 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to the Bayou everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is VeeamON 2017, two days of wall-to-wall coverage from theCUBE. Harley Carter is here as a solution architect at Scania. We're going to have a case study on transportation. Talk to the customers we love when we get the practitioners on. We can pick your brain about what's really happening. Harley, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. How's the conference going? What do you think of VeeamON? Yeah, it's good. I mean, Dave, for us, Veeam's becoming more of a sort of strategic part of our business now. You know, we rely on it more and more. So excited to be here and learn some of the new features, what's coming. Great, we'll come back to that. And I want to ask you to set up your business a little bit. Tell us about your business. You know, Scania Transportation Company, a huge company actually, many, many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees. What's your business all about? What are the drivers in your business that are driving technology? Yeah, so our business set up. And so I work for Scania in the UK and we act as the main sort of wholesaler for the UK and we also own half of the retail network in the UK. So we have sort of two pronged attack really. So we're responsible for bringing the vehicles into the country and shipping them out to our distributors and then we also sell direct to the customer as well. So, you know, those two main bits of focus for us. And I think like most other companies at the moment, we're finding that more and more of our services are changing to be in digital services. We sort of position ourselves in the market as the premium product. We're considerably more expensive than some of the competitors. And then obviously to back that up, we have to give them the full service and we have to give great service to the customers and great backup services. So we're moving to more and more supporting services around the trucks. So for example, we sell telematics packages, driver training packages and a lot of those are more digital than we used to be. We're not really an engineering company anymore. Okay, so the priority really is to drive new sources of value through digital. As opposed to, I mean, a lot of times when we ask that question here, do more with less, cut costs, that sort of table stakes is what I'm referring. I think we've passed that stage now and we've happened to add more and more and more value to the customer to keep our proposition as the premium brand. So telematics as an example, you're saying you're embedding telematics into your products and providing telematics services. Every truck we sell comes with a full telematics package and then, depending on the customer needs, if they're a large fleet customer or we have some sort of small people who own their own truck like owner drivers, they can subscribe to different levels of the package and it gives them a lot more information about their driving habits. Say for fleet customers, they can track vehicles and one of the biggest costs for our large fleet customers is fuel for the vehicles and we sell telematics and training packages which helps them reduce their fuel consumption and so it adds a lot of monetary value for them as well as just increased uptime for the vehicle. So that's cloud-based service, obviously. Okay, and so you've got to protect the data. It's all about data. Digital is all about data. That's one thing that's clear, but digital transformation, it gets really fuzzy but it's data. So you got to protect the data. So you have to architect a solution around that. So paint a picture of your environment. You know, if we had to draw a schematic, what would it look like? Can you describe sort of the, we got the telematics piece, but what are the sort of apps are you supporting? What's the infrastructure look like? And very importantly, how are you protecting the data? Yeah, so our infrastructure, we're pretty much, I'd say 95% virtualized these days where all VMWare. We do have a small Hyper-V environment for Citrix, VDI, but actual server and applications is all in VMWare. We have a main data center at our head office in Milton Keynes, which is a bit north of London. So pretty much everything is hosted internally within that data center. And then we have a co-location facility, which is about 30 miles away. We rent Rackspace in another data center. So historically, we were purely on site and then more recently we started to try and move to keeping things available across the two data centers. And VM helps us with that in the actual backups and recoveries and replication between the data centers. What are the key apps that you're sort of managing? We have pretty much everything, I guess. So we have SQL databases, we use Microsoft Dynamics, CRM. We have lots and lots of internal web apps and Windows applications that have been developed internally. We have small SharePoint installation. So we have, we're mostly Microsoft based, but within the Microsoft stack, we've probably got most of the products in one place or another. You mentioned the word availability. What does that mean to your business? How critical is it for you to be always on? From the retail side, the customer facing side, most of our depots do operate 24 seven. So they will have customers coming in and out all day, every day, all night 365 days of the year. So the actual retail systems have to be online all the time. And as we mentioned, some of the more sort of online systems now for customers, obviously they're designed like online systems are that the customers can access them wherever they are, whenever they need. Those have to be online all the time. And then as we support the retail network with a lot of back end systems, we provide IT services for some of our independent dealers as well. So if they sign up to be a escorted dealer, they use some of our central systems. So we have to support those employees, just scan your employees. A lot of those aren't 24 seven, but still from early to late in the evening, there are people working all the time. And what do you see from an IT standpoint? You've got your customers, some of those have other customers there. Speak a little bit to kind of the role of IT that it plays in driving the business forward. Yeah, I think it's becoming more and more realized that IT is a business driver rather than the cost that we were probably seen as historically. It's still bloody expensive. It is, there's no getting around that, but someone's got to pay for it. But at least people, seeing the benefits. But we are, as we said, trying to create new services and things for the customers. So we happen to ensure that we have the infrastructure in place, that we can roll out new products and services, go to market quicker, the agility that is being mentioned all the time now for fully digital transformations. So it's, I think making sure that we're in a good position to be able to react to business demands and to supply the business with whatever they need when they need it. You said that Veeam's becoming more strategic to your operations. Do you have any key metrics you could share with your peers in the industry? What did you get by deploying it? Sleep easier, you know? Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a big one. Be able to do other things, what would be some of the key results? I guess some of the main benefits for us is that it is simple to use. More and more has been added to the product all the time, but it's simple to set up and it does just work. So with the solutions we had before, we were never 100% confident that, should a disaster happen, that we would really be able to rely on everything. We do tests, but yeah. Maybe you tested it, but didn't test it as much now. Do you run regular tests on this? Yeah, we do run regular tests and some of the built-in tools within Veeam give us those options, the sort of automated options, the shore backup and shore replica. So we get automatic verification that the backup jobs have actually worked and that we can restore machines and data from them. So definitely takes a lot of the guesswork out of it, which, should you say, helps us sleep easier. How would you describe your data protection strategy? Do you offer, so I'm presuming data protection as a service and you've got different service levels for different workloads, different applications, right? So how do you approach architecting that generally and specifically where does Veeam fit? So Veeam for us does cover pretty much the whole range of it, so we use it for backups. That's your primary data protection platform. That is basically it. So we do have actual storage-based replication between the data centers. So I guess we have that level, but as far as actual recovery in a disaster, then we do rely on Veeam a lot. So we use it in disk backups, take backups. We use pretty much all the features that we can to, let's see, try and leverage that investment as much as possible. Is it essentially a perpetual incremental, once you seed the base? Yes, we do use it in that mode. So we have perpetual incrementals, which back up to our main site. Those copies for those backups then get copied over to the disaster recovery site, the co-location center. Okay. And then the copies at that site then get taken off the tape as well. And then also at the DR center, it uses the grandfather, the father, son backup scheme. So we have shorter term retention that's duplicated across both sites, long-term retention at the co-loc sites and then also tape back up. And when you sit down, well, do you sit down with a line of business to determine sort of the value of the data that you're protecting? Do you sort of provide that estimate? Do you speak in terms of RPO and RTO to the business? Or do you talk in different terms? Like on a scale of one to 10, how important is this data? Or how much money do you have to spend? Or do you not do charge backs? Help us understand how you decide. We don't do charge backs. Okay, so we probably don't go into as much detail as if we did, but there's been more of a company-wide business continuity project going on recently. So we have had to have those conversations with pretty much all the business areas, all the applications. Yeah, so how important is it? How long can you live without it? What are your backup plans? Should the system be unavailable? Of course, if you ask people how often they want it back how much can they afford to lose? Everyone says nothing. No, and then you figure out- Then they think about it a bit more. How many millions do you have to spend? Yeah, exactly. They come to a more realistic estimate. Okay, but so you guys are responsible for providing that level of service based on the results of that survey, if I can call it that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And it's your job to make sure that you're constantly refreshing that service level. And then living up to it. And so you're able to offer, if I understand it correctly, a very high degree of granularity? Yeah, we have a few different options. I mean, when we roll in new products or new services, we have a default, if you know what I mean. So by default, it will backed up this often. We'll keep this many copies, we'll replicate this often. But then, as you say, we discuss with the business, is that acceptable? Does it need to be that often? Does it need to be more? And so we can tailor quite simply. And then there are a lot of different options in Veeam and lots of different ways of doing basically the same thing, but it makes it simple for us. We don't have to invest a huge amount of time tailoring solutions to different applications. You know, a couple of tick boxes and change a few numbers and we're basically there. Does security considerations come into the discussion of backup at all? It does. I mean, I guess with some of the more recent attacks and things, we've had to start thinking about it a bit more, you know, like separate networks and trying to go into the technicalities of air-gapping some of the actual backups more than we did in the past. So I don't know, I don't think we're 100% there yet with that side of things, but it's definitely higher on the agenda than it used to be. And how about cloud? We've heard some announcements today. We've heard sort of a strategy that is sort of on-prem, on-prem to cloud, cloud to on-prem, cloud to cloud. Where are you with cloud and how are you? At the moment, we are entirely on-prem. There are a couple of SaaS apps that we use, that we don't actually have any VMs or anything in the cloud at all. Okay, let's get... It's been more historical than anything. Our parent company have a very heavy R&D focus, so all the actual search on the trucks happens in Sweden. And they've been quite anti-cloud, I guess in the IP concerns. So your telematics offering is your cloud? It is, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, so your cloud service provider as well. All the data goes... Everybody's becoming a cloud service provider or a software company. It's all part of the digital transformation, I guess. It all changed. So last question is, again, we come back to the show. Things you've learned, what brought you here? Take some of the takeaways. Yeah, so as I said, it is becoming quite a strategic part of our infrastructure solution. So one of the things for me here is to learn what's next. So we like to stay up to speed and try and plan as far ahead as we can. What are the new features? Can we use? What options does it give us? So if we're interested to hear some of the options this morning, like the CDP, I think it sounded quite interesting. Again, it gives us another different option that we don't have today. So for some of the more critical services, we could look at that as well as the sort of a Ray-based replication that we have at the moment. And again, it's good to talk to different customers. A lot of people have the same experiences and are going through the same issue. So it's always good to talk to different people and just to try and soak up as much information as I can while I'm here. Great. Harley, thanks very much for coming on the queue. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this short break.