 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris, Peter, great to be working with you. We haven't done much this week, but I'm really excited to have you here. It's been a great week, despite that. It's been a great week. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage. Last year at VMworld, one of the biggest hottest trends was data protection. Same thing this year, a lot of buzz, a lot of hype, a lot of parties. Rhea Barrett is here, she's the Vice President of Product Marketing for the Data Protection Division of Dell EMC. Welcome, great to see you again. Thank you, great to be here. Brian Linden is here. He is the IT Director at Melanson Heath, out of Austin as well. Brian, thanks very much for coming on. Thanks for having me. So Rhea, I mean, you and I have talked about this. What's going on in data protection? I mean, VMworld, it's become the hottest topic. You're seeing you guys, some of the VC-funded startups, trying to duke it out, throwing big parties. All right, you guys got all the customers. Everybody wants them, you're fighting like crazy. Cloud has now come in. What's your take? What's going on? Well, it's really exciting. I mean, data protection, I started out my career in data protection, but move forward and back in data protection is hotter than ever. It's great. And I think it has to do with the trends that are happening out in the market, the big mega trends that are happening. We talk about distribution, data moving out of the data center, where the four walls are no longer defining how you secure something. So security, recoverability are becoming really critical as you talk about edge and data moving to the edge and to cloud computing and multi-cloud computing. I think it's going to be one of those frontiers that the enterprise still wants to have a reign over. How do I recover my data no matter where it's sitting and how do I get it back and how do I secure it? So it's very exciting. So Brian, talk about Melanson Heath, set it up. Company, you know, tax accounting, Boston based, New England, et cetera, your role. And I really want to understand the drivers in IT, but start with the company please. Yes, Melanson Heath is a top 10 regional accounting firm in New England. We have offices in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine. We service other clients in Vermont, et cetera. A large portion of our focus is on auditing. We do a lot of municipal audits, school districts, towns, cities. We also do traditional tax accounting, management advisory, the full gamut of accounting professional services. You run IT? I do, yes. Okay, what are the big drivers in your business and how are they forcing you to sort of rethink the way in which you generally approach IT, but specifically approach data protection? Over the years, we've gone from the traditional everything on premise to moving things to the cloud, whether it's a SaaS provider or whatever. So we really need to be able to secure our data no matter where it is, whether it's in the cloud, be able to have it back up locally, between our various offices, et cetera. And uptime is paramount. We have deadlines that don't shift. The IRS does not care if we have a storm or we have something wrong with our building, we have, our professionals have hard deadlines. So one of my tasks is to make sure that no matter what happens, we have a timely backup plan and I need to be able to focus on the business and not be focusing on worrying about the backup and data protection. So obviously the other part of that equation is the recovery plan. So Rhea, this is our ninth year of theCUBE at VMware. Congratulations, by the way. And at the time, when we first started, it was a lot of talk about re-architecting backup to handle the V Blender, if you will, and the lack of resources. Now all the conversation, and Brian just mentioned it, is cloud. So how are you guys responding to that from a product standpoint? Oh my God, yeah. This has been a big topic of conversation. I think one of the areas where we really differentiated, one of the areas that Brian is in the middle of is mid-market and we see a big propensity for an appetite for cloud, from an agility standpoint, from a time to respond standpoint. And one of the biggest trends, and we heard about it at yesterday's keynote as well, is cloud is a disaster recovery site, especially for customers that might not have a secondary site. So we recently introduced a product called the DP4400. Brian's actually the first customer to purchase the product, so in July we announced it. One of the key differentiations of that product is the ease of which customers can now access cloud. Whether it's for long-term retention or cloud disaster recovery without needing any additional hardware. Literally, it's at the fingertips. You manage it exactly the way you would. You can manage it directly from your VMware operational tools and have access to cloud as a secondary site, whether it's for DR or long-term retention. So that's one of the ways for mid-market customers, we're really bringing that cloud and bringing it at their fingertips from a recoverability standpoint. And then we've done some exciting announcements. Beth was here with Yang Ming talking about some of the innovations that we've been delivering in cloud, whether you're a service provider, whether you're a big enterprise across our portfolio. So I think that's by far one of our key differentiations and better together stories with VMware. So I'm really fascinated, Brian, about some of the things you're doing. Let me throw a thesis at you and really you probably heard this. We tend to think that there's a difference between business and digital business. And that difference is the degree to which a digital business uses data as an asset. And many respects, if you start thinking in those terms, then data protection for the new world is not just protecting your data, it's protecting your digital business. For sure. Now, if you think about an accounting firm, we normally associate accounting with manual processes, manual activities, but there's a lot more data being generated by your clients, by the people that are providing the services. How is this relationship between data, the value of your business, and the value of your services driving you to adopt these new classes of solutions? For Millanston Heath, we are almost completely paperless. So all of our data, all of our work product goes through technology. So we need to, it's imperative that we be protected. If servers go down, if a site goes down, our professionals don't do work and time is money. So it first is the old thinking of having paper storage or just having local backups. If there's a significant enough event, we can leverage the cloud and be able to disperse our staff to places where they can sit down with a computer and do work. Additionally, like you said, we're collecting a lot more data. Our very software processes are using more machine learning to get more out of that data. So having that protected as it expands is critical. So increasingly the services that you're providing to your clients are themselves becoming more digital as well? That's correct, yes. So as you think about where this ends up, would you characterize yourself as especially interested in the DP4400 and the set of services that are around that as facilitating that process? Are you going to be able to tell a better story? To your business about how they can adopt new practices, offer new services, et cetera, that are more digital in nature because of this? I think so. I think having the DP4400 with its cloud connections will help our partners, our principals become more comfortable with the cloud and not fear it. They've tended to be a little more insular and want to see and feel and know that the data is there so being able to recover to the cloud or just use the cloud natively is going to be a game changer for our firm and our business. Just to add one thing that we talked about with Brian, one of the capabilities with the DP4400 is the instant access and restore capabilities. And we're seeing more of a trend, especially in secondary storage platforms, much like the ones we're using with DP4400 where basically all your data is there, right? So you're doing your data for recovery, your data for disaster recovery, for replication is in a place. And we're seeing a trend towards wanting to have flash and VME cash to be able to actually do instant access and restore not only for recoverability purposes for app test and dev type applications and data sharing. So that trend has already left the station. Even in our mid-tier products like DP4400, while targeted specifically for commercial buyers and mid-sized organizations, we're bringing that enterprise-class capabilities and making it available to them to be able to leverage, not only cloud, but also on-premise. And your cloud is, are you all cloud? Are you some cloud? Are you hybrid? We're hybrid. We do have a lot of on-premise. We are migrating things over the years to the cloud and that's certainly going to be the trend. And is that in effect or in part what's driving you to rethink how you approach data protection or how did that affect your data protection decisions? I think having the capacity to touch all types of systems and services is critical. We need to be thinking not what we're doing now but we're going to do a year, five years from now. And just looking back at the past five years, it's a completely different IT environment. Okay, so I want to translate a little marketing into what it means for the customers. Rhea, when you guys announced the DP4400, it was simply powerful, was kind of the tag line. Absolutely. Okay, so what are you looking for from the standpoint of simplicity and same question on power? Simplicity, the DP4400 is a 2U unit. Goes right in the rack, it's not use of various interconnected components that you have to figure out how to connect. It's one interface, it's extremely simple and quick to deploy. I have a very lean IT shop. We don't have a lot of time, a lot of people to be devoting hours and days and weeks to getting a data protection environment set up. Our previous solutions were much more complicated, different interfaces, always changing interfaces and they didn't really work well. I need to be able to just set it and forget it. It's an insurance policy is what it is. When something goes wrong, I need to know what's going to happen from the moment that the disaster is recognized to when our staff will be able to get back up and working. Okay. The DP4400 just makes that extremely simple. Okay, so it's simple, not just simpler. No. Is that right? It's simple, okay. It's simple. And what about the powerful piece, what does that mean? The power of having everything in one unit, it's one interface giving me and my staff the power to do what we need to do without having to have a degree in data protection. It's very simple to learn, very simple to use. It just works. And a couple of the things Brian and I talked about earlier was really no one wants to impact production to do data protection, right? Like he said, it's an insurance policy. So the performance of the platform is really significant. I think performance, performance without compromising efficiency because at the end of the day, cost is a big consideration, especially for mid-sized organizations when they're buying a solution. So I think it's really, hey, it's simple to use, simple to deploy, but it's powerful because you can get your stuff done in a lot of times for data protection, which is almost zero these days with efficiency. I got to also say really quickly that I would also presume that because every single document is so valuable and so essential, power also relates to being able to sustain the organization of that data at every scale. Absolutely, going further into power as we was indicating is the performance of the backups, the deduplication rate, sending things over the network to our disaster recovery site very quickly, very efficiently. We can pull back, do backups during business hours. We don't have to throttle it to just the overnight hours, which those hours are off hours are getting fewer further between because in taxis and in particular, we have people working seven days a week all day. So to send that data to where it needs to go in a compact form doesn't prevent our staff from doing work whenever they want and need to be able to do it. Organization is increasingly focusing on the data. Data has more value, means it's got to be protected in new ways, bring in cloud, requires new architectures. Games on is a big market, $30 billion plus TAM when you add it all up. Bring it on. A lot of people want it, you're the leader. Congratulations guys. Thank you. All right, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, everybody theCUBE will be back from VMworld 2018 right after this short break.