 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Hi everybody, welcome back to Miami. I'm Dave Vellante, and this is day two of Veeamon 2019. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel in beautiful sunny Miami. A lot of swanky people, a lot of big boats, parties going on last night. Of course it's Veeamon, so you know there's a lot of fun. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Alan Stern is here, he's the technical solutions architect at Cisco, really what that means is he's an evangelist, theCUBE along with Alan, good to see you again. Great to see you again, Dave. Thanks for coming on. So yeah, this is quite a venue. As always, Veeam, a lot of action going on, a lot of customers here, 2,000 plus people. So let's get into it. Cisco, we're going to be at Cisco Live in a couple of weeks. We're really excited about that. It's going to be a great show in San Diego. Absolutely. Another awesome venue. We were in Barcelona early this year to do Cisco, so we love the circuit, it's a great customer show. I want to start with something that we talked about in Barcelona, which is Cisco really, as it evolves into the multi-cloud world, is making the case that its networks are more secure, higher performance, and more cost effective than anybody out there. And it's in a good position to do that. Now we're going to talk deep about infrastructure, but I want to start there and just get your take on that sort of overall challenge to Cisco. Well it's not really a challenge, it's an opportunity for us, because we look at the cloud as this great opportunity. You still have to have networking within your cloud provider. You've still got to do all the things you do on your on-prem data center. You just have to do it in somebody else's data center. And what we've done is we wanted to simplify that operation. So the way you deploy Cisco ACI on-prem, you deploy it the same way in the cloud provider. You're using the same interface, and yeah on the back end we're doing different things because we're interfacing with their networking APIs. But to the end user, they don't have to know each cloud provider's interface, they just have to know Cisco. And they know that it'll be configured correctly. And if we think about what happens with a lot of the threats and attacks that occur in networks, what's one of the easiest ways to get attacked? It's a misconfigured network, a firewall port that's left open. But if you're doing it the same way every time, regardless of where you're doing it, that makes it a lot easier and reduces the chance that you're going to make a mistake. Yeah, and you guys can do the deep packet inspection. You've got a lot of experience around that. You're driving a lot of analytics and obviously machine intelligence is going to come into play. And so, but I want to go back to what you just said. So give me the example. So you guys have announced a multi-cloud strategy to support. Basically, you're essentially describing what we talk about on theCUBE all the time is bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is. So whether it's on-prem, in the public cloud, supporting hybrid. So you're saying, for example, if you've got a customer who's running on AWS and heavily using AWS primitives and APIs, you make that transparent to the user. Is that correct? Absolutely. And so, it sounds like magic, but it's a lot of hard work, I'm sure. A lot of software. It is a lot of hard work from a lot of really smart people inside of Cisco that we have some amazing developers. Now, your sweet spot is the infrastructure side of the business. So UCS and obviously the partnership with Veeam, which we'll get into. But what's your swim lane? So my swim lane really is our software-defined storage partners and our data protection partners. And when I started on this role a few years ago, they seemed very much separate. And now what we're seeing is they're coming very much together because what are customers looking to do? Get away from tape. What do they need? Large amounts of storage because we've seen this explosion of data. We talked about it last year. And we're seeing terms like yottabyte and bronabyte. And I remember when I first saw bronabyte, I was like, is this something, somebody watched too many episodes of the Flintstones? But no, it's a real term. A yottabyte is a thousand exabytes and a bronabyte is a thousand yottabytes. So data is growing at multiple orders of magnitude on a regular basis and we've got to store it differently than we have in the past. You know, somebody sent me a stat. And you just reminded me of it, Alan, a couple months ago. And I got to go back and research it. But if anybody out there knows the stat, it was astounding to me. It said by like 2025 or 2022, there's going to be more bytes of data created or stored than there are stars in the universe. Now, that just blew my mind. And we could do the math and figure that out. But I got to go back and check out the link. But to your point, the growth curve, it's non-linear. You know, it used to be Moore's law and now their curve is reshaping. So when everybody talks about digital transformation, what they're really talking about is making their business digital, which is all about data. And you're talking about getting away from tape. You can't have a digital business that runs on tape. You can save tape for the deep archive and stick it in the iron mountain or whatever. But you can't recover. They keep your business running 24 seven. So to your point about those worlds coming together, that really underscores it. So what's your role in supporting digital business strategies and keeping businesses up and doing fast recovery and your partnership with Veeam? So we provide great platforms for folks like Veeam and the object storage vendors. So Veeam now has fantastic integration with the S3 interface that many of these object providers allow. Cisco has very deep platforms. You know, we've got a 4U box that can hold 768 terabytes of data. And if you think about how much data that is, you know, two of these units, it's a petabyte and a half of data. I mean, that's a fantastic amount of data. It's online. It's available to them. If they need to restore it, they can do it quickly because each of those nodes has 160 gigabits per second of network connectivity. But more importantly, if they want to use some of this data, it's available to them right on the platform. They don't have to pull back the tape, restore it from tape, and hope they got the right one. It's about data management, really. Yeah, you're talking about all these bytes and Yotta bytes and Hexa bytes and the growth of storage. Are you seeing a really big wave, a trend toward the petabyte data center? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it used to be petabytes where the purview of only the Fortune 500 maybe, and now we're seeing it really across the board as companies, you know, we're digital hoarders. I look at my laptop. I've got emails from 10 years ago. I've got pictures of everything from forever. Companies are no different because they're looking at data and saying, I've got this data. I'm not sure if it's valuable today, but it may be worth something tomorrow. Let me hold on to it. But their ability to access it and use it, that's going to be the critical piece because it's like an oversized storage unit. You stuff it full of stuff. You're not really sure what's in there. And if you have to find that one little widget that's in there, forget it. As the tools get better to go find the data within the BitBucket, I mean, that's where the real value is coming. So why don't we go a little journey down memory lane and talk about the Cisco strategy and how it's evolved. I remember when you started with UCS and I was like, well, I was getting into servers and kind of didn't really understand it until I dug into it. And you guys obviously were trying to change the game with converged infrastructure and you had some partnerships to do that. But I remember one of my first questions was, you had like a zillion VMs that you could run on this block. And I said, how do you protect that? And they're really, at the time, it was like 2009, it was like, well, we could kind of bolt on and that's the way backup was back then. Fast forward to 2019, it seems like data protection is much more of an integrated component of people's digital strategy. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and how your strategy has evolved. Yeah, and it absolutely is because we're not just talking about data protection anymore. If you look at the capabilities of folks like Veeam, it's really about data management. It's not just, hey, back it up, put it over in the vault and forget about it, never use it again. It's back it up, put it in the vault. And if you need it, I can bring it back really quickly. I can use it to test data with. I can use it to scan for malware so I'm not reintroducing an infection after I've cleaned it out. So a lot of ways to use it and then Cisco's providing the platforms to do that. The days of the old monolithic storage arrays, they're still going to be here, but the world for them is shrinking because you think about what do they do? They're the last bastion of vertically integrated systems. We saw storage, the mainframe still here, but the world for it shrunk as we had x86 systems with the operating system of choice. So we're seeing the same thing happening with storage. Customers are just, they want to be able to use all this data that's out there. And in my career I've observed it's always been about recovery. Like when something goes wrong, how do you recover? That's always the killer question, right? And so, but now it's even more complicated because Veeam's messaging this week has been fast recovery. They announced a bunch of stuff that you could recover directly from backup. Don't have to go to a replicated set of data. And so the compression, the time to recover has really compressed. So have you seen that? How are you guys responding to that? Both technically and just from a business standpoint? It's a great question. I mean, you and I have enough gray hair to remember the days of planned downtime. That's gone. So now it's, how do we build a platform? They're going to enable the software side of the recovery, but if the platform isn't capable of keeping up with the software, then you've got a disconnect. So you've got to have disk systems, disk subsets, systems that are capable of keeping up. You've got to have networking. You've got to have a completely integrated system that not only do we look at it and go, okay, well this software should work here. We know that it does. And we do Cisco validated designs with folks like Veeam to make sure that the customers don't have to turn all the different nerd knobs to make sure they're going to get the optimal performance because at the end of the day they don't have time for that. That's not their area of expertise. And we want to make sure that they've got the always on enterprise. So I love to talk about the horses on the track or the competitive landscape. And I especially want to explore a little bit with you Allen, the multi-cloud. You know, some people don't like that term. I think it's fine. Hybrid to me is different than multi-cloud. I've argued that multi-cloud has largely been a system of multi-vendor where people just line a business, shadow IT and then all of a sudden you have these multiple clouds and sasses. But increasingly now organizations are saying, okay, CIOs, get a handle on this mess. Okay, so multi-cloud strategies are starting to come into play. Cisco announced in February, I believe, at Cisco Live Barcelona a big push into multi-cloud. You certainly see Dell EMC talking about it. Google announced, you know, certainly Microsoft is there. You guys have partnerships. You were on stage. David Gekler was at Google next, Cloud Next. So it's Red Hat, IBM's acquisition of Red Hat. So you have all these interesting, you know, cooperation and people, companies going after this multi-cloud. So question, how do you see the multi-cloud opportunity? What's Cisco's strategy with regard to that? Obviously you're coming at it from a standpoint of network and infrastructure strength. But I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and sort of summarize the opportunity and what your strategy is. Sure, so I want to go back to a quote, a famous quote by John Chambers. He said, we were plumbers for the network. And being a plumber is an honorable profession. And I think while we've certainly expanded beyond that, we still do that. Whether, you know, you're talking about multi-cloud strategies, well, you've still got to connect to all of these different clouds, whether it's infrastructure or as a service, you've still got to connect to it so that it works efficiently for your enterprise. We want to make sure that we enable that technology that we're giving the customers what they need from that technology. And there's still room for on-prem. It's not like any of this is going away. It's select whatever feature is best for that particular customer. So, you know, if there's an as-a-service provider that does customer CRM better than anybody else, by all means, go use them. And we'll help you connect to them, help you secure it. And with partners, we may help you back up. If it's email, without saying who it is, we know who it is. But you've still got to back that up. Where are you going to back it up? How are you going to have the networking? How are you going to have security? So Cisco provides all of that enabling technology to make sure that you've got the enterprise that's secure, and you can connect to all of them so it operates seamlessly for you as your multi-virtualized enterprise. Well, and so Cisco's always been a, you know, a partner-friendly organization. You've stressed optionality. Every one of those companies I mentioned is a partner of yours as well. And, you know, it's like Joe Tucci said, hey, sometimes we compete, sometimes we partner. At the end of the day, it's the customer's going to decide. Right. So if I understand you correctly, just from a control plane standpoint, you've got software technology that your customers can use. If a customer wants to use a VMware control plane, you'll play there or some other, you know, third party. That's the strategy, correct? And then, but at the same time, you're investing in your own IP to build the best control plane and other, I guess, you know, network capabilities, data plane infrastructure as possible. Yeah, we want to, we're going to leverage, you know, their infrastructure because in some ways they're ubiquitous, but there's things that they don't do. You know, network analytics. We do that better than anybody else with, you know, products like Tetration, also perform some security functions. We have StealthWatch, you know, at the branch, you want to make sure that the farthest things aren't happening on your network that without you knowing it. So we want to enable that visibility and allow the customers to take action. So it's not just enabling the technologies, it's protecting the technologies as well. So I think a lot of it is things that these other infrastructure providers aren't doing or they're not doing well. We can do well because of our history, because of our continued investment in all of these areas. You know, Cisco, we have a lot of money to spend on R&D and we spend it well. Two other areas I want to, absolutely. You have great engineers and also you do, you do acquisitions pretty well. But two other areas I want to cover that we haven't touched upon that much. Hyper-converged, you know, you guys kind of started the converged infrastructure, or at least the modern era. And then hyper-converged comes in, you've got to play there. And I want to talk about the edge, but let's start with HCI. So HCI, we've got a fantastic platform in Cisco HyperFlex. We've continued to evolve it. You know, we have spinning disk, we have all flash, we have NVMe, we've got hybrid. So whatever the customer's performance needs are, we're there with them. As we look at it, this is about simplifying and collapsing the infrastructure. That's what converged infrastructure did. We went out, partnered with some leading companies in the storage space at the time, and said, how do we make this easier for customers to consume? We reel it into the data center, they turn it on, they move their workloads to it. Well, now we've seen this cost model and technology shift towards hyper-converged, where it's x86 servers running the storage and the compute together, and you wheel it in, you move your workloads to it, and you grow it in very nice, easy to consume increments, and it just works. And that's coupled with our management plan. And I can never overemphasize that. When you look at how we manage HyperFlex, how it plugs into our new InterSight product, which is a cloud offering to let you manage the infrastructure anywhere, InterSight will help you deploy the hyper-converged infrastructure. So we continue to focus on making this easy to consume. So now that leads me to your tagline, the Anywhere Data Center, which I want to ask you about the Edge IoT. I know it's not your area of expertise, but I love what the DevNet group has done with infrastructure as code. I see all these CCIEs getting retrained, and coming up with really some amazing use cases. I mean, I saw one at Cisco Live in Barcelona, basically an Edge case in a police vehicle, with some Cisco HCI infrastructure. It was unreal. And just collecting data at the Edge, which is critical. But so what's your strategy with the Edge? What do you see as the opportunity there? So the hard part is always defining the Edge. Is the Edge the branch? Is it my home office? Is it a telephone pole? The windmill? And the answer is yes, yes, and yes, right? Absolutely. So at some of the Edge, we've got the Cisco Hyperflex Edge twice, which is a two-node Hyperflex cluster. We've got small servers that fit into our routers for collecting Edge data there. So really the idea is meet the data where it is, and to the degree that we can, let's help process it there, because you can't always bring all the data back. Yeah, and what I like about Cisco's strategy, just to sort of set the context here, is many infrastructure providers I would observe are trying to take a top-down approach to say, okay, we've got this box, we're going to go put it on the Edge. And you guys do that too, but what I really like about your approach is that your box is programmable. So I can develop applications at the Edge. I can do that with a cloud provider if I want to. I can do that directly using Cisco APIs. And so I think that gives you guys an advantage, and obviously your networking estate helps as well. Alan, great to have you back in theCUBE. Thanks so much, and I'll give you the last word on Veeam on 2019. You know, it's a great show. We love being here. Veeam is a fantastic partner. We're doing some really innovative things, and it's just, it's wonderful to be here. I'm almost speechless. Yeah, so theCUBE is here all day today. We've got keynotes now coming up, so we're going to come back after those keynotes. Of course, Veeam has its big customer party tonight. Veeam parties are renowned. Always a lot of fun, always great food, and always some kind of interesting twist. So Alan, thanks again for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you. Always a pleasure, thanks. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. I'm Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE from Veeam on 2019.