 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Actifio Data Driven 2020 brought to you by Actifio. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE's coverage of Actifio Data Driven. Happy to welcome to the program the co-founder and Chief Product Officer, David Cheng with Actifio. Thanks so much for joining us. Great to have you back on theCUBE. Great to be here, Stu, thank you. All right, so the big theme of the event is the next normal, of course, we've been talking about transformation of data for many years, but the global pandemic has put a real emphasis on some of the transformations that customers are going through and alluding to that next normal because definitely things have changed a bit. Give us if you could kind of the high level, what you've been seeing, you've been there since the start for Actifio, so what is that next normal for customers? Yeah, absolutely. So I would say over the span of the last two years, we've seen definitely a accelerated ramp into the clouds, but I think this whole pandemic has really accelerated. I mean, this really tell-tale sign came in, we actually, prior to the pandemic hit, we closed a large European customer and within a span of two weeks, they were saying, I can't get access to my data center for all the important work that I have to do and with Actifio, like to move everything into the cloud. So within a span of three weeks, we were able to move a lot of their critical workloads with them, so I think that gave us the tell-tale sign that this thing is really, truly accelerating. Yeah, absolutely, there's that acceleration. It's tough to move data though. It's not like we can just say, okay, hey, we've got petabytes, the laws of physics still are in place, and also with that move to cloud, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, still critically important. So any learnings that you've had this year or things where you've had to help out customers, as they say, we need to move fast, but we also just need to stay secure and we need to make sure that our data is safe. Absolutely, so I think there's a major difference between the lift and chip model in terms of your application infrastructure and then the actual foundation building block you're using, those pieces are very difficult to lift and chip because cloud fundamentally present different set of building blocks. A great example here is that object storage, it's the most scalable and lowest cost storage available in the public cloud, hyperscalary infrastructure, and without that, trying to move to the cloud would be a very difficult indeed, trying to make the infrastructure match. So let's dig in and talk a little bit about how cloud really transforms storage. Back in the storage industry, we've talked for a long time that object was the future and that's what cloud was built on. So you've got large scalability, you've got some great cost efficiencies. What does that mean to the activity of solutions in your customer? Yeah, I think from the very beginning, I would say, I recall this conversation three or four years ago when we were looking at what are some of the next generation architecture we wanna build the activity of technology on. It was very clearly that object storage needs to be front and center in everything we do. It's maybe a little known fact, but Amazon AWS service initially started with the S3 architecture and that was the very first service they brought live within the AWS sort of product portfolio. So it is as fundamental to the cloud as EC2 more so than containers and so on and so forth. And the fact that you have this almost linear scalability horizontally to exabytes of storage and the fact that you can essentially leverage all the performance you need to get out the object storage that's all built into the environment. Those are some of the critical pieces and obviously the low cost, compared with SSD or spending drives on the EC2 environment, those are all some of the critical elements on why object storage is so critical in this whole cloud migration if you will. Yeah, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the application side of things because of course the architecture matters but it's really the outcomes. It's the reason we have infrastructures for the applications and of course one of the most mission critical applications. We talk about data, it's those databases. We've seen a lot of transformation in the database world. Most customers I talk to now, it's not their one central source of truth. They now have many databases and especially in the cloud we've seen that kind of Cambrian explosion of options out there. What does that mean for your customers? Take us inside that most important database world. Yeah, I think any customer with their interest to go into the cloud or minimize the on-premise environment anyway, the very first thing they think about is what are my most critical application I need to move? Databases are typically it. There are companies that has a lot of, I would say projects around migrating some of the traditional databases into NoSQL or even hosted services like RDS but I would say the vast majority of the database population that's essentially in production today are some of the traditional databases. So that also tend to be the most difficult problem in terms of trying to migrate the workload to the cloud or DR or business continuity into the cloud. So David, what is new from Actifio now? What should customers be looking at when we talk about the storage capabilities? So I would say the first thing is that Actifio allow our customers to kind of maintain the legacy databases they use. And by using Actifio, we normalize the entire cloud infrastructure so you can get all the same RPOs and RTOs that you're used to on-premise into the cloud. And through the adoption of object storage down deep into the foundation blocks of our architecture, now you can have sort of the best of both worlds. You can have this on-demand capability you're using from the public clouds. You are getting capability as you need them. But also you can leverage sort of object storage without changing your application architecture to get that performance and get to the sort of the cost point that you need to to make that entire business viable. I think relatively recently, we did a ESG sort of project that really validated that you can get 95 to 97% of the performance of SSD, but rather on object storage and from a cost saving perspective, that cost actually went down by 88%. So it is indeed the best of both worlds, if you will. Yeah, well, explain that a little bit more if you could because you want that scalability, you want high performance, but there's always been those architectural trade-offs. So what is it that Actifio does, you're talking about the object storage that pairing with the cloud capabilities help us understand what is differentiated about that solution? Yeah, absolutely. So I think in some ways, object storage has been getting a bad rap in terms of people's perception of slow performance and so on and so forth. But I think the real reason is because other vendors are using it incorrectly, if you will. A lot of things we've seen in the past like legacy backup vendors taking sort of a looking at object storage as a tape replacement. With all object storage system, there is a fundamental limit on a per object performance you can get out of the entire object infrastructure. But really the secret sauce Actifio came up with is to design an infrastructure that natively translate block or file storage that for example, Oracle or SQL consumes. And then taking that data, sort of if you will, from the application perspective and divide it into hundreds of thousand, if not millions of object. And that could be spread across the entire object storage infrastructure. And this is how you get the performance, if you will. That's very, very similar if not almost identical to SSD even on object storage. Yeah, I saw a blog post on the Actifio site making a comparison to the Snowflake database. Of course, super hot company, lots of adoption in their cloud service. Help us understand a little bit that comparison that your teams make. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a very interesting insight. I think both Actifio and Snowflake probably independently arrived at the same with conclusion about four or five years ago that object storage is the foundation building block. And this is how you scale massive infrastructure at a cost that's effective for business models, right? So I think in many ways, if you look at how Snowflake works is they leverage this almost infinite scalability of object storage to consume sort of this data lake to store this data lake. And therefore they can effectively offer that basic service to your customer at a very low cost point. And then when they actually decide, the customer decided to use that information, this is where the business model works and they actually just start charging the customer. So that foundation building block of object storage, in terms of the fundamental building block for the Snowflake service, I would argue is also the reasons why they're so popular today. Yeah, David, we've seen quite a change in the landscape since the early days of Actifio. It's interesting to hear you talk about those analogies of some of those cloud native solutions. Give us a little bit of insight. You're the Chief Product Officer. What's the biggest change you'd say of Actifio today versus maybe how when people first heard of the copy data management technology? Yeah, I would say, I think we were kind of fortunate that when we started the company, the fundamental premise of being very efficient, very scalable and instant reuse is a sort of fundamental premise of our product and architecture that has held true through a technology evolution, three or four different waves in the last, I would say 10 years. So I think what's kindly the biggest difference between I would say now versus Actifio five years ago is that everything, with everything we do, we're thinking cloud first. This is how essentially the Actifio platform has evolved into this normalization platform for enterprise customer to achieve the same RPOs and RTO, the same applications, and be able to using some of the same building blocks across both their hybrid infrastructure and also public cloud infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely. That hybrid discussion has really dominated a lot of discussion the last couple of years. A challenge for the engineering teams is architecting into those environments. It's not just once you've got Amazon, you've got Azure, you've got Google, you've got others out there. What are you seeing? It doesn't feel like we have a standardization and there's specific work that you need to do, but your ultimate customer, they want to be able to do it the same way no matter where they are. Give us a little bit of what you're seeing is some of the challenges in how Actifio is facing that. Yeah, I think there are fundamentally two ways to go to the cloud. I think one is to entirely consume a lot of the higher level functionality that Amazon, Google and Azure has. That does mean rewriting your application from scratch to take advantage of that. I think some of the benefit there is you have some very low entry costs and you don't have to worry about operationally how to keep that going. But I think more commonly what we're seeing enterprise customer do is to taking their existing stack, rewriting portions of this and kind of build it on EC2 and container environment. And those are sort of, I think, more of the more popular choices that people are making in terms of making the move to the cloud, at least from an enterprise customer perspective. And that is an area that Actifio could really help by again normalizing what they're familiar with on premise to the cloud and we can provide the same service level and provide really this level of flexibility for you to shift workloads back and forth to make that work for your business case. Yeah, I'm curious. I remember back you talked about Actifio five years ago and in some of the early days it was like, well, the traditional storage companies might not like Actifio because at the end of the day, they're going to sell less capacity and that's really how they price things. It feels like the cloud providers think about it very different. You don't really think as much about, I don't buy capacity, I have scalability, I build out my applications in a certain way. Do you see that cloud model taking over any other comparisons you'd make kind of the cloud world versus the data center world? Yeah, I think really the switches is very telling, right? I would say in some ways, surprised a lot of people at the pace and that it has happened but I think it is, that pace is pretty solid at this point. I mean, we are seeing broad adoption of sort of that strategy all over the world and it's only accelerating. All right, final question I have, let's bring it on home, that next normal, what do you want customers to have as their takeaway from this year's data-driven event? I think the probably the most important thing we want to communicate to our customer and potential prospect is that you can have the best of both worlds, right? It's not a one or other decision you have to make. You could be in the cloud and enjoy a lot of the same benefits and a lot of the same service level that you're used to but taking advantage of that, there is a separate very large company running world-class operations for you in the cloud. The elasticity of that capability is very important as well but with Actifio, without having to rewrite your application per se, you can have advantage if you will of the new world still maintaining the presence of the old and you can manage both environment in the same way. David Chang, thank you so much for the updates. Great to catch up with you and thanks for having us at the event. Thank you, Stu, for having me. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.