 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to VeeamON 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, my name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. This is our second year at VeeamON. Hashtag VeeamON. Alan Stern is here, he's the Technical Solutions Architect at Cisco. Alan, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Great to be here, it's a real honor and a privilege. It's exciting. It's a great show, it's smallish, it's not as big as Cisco Live, which will be next month, but it's clean, it's focused, but start with your role at Cisco as a Solutions Architect. What's your focus? So my focus is really on three areas of technology, data protection being one of them, software-defined storage or object storage, and then the Hadoop ecosystem. And I work with our sales teams to help them understand how the technology is relevant to Cisco as a solutions partner, and also work with the partners to help them understand how Cisco, and the benefit of working with Cisco is advantageous to all of us in order to help our customers come to solutions that benefit their enterprise. So your job is a, you're kind of a catalyst and a technical expert, so you identify workloads, use cases, and figure out, okay, how can we take Cisco products and services and point them there and add the most value for customers? That's really your job. To some degree, yeah. I mean, in a lot of these solutions, this is an area that our executive team has said, hey, this is something we can go help our customers with, and then it's handed down to my team and my job is then to make it happen. Right, okay. Along with a lot of other people. So let's look at these. Data protection obviously relevant at Veeamon. What role does Cisco play in the data protection matrix? So Cisco provides an optimal platform for great partners like Veeam to land these backups. It's critical, it's funny, we often talk about backup and what we should be talking about is restore, because nobody backs up just for the sake of backing up, but how do I restore quickly? And having that backup on-premise on an optimized platform where Cisco has done all of the integration work and make sure everything is going to work is critical to the customer's success, because as we know, maintenance windows and downtime are a thing of the past. They don't exist anymore. We live in an always-on enterprise, and that's really where folks like Veeam are focused. Yeah, for you younger people out there, we used to talk about planned downtime, right? Which is just, what is that? Why would anybody plan for downtime? That's ridiculous. Alan, I wonder if we can unpack that a little. So I think back in the data center group when Cisco launched UCS, the memory that it had was really geared for virtualization. I could see why Veeam and Cisco would work well together because it's some unique architecture that's there. It was a few years ago now that UCS has been on the market. What's the kind of differentiation? And maybe bring us inside some of the engineering work that happens between Cisco and Veeam and some of these spaces. So we take our engineers and lock them in with Veeam engineers into a lab, and they go in and deploy the solution. They turn all the various nerd knobs to get the platform optimized. And primarily we talk about our S3260, which in a 4U space holds about 672 terabytes of storage, and they optimize it and then publish a document that goes with it. We call them Cisco validated designs. And these designs allow the customer to deploy the solution without having to go through the hit or miss of, well what happens if I turn this nerd knob or that nerd knob, alter this network configuration or that one, and to get the best performance in the shortest possible time. Yeah, I mean those CBDs are critical. The field knows them, they trust them. Can you speak a bit to kind of the presence that you have having Veeam in your price book, what that means to kind of take that out to the broad Cisco ecosystem? Yeah, and it's more than just having it on the price list. It's the integrated support so that the customer knows that if there's a problem they're not going to end up in a finger pointing solution of Cisco saying call Veeam, Veeam saying call Cisco, they have a solution and we're in lockstep so that there aren't going to be the problems. The CBD ensures that problems are kept to a minimum. Cisco has fantastic support, Veeam has great support. I mean they were talking this morning about the net promoter score being, I think it was 73 which is unbelievably good. So that in the event that there is a problem they know they're going to get to resolution incredibly quickly and they're going to get their environment restored as quickly as possible. So when I think about the three areas of your focus, data protection, object storage and Hadoop ecosystem, there's definitely intersection amongst those. We talked a little bit about data protection. The object store piece, the whole software defined is a trend that's taken off where we were talking earlier about sort of some of the trade-offs of software defined. It's like Bill Philbin was saying well if I go out and put it together myself when there's a problem I got to fix it myself but so there's a trade-off there which is I don't know if you watch Silicon Valley stew but the box, right? Sometimes it's nice to have an appliance. But so what are you seeing in terms of the trends toward software defined? What's driving that? Is it choice? Is it flexibility? The priority trade-offs? It's a couple of things. The biggest thing that's driving it is just the explosion of data. And data that's born in the cloud, okay it's probably pretty good to store with one of the cloud providers. But data that's born in your data center or that is extremely proprietary and sensitive, customers are increasingly looking to say you know what I want to keep that on site. And that's in addition to the regulatory issues that we're going to see with GDPR and others. So they want to keep it on site but they like the idea of the ease of use of cloud and the nature of object storage and the cost model for object storage is great. I take an x86 based server like UCS and I overlay a storage software that's going to give me that resiliency through erasure, coding, or replication. And now I've got a cost model that looks a lot like the cloud but it's on premise for me. So that also allows me, if I'm putting archival data there, I can store it cheaply and bring it back quickly. Because the one challenge with the cloud is my connectivity to my cloud provider's finite. Just a quick follow up on that. I know Scality is a partner, are there other options for object storage? Yeah, we work both Scality and Swift Stack are on our global price list like Veeam. We also work with some others, folks like IBM Cloud Object Store, Cohesity which sort of fits in between space as well as we're doing some initial work with Cloudy. And then, think about the Hadoop ecosystem. That brings in new challenge and a lot of Hadoop is basically a software defined file system. And it's also distributed, the idea of bringing whatever, five megabytes of compute to a petabyte of data. So it's leave the data where it is. So that brings new challenges with regard to architectures, protecting that data. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean the issue with Hadoop is data has gravity. Moving lots of data around is really inefficient. That's where MapReduce was born is the data's already there, I don't have to move it across the network to process it. Data protection was sort of an afterthought. You do have replication of data, but that was really for locality, not so much for data protection. Or recovery to you earlier. Yeah, so, but even with all of that, the network is still critical. And without sounding like an advertisement for Cisco, we're really the only server provider that thought about the network as we're building the servers and as we're designing the entire ecosystem. Nobody else can do that. Nobody else has that expertise and a number of hardware features that we have in the products give us that advantage like the Cisco Virtual Interface card. Yeah, it's true point, you may manage your heritage. So of course that's where you started. So what advantage does that give you? I mean, one of the things we talk about in theCUBE a lot is flash changed everything. Absolutely. We used to just use spinning disk to persist and we certainly didn't use it for performance. Did unnatural acts to try to get performance going. So in many respects, flash exposed some of the challenges with network performance. So how has that affected the market, technology and Cisco's business? We're in this period of shift on flash because if you think about it at the end of the day, the flash is still sitting on a PCI bus. It's probably iSCSI with a SATA interface. You got the horrible storage stack to do. Right, so we've moved the bottleneck away from the disk drive itself now to the bus. Now we're going to solve a lot of that with NVMe and then it'll come to the network. But the network's already ahead of that. We're looking at, we have 10 gig, 40 gig, we're going to see 100 gig ethernet. So we're in pretty good shape in order to survive and really flourish as the storage improves the performance. We know with compute, the bottlenecks just move. I think this morning they said whack-a-mole. Yeah, so in thinking about the next progression and the whack-a-mole, what is the next bottleneck? Is it the latency to the cloud? Is it, I mean, if it's not the network because it sounds like you're prepared for NVMe, is it getting outside the data center or is the next bottleneck? I think that's always going to be the bottleneck. And I look at, I use analogies like roads. We think about a roadway inside my network. It's sort of the super highway, but then once I go off, I'm on a connector road. And gigabit ethernet, multi-gigabit, some folks will have fiber in the metropolitan area, but at some point they're going to hit that bottleneck. And so it becomes increasingly important to manage the data properly so that you're not moving the data around unnecessarily. Yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the cloud here. At the Veeam show, we're talking about beyond just the data center and virtualization, talking about a multi-cloud world. I had the opportunity to go to Cisco Live Barcelona, interviewed Rowan Trollup. So he talked heavily about Cisco's software strategy, living in that multi-cloud world, maybe help connect the dots for us as to how Cisco and Veeam go beyond the data center and where Cisco lives beyond the data center. So beyond the data center, we really believe that the multi-cloud world is where it's going to happen, whether the cloud is on-prem, off-prem, multiple providers, softwares of service, all of those things. And both Cisco and Veeam are committed to giving that consistent performance, availability, security. Veeam obviously is an expert at the data management, data availability. Cisco, we're going to provide some application availability and performance through AppDynamics. We have our security portfolio in order to protect the data in the cloud. And then the virtualized networking features that are there to again, ensure that the network policy is consistent whether you're on-prem in cloud A, cloud B or the cloud yet to be developed. So I'll come back to backup, which was the first of the three that we talked about. What's Cisco's point of view, your point of view on how that's evolving? From one, you know, I think about Veeam started out as a virtualization specialist, generally, but specifically for VMware. Now we've got messaging around, you know, the digital economy, multi-cloud, hyper-availability, et cetera. What does that mean from a customer standpoint? How is it evolving? Well, it's evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined. Everything is connected now, and that data, that's the value. Those are the data that the customer has is their crown jewels. What Veeam has done really well is, yeah, they started off as a small virtualization player, but as they've seen the market grow and evolve, they've made adaptation to really be able to expand and stay with their customers as their needs have morphed and changed. And in many ways, similar to Cisco. We didn't start out in the server space. We saw an opportunity to do something that nobody else was doing, to make sure that the network was robust and well-built, and the system was well-managed, and that's when we entered the space. So I think it's two companies that understand consistency is critical and availability is critical, and we both evolved with our customers as the market and the demands of the business have changed. Last question, what are some of the biggest challenges that you're working on with customers that get you excited that you say, all right, I'm really going to attack this one, and give us some color on that. I think the biggest challenge we're seeing today is a lot of customers, their infrastructure, because of budgets or whatever, hasn't been able to evolve fast enough, and they have legacy platforms and legacy software on those platforms in terms of availability that they've got to make that migration to. So helping them determine which platform is going to be best, which platform is going to let them scale the way they need, and then which software package is going to give them all the tools and features that they need. I mean, that's exciting because you're making sure that that company is going to be around tomorrow. Well, that's a great point, and we've been talking all day, Stu, about some of the research that we've done at Wikibon, David Floyd, that quantified in a Fortune 1000, they leave between one and a half and $2 billion over a three to four year period on the table because of poorly architected or non-modern infrastructure and poorly architected availability and backup and recovery procedures. It's a hard problem because you can't just snap your fingers and modernize, and the CFO's going, oh, how are we going to pay for this? Yeah, okay, we got this risk, this threat, we're sort of losing soft dollars, but at the end of the day, they actually come down, and they do affect the bottom line. And I think, do you agree that, I said last question, I lied, do you agree that CXOs are becoming more aware of this problem, and ideally we'll start to fund it? Absolutely, because we talked earlier about the days of planned down time are gone. Let a CXO have a minute of down time and look at the amount of lost revenue that he sees, and suddenly you've got his or her attention. Yeah, great point, Alan, we got it wrong. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure, great to meet you. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE live from Veeamon, 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back.