then Commvault came along and started to disrupt the big players. And we're seeing new entrants, certainly Veeam and Actifio and others coming into this space. But I think it really comes back to CIOs and even CFOs really having a complete rethink about what do we need to do to protect our business? How are we doing it? And what tools do I need? And ideally, how can I reduce the number of tools that I need to actually keep my business in business? So Doug, Veeam's obviously having success and by premise it's having success because the stress that virtualization puts on backup, you guys are like the aspirin for that. So people saw that said, great, let's hop on that. We were talking off camera and it's relevant to what Brian was saying about this notion of snapshots. You guys have a capability around HP's left hand. So talk about snapshots and how they fit into the future of backup and more importantly, recovery. Yeah, so we view from a SAM perspective, on primary storage, a SAM based snapshot is not a backup. Because as I like to say, your SAM could always be affected by fire, flood or idiot. So something could go wrong and something could happen. Oops. So from a tier one approach, we look at that as being able, how do we enable the customer to recover from the native capability that's in their SAM? So we drove some integration with HP around their store virtual VSA product and left hand, which the store virtual VSA is based on left hand, to allow customers to be able to use that first tier and be able to recover very granularly. And from a snapshot perspective, the SAM based snapshots are much less stress on the infrastructure when we're talking about virtualization than initiating hypervisor based snapshots and as the virtual machine is running, it has to, once we're done, then we have to consolidate that back. There can be a performance impact. So we get much better RPO by leveraging the recovery capabilities of what the SAM can provide. So Brian, you mentioned time machine for the enterprise. That's a term we actually used in the Cube in 2010 here at upstairs across the street at VMworld 2010. And it references, it's a metaphor for the Apple's time machine. Notion being that you dial up or dial down your RPO based upon the frequency of snaps, right? So let's talk about that a little bit. Is that, in your guys opinion, the new model for data protection? I think so, right? Obviously, we're talking about disk-based paradigms now. And ultimately, it really comes down to snapshots but smart snapshots, right? Because why didn't snapshots take over the backup space 10 years ago when NetApp came out with this really awesome capability? Well, it just choose too much disk and it's too expensive, if done the traditional way, to really displace some of these other tools. Nowadays, what Actifio does is really takes a snapshot but then creates virtual images of those available for any point in time. Because you really don't wanna have to keep storing all the snapshots. You wanna create a single gold disk image of your production system at any point in time and then have virtual access to it and then the ability to mount that at any point in time. You don't wanna keep spending gobs and gobs of dollars on disk, no matter how cheap the disk gets, it's still expensive and it still consumes floor tiles. And Doug, what's your point of view on the trend toward using snapshots as a backup mechanism, what's Veeam's perspective? So our perspective, from a SAM perspective is that snapshots are not backups, right? They're a tier of data protection to give you very fast RPO but they're not a replacement for backing your data up and then storing it in another location, another physical location, or even off the sand, because if you lose your sand, you've lost your backups if you're relying on snapshots. So it's a backup when it gets off-site? Yes. Synchronous or asynchronous, right? Distance wise. Okay, and so will that sort of mode of operation, that snapping and then moving off-site in your view, eventually replace the traditional backup methodology? Yeah, I definitely think it has the capability to do that but what is important from our perspective is to make it easy to work with those snapshots. And that's one of the things I think if we look in the industry today, it's very complicated to be able to utilize those sand-based snapshots and at Veeam we're all about powerful, easy to use and affordable. So we really focus on making things are easy to use. It doesn't take a PhD or three weeks of consultants to come in and install it. The customer can download it and instantly use it. What about archiving? We've talking off-camera about Amazon's Glacier. What's your perspective on that? I think Glacier is a great thing for the industry. I feel sorry for the guys that drive the tape trucks because I think they're gonna be out of business soon. You think so? I think so. Really, if you were CIO, you'd put your archives in Glacier? I mean, you have to understand in terms of what business model they're going after. I think if you look at the mid-market and below-space, I think they're gonna be much more receptive to those types of technologies. They're much more willing to change, they're much more willing to embrace these types of things under maybe the large enterprises are. I say if you're cool with an SLA of, we'll do our best and if we don't, we'll apologize, then put it in there. If not, you better be careful. Unless a thunderstorm hits the DC area, in which case you might not get it back ever. Right, but to your point, Amazon's always been a trendsetter and it probably does mark a catalyst point for other types of services in the deep archive space. Interesting comments about the tape. I mean, you know, the Chevy Truck Access Method, right? Is it Jams Money Taps, tapes on the truck? That's still the fastest way to move data and pretty cheap way to move data, so I'm not sure I agree with it. It's going to disappear, but the point is that it's going to chip away at a piece of that activity. All right, well, we're very tight on time. I apologize that we have such a short timeframe here because we could go on forever about this, but I really thank you guys, Doug and Brian, for coming on theCUBE and sharing your perspectives. Have a great rest of the event and I hope you can come back and join us again. Thanks, Dave, great to be here. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsor.