 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. The one constant that we know for customers is change and how they manage their data, their applications in this ever-changing world is something that is always interesting to dig into and helping me with this conversation. First time guest on the program, Jody Angelo, who is a Distinguished Engineer and National Practice Lead of Availability Solutions with Veritas is here with me. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thanks for having me here, this is great. All right, so first, before we get into it, give us a little bit about your background, what you work on, how long you've been with Veritas? Sure, so I've been with Veritas for nine years in various different roles. I was a product manager when I joined the company. Since then, I've joined the field sales technical field sales organization, working as an advocate with some of our more strategic customers, sort of like a liaison back to the product team. Before that, I was a consultant, sort of as a implementing these technologies from Veritas. And of course, there was a customer too, so I always had sort of that round out, that full spectrum of experience with the company. Ooh, love that we can draw on some of your experience as a customer, let's start there if we will. You work with a lot of customers in the space you're working on, the availability solutions, I kind of teed it up with, we know that there's change happening. When I talk about customers and their cloud journey, it is an ever-moving thing, it's not a one-way thing, there's data centers, there's cloud, there's edge, there's all of these environments, and figuring out what application goes where and how that's changing over time is, there's a real challenge for customers these days, is it not? It absolutely is, and really one of the sort of the foundational tenets of the availability solutions at Veritas is that we give customers the ability to sort of decouple their applications from all of that sort of chaos that's in their infrastructure, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's hyper-converged, physical, virtual, different storage technologies, they can run their application, where they need to run it, when they need to run it, and be confident to know that it'll be performant. Yeah, well we know from Veritas' legacy, I remember seeing the billboards and the t-shirts, there's no hardware agenda, so we understand Veritas has always been a software company, and you look at that kind of wave of software-defined storage and the like, help us understand today, here's 2020, we're living in the future, what that means for customers' data, customers' application, what the availability solution and the product lines that you work with mean. Yeah, that's a terrific question. Well what it means is you have a myriad of choices you have to decide on, so it's not just the individual application, but really the composition of those apps and the relationships they have with other applications. You mentioned software-defined storage, I mean we cut our teeth on software-defined storage back when that wasn't even a term, 30 years ago. I like to think that it's almost in our DNA that taking and virtualizing storage is one of the first things we did as a technology. Today we've taken that same sort of approach to commoditizing most of the infrastructure so that it doesn't matter what operating system, it doesn't matter what storage vendor you use, it doesn't matter what cloud provider you use. Our technology gives you the luxury, or I like to say breathing room in many cases, to make those decisions so that they can align with your business outcomes more effectively. All right, so Joe the product we're going to be talking a bit about is InfoScale. InfoScale. For people that aren't familiar, what is InfoScale, how does it fit in this ever-changing landscape? You mentioned cloud and operating systems and hypervisors and everything, so help us tee up where InfoScale fits. Sure thing. So InfoScale is really a moniker if nothing else on top of our storage foundation, Veritas Volume Manager, Veritas File System, Veritas Cluster Server Technologies. And those have been industry staples for decades, right? Being able to address the needs of the most critical applications and some of the most stringent and high demanding workloads be it the top financial institutions, healthcare providers, et cetera. The technology itself really addresses resiliency and availability from sort of three areas. We'd like to think that you can provide the ability to keep your services online with our high availability and disaster recovery solutions. But we also want to make sure that those applications and those data sets that you're using the technology with make sure that they're performing, right? Because an underperforming application is just as detrimental to availability as would be an application that's simply gone offline. And we also want to give you the ability to migrate workloads and move those applications among different technologies. So that's really where the focus of InfoScale is. Okay, so Joe, when you have customers that are trying to figure out, okay, I'm taking an application, do I take that from my data center? Do I move that to the cloud? If I'm building a new application, where do I do that? How does InfoScale fit into that discussion and how is the discussion of InfoScale fit with the infrastructure discussion that they are having? Yeah, absolutely. So inevitably what the choice, a lot of the customers I have conversations with struggle with just, what's the first step to get to the cloud? And many of them are locked into a proprietary solution or some technology that doesn't really have an analog or some sort of equivalency in the cloud. With InfoScale, what we allowed them to do is actually replicate that data anywhere they want to go. Because you said we don't have a hardware agenda, it doesn't matter what the storage underneath the covers may be. So we can go from physical storage on-prem into the public cloud across any variety of different tiers of storage that exist there. And this works at not just from a dataset standpoint, but the applications as well. So if you've got something as critical as a database, a relational database, a Oracle database, a SQL database, whatever it may be, you can very easily replicate those and move those workloads into the public cloud for the purposes of migrations or disaster recovery, with truth be told to the exact same thing. Migration is just a one-way ticket, a DR is a round-trip ticket. But the technology is exactly the same. So that's how you're able to achieve those goals. Okay, we talk about applications. In general, you mentioned some specific, is there a compatibility list or what sorts of classes of applications? How do I know if my application today is something that fits under this? Certainly, so we have a catalog of agents we support, what we call our bundled agents or agent framework, and it's a list of roughly over 500 different infrastructure components, applications and services that we monitor and protect for the purposes of, again, for disaster recovery and migration capabilities. Pretty much all the enterprise applications, the most prolific workloads that are in the industry today, so your databases, your middleware tier, application servers, those are all included. But we also have the ability to very easily introduce custom applications. So a customer can take and say they may have written something homegrown and it has any number of different components to it. If you can tell me how to start it, how to stop it, how to monitor it, we can put it into InfoScale. Okay. Joe, I think we've paint a pretty good picture of what InfoScale is. Maybe do you have a customer example that might help us understand a little bit about kind of the use cases and commonly why they're using it and how that works? Well, I have a little bit of an anecdote that I like to tell a story about a customer, this is a state agency that was a big InfoScale user. It just happened to be on Windows and we'd gotten through a deployment and everything was looking great and they were able to move all of their applications in this particular, these Windows applications, all, being protected by InfoScale, being replicated and having both high availability as well as disaster recovery and everything was looking great. I finished the project on a Friday afternoon and by Sunday morning I was getting frantic phone calls from the people that I was working with. At the time I was actually a consultant and they're asking me, what happened? What's going on? What's the issue here? I go, I left the customer just fine on Friday, there were no issues at all. And they said, you need to reach out to your team there and see what's going on because we're getting some phone calls that there's some problems. I was like, okay, so I got on the phone and I spoke to my contact there and he said, oh no, nothing's wrong with the environment but we might have some issues with who's going to be maintaining it come Monday morning and I go, why? Well I think half the team, well pretty much all the team's going to be calling in rich Monday morning and I go, what are you talking about? He goes, the entire IT staff at the Mega Millions Jackpot. So, this is the entire staff. This was the DBAs, the network admins, the manager, the manager's manager, all the Mega Millions Jackpot. So needless to say they weren't too concerned about coming into work on Monday morning but this poor person that was left, he was a hell of a hole in the bag. He said, we already reached out to support, your guys are on the call, we're confident knowing that Veritas is going to be there to help us through this transitional period because we've got this consistent layer. So I use that example because one, it's a fantastic story but two, it addresses the fact that disasters come in many different flavors and many different, they can produce and manifest in many different ways and your people, that to me, that's always your most critical asset and when those suffer, this technology is there really helped to address them. Well Joe, I like that example rather than I think going forward, rather than saying, well, what happens if one of your critical staff gets it by a bust? What if your entire support team wins the lottery? And it happens and it did happen. I'm here to say, hand to God, God's on the street. All right, what would you say are some of the kind of misconceptions that maybe people don't understand if they haven't looked closely at InfoScape lately? Yeah, great question. So I think some of the misconceptions about it is that it's tied to a very specific sort of heritage, big iron, UNIX only workloads. Admittedly, we cut our teeth in that space, right? Whether it was going back in the days of the original SunOS and some of the big iron systems, we gained a lot of traction, a lot of, we earned our stripes in that space. But in reality, that space has shrunk tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years for a variety of reasons. And I think there's still some misconception that InfoScape or Veritas, volume manager and file system only is relevant in that space and truth be told, nothing could be further from the truth. Because if you go back to what I commented earlier about this idea of commoditizing that infrastructure, we can help customers transition throughout all those different sort of points of inflection. So going from the big iron to go into the more commodity, commoditized, x86 hardware, going from physical to virtual, going from virtual to the cloud, going from virtual to hyper-converged and even back in some cases. We have the capabilities and the wherewithal to be able to help customers through those kinds of transitions. Yeah, I've been in the industry long enough. I remember a lot of those Unix migrations, whether we're going over to Windows, whether we're going over to Linux. What would you say are some of the similarities and some of the differences from what we did in those environments compared to what's often a cloud discussion today? Yeah, so truth be told is that we tend to not reinvent the wheel at Veritas. We look and say, okay, what are some of the really tremendously powerful tools and capabilities that we have? How do we apply those to new platforms? You take the cloud, for example, one of the things that we've always prided ourselves on is giving customers, again, that breathing room to make a decision and say, I'm going to move to a new platform. So I can literally take a workload that was running on Unix and I can move it over to Linux. Well, that same model now can be applied where I can take that legacy workload running in Solaris, I can move that directly into the public cloud. And that's something that turns a lot of heads because I asked a lot of customers, like would it be compelling if I had a means for you to be able to take that legacy Solaris environment or that Unix workload and I can might it directly into, say, EC2 in AWS. And they're all, they're incredulous. They're like, no, this can't happen. There's no way you can do this. And they said, yes, it can because we look at the cloud as another platform and we want to be able to have customers take full advantage of it, exploit it, but at the same time, not be fearful that they won't have a way to move data in and out of it. How is Veritas helping with some of the management pieces when you talk about going through those migrations? It's one thing about what platform I live on but how do I manage that environment? What skillset do I need? How are you working hand in hand with your customers on that? Well, the great thing about it is is that there is a sense of parity between what you do on-prem and what you do in the public cloud when you're using InfoScale. Because again, we consume cloud resources just like they were any other platform. So whether you were going from physical to virtual, virtual to hyperconverge or into the public cloud, the same operations, the same configurations, the same scripts, the same user interface, all the things, all of the machinery and the tooling that's around those applications can be consistent. And in many cases, that is invaluable because a lot of customers, while they want to adopt the public cloud, they don't want to have to redefine their operational paradigm. They want to be able to take those workloads and I want to just be able to scoop them up and say, put me in the public cloud, I don't want to change everything around it because I don't have the bandwidth to do that. To take on a whole new rearchitecture using the cloud, that's basically starting your IT from zero and building only back up. And they don't have the time or the money or the resources to make that happen. So looking for that consistency, looking for that parity between the on-prem and the public cloud. All right, what are some of the features that are most resonating with your customers? Well, I would say first and foremost, the fact that our core technology around volume management helps you to virtualize storage, all of the capabilities you have there, the fact that our file system can transition between different Indians, right? Going from Unix to Linux, going from Solaris to Red Hat and so on. That gives you that flexibility. Our hardware agnostic replication with volume replicator, giving you the ability to not only provide DR over any geographic distance, but also the ability to migrate between those platforms. So being able to take and replicate data that's on a Unix system today into the public cloud running Linux. So that's with volume replicator. We also have capabilities that allow you to utilize local storage in the sense that and treat it like it's shared storage. Some of the challenges with the public cloud are around some of the restrictive storage architectures. So you take an availability zone inside of AWS. All that storage is only available inside of that particular availability zone. If you want to move an application over to the other node, you can't share storage between those availability zones. With InfoScale, you can. And you can basically address some of those gaps or shoot through some of those blind spots. Yeah, how is your team helping your customers keep up with all those changes? When you look at the public cloud, there's always new instances, there's new zones. It's a constant reinvention happening in the cloud. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things were happening. First and foremost, we're in the marketplace. We have CFTs, we've got AMIs for that product so that for InfoScale, so you can spin those up much more quickly. Working to get in the same thing for the Azure marketplace. We integrate with a lot of the automation and orchestration tools that are in the market today, the Ansibles, the Puppets, the Chefs, making sure that what I call the time to value for our technology is as short as possible so that you get out of the business of becoming a Veritas admin, but focusing more on your business and what Veritas can do to help you improve that. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. A lot of automation going on in this space. Very different world for your customers. Is there some that you need to kind of reeducate customers as to what Veritas is doing today versus what they might have done a few years ago? There is, we're not your father's Veritas kind of mentality that we try to promote. And I think you've seen over the last 12 to 18 months that our messaging, our corporate strategy in general has had a tremendous sort of resurgence of InfoScale being a big part of that. Because we recognize that when you talk about Veritas as a whole with our API strategy of availability, protection, and insights, availability of your services and your data are critical to your success as an enterprise, not just from an IT perspective. And it's where InfoScale really plays sort of the critical role in achieving that. Any other, what sort of outcomes do your customers find once they've rolled these solutions out? Well, I think operationally that there is a significant reduction in the overhead needed to make some of them more complex and really challenging operations. Cookie-cutter, I had a customer just last week, this might sound like a little bit of self-promotion, but he said, Storage Foundation is the single greatest software-defined storage technology that's ever been written. And because they are able to achieve a migration on a scale that they never would have been able to achieve without a technology like this. And of course, I know there's no way to vet that statement, but you're just gonna take it on. If the customer is gonna, has said it, we will take them on there. Then where he did it, it was, I took pause, I'm like, wow, I was like, can I quote you on that? And he was just like, yes, you may. I'm like, well, there you go, I just quote her. Excellent. Joe, what other features underneath that are kind of lesser known things from InfoScale, do you wanna make sure customers know about it? Oh yeah, I mean, listen, there are so many incredible capabilities that are included within InfoScale. I would say that most important is that we can do things like transparently tier storage between on-prem and the public cloud, and that can be something as granular as an Oracle database or something as general purpose as just a shared NFS file system. We have intelligent caching mechanisms to accelerate performance of workloads that again, address the issues of performance on-prem as well as the public cloud. We can help you transition your applications. We have a migration wizard framework inside of our dashboard, our InfoScale operations manager that allows you to, on the fly, establish all of the necessary relationships between the different clusters to be able to move applications from Unix to Linux, move it from physical to virtual, to go from a virtual into a hyperconverge. We identify all those pieces and I said in an on-demand fashion build all the components for you. We have a number of different, what's most common to talk about today is ransomware, right? This idea that how do we insulate our data from the threats of ransomware? You can do so many different off-host, snapshot, recovery methodologies within InfoScale, creating an air gap between your data and secondary data sets that you can recover instantly from, but has that enough gap so that something that would corrupt the primary data set would not infiltrate your secondary copies. So I mean, there's just so many cool things that it can do. It's just, the use cases are just pretty innumerable. You know, so last question, Joe, is let's go up level a little bit. Sure. You talk about the application portfolios really changing for a lot of customers, proliferation of databases. We talked about virtual and physical and cloud environments ever changing. So when customers think about Veritas, when and how should they be thinking about Veritas? Well, especially from an availability standpoint, it's really about abstracting your applications from the underlying infrastructure, providing a resilient and performant storage layer to achieve really the goals of your business, not just the goals of your IT, because at the end of the day, we wanna make sure that there is a direct line of sight between what you're trying to do as an enterprise, what you're trying to do as a business, be it a financial service institution, healthcare provider doesn't matter what the industry is, and that the investments you make in IT can directly contribute to that. And with Veritas, we really help customers to make that a reality. And we do it tactically with the idea of protecting your applications and ensuring that you have resilient services. And we do it strategically by giving a platform to be able to host any number of different applications across all different operating systems and technologies. Joe D'Angelo, thank you so much for all the updates, really appreciate you. It's doing my pleasure. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the interviews we have. Go hit the search. You can find past interviews we've done with Veritas, as well as all the shows that we'll be at 2020 and beyond. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.