 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. We're back, VeeamON 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage where we go out to the events so we extract the signal from the noise. Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Mark Krespie is here. He's the vice president of sales engineering at Exigrid. Another mass boy. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again, Mark. Thanks, great to be with you guys again and great to be at another fantastic VeeamON in the world-class city of Chicago. Yeah, it's a great city. What's happening at VeeamON for Exigrid this year? Of quite a few executive meetings, a lot of customer contact, existing customers, prospective customers, meeting with the joint sales teams and so on. We coordinate a lot with Veeam in the field and on an engineering level so it's great to get off the phone and see each other face to face and really deepen the relationship. So, talk a little bit about what customers are, what the conversation is like with customers, particularly as it relates to data protection. We're hearing a lot on cloud, multi-cloud, intelligent data management. What does that all mean to your customers? Sure, so obviously Veeam provides a wealth of different functionality in all of those areas, whether it be the intelligent data management, you know, which includes cloud components, et cetera. So, we at Exigrid played a role in mostly on the on-premise side, to be honest, of the equation and because we typically deal with quite large customers, the use of the cloud is really typically relegated for older, more archive-oriented data or long-term retention backup data than it is for primary data or even a primary copy for disaster recovery, simply because of the logistics of managing that much data when you may need it. However, where the cloud plays a very important role in those types of customers is many of them have regulatory requirements, compliance requirements to keep data long-term that they may never need to access or never need to touch, in which case then, tearing that out to the cloud is a potentially good strategy. Yeah, Mark, one of the things we're watching at this show is how Veeam's trying to get deeper and broader into the enterprise. So, if you can, give us a little bit of color as to how you're seeing, where's Veeam being successful? What are customers liking for that kind of vision? We're seeing a significant amount of traction with Veeam and enterprise customers. In fact, we met with a large travel agency out here at the show who's looking at both Veeam and Exigrid as a combined solution. So, we're working very closely. Veeam has a dedicated enterprise team in the field and they're breaking down doors to a number of the different enterprises and our solution, the way it scales and its performance profiles, very well suited to the enterprise. We are an enterprise class company as well. So, we're doing cross introductions for each other and to each other's enterprise customer base as we go. Talk a little bit more about your solution, where the sweet spot is. We always talk about horses for courses on theCUBE. What's your favorite course? So, we define a target customer. The first demographic that we use is typically the amount of data they have under management. Put another way, the amount of primary data they have or the utilization on their primary storage. And where we typically live these days is 50 terabyte is kind of the low end all the way up to multiple petabytes of data being backed up. And we can store many, many, many weeks or months or years of that data because of the data deduplication impact. But that's our sweet spot. And typically, that's the most key demographic for us to look at is how much data they're managing. And you're an infrastructure provider, obviously. You have software, but you don't do backup software. That's not your specialty, right? That's correct. That's one of the reasons we have such a close relationship with Veeam. And quite honestly, we partner with a number of folks, but Veeam is clearly one of our key, if not our key partner, because they provide the data protection functionality, the management, et cetera. And we provide the intelligent, hyper-converged secondary storage that can store all of that data, deduplicate it, replicate it, and also provide, uniquely, I might add, support for some of Veeam's really critical features like instant Veeam recovery and virtual lab and sure backup. Because of the way our product is architected, those features work extremely well with us, where in some cases with some solutions, they don't quite work as well. Yep. You know, I think back to a number of years ago, deduplication was all the talk in the storage industry. How are the latest trends in, you know, everything from, you know, flash of the dot in NVMe and NVMe over Fabric coming soon? How is that going to impact what customers are doing in your space? Sure, so first I'll tackle the deduplication part of it. There's no question that it's now become an accepted norm. There's, it's rare these days that you're explaining what it is or what it does, but there still is one leftover misconception that I think it's really important for all of us who have deduplication to educate customers. And that is that not every type of deduplication is created equal. Sometimes people conflate it with compression. You know, all compression is kind of the same to a certain extent. The way deduplication is implemented, there are certain characteristics that will either increase the amount of data reduction you get or lessen the amount of data reduction you get. And for customers, it's really important to know what type of algorithm you're dealing with because that's going to translate to long cost over the long term. So that's the first thing. The other trends, the adoption of flash and so on really has been more on the primary storage side where that level of performance is required for high transaction, high performance requiring applications and so on. Because flash remains quite a bit more expensive than spinning disk is, it's inroads into backup or secondary storage have been somewhat more on a limited basis. So, if I understand it correctly, it's as a large part of the data reduction is a function of the algorithm. I don't want to say not so much the workload, but I was always under the impression that the workload determined the sort of data reduction efficacy. Which I'm sure is true, but you're saying the algorithm also has a huge impact. It's a combination. So there's no question that certain data types deduplicate extremely well. Other data types not as well and some not at all. Pre-compressed, pre-encrypted data tends not to deduplicate well at all. What where the algorithm comes in is there's a couple of elements and not to get too much in the weeds, but something called block size, which is basically the size of the objects that you examine when you deduplicate. And then whether or not you do what's called variable length analysis, which is adjusting to the fact that the data is expanding and shrinking as it's changing. Algorithms that implement very large block sizes and avoid variable length technology are going to get much lower deduplication ratios than algorithms that implement both of those elements, smaller object sizes and variable length technology. We're in the latter category of the more aggressive form of deduplication. So you've got greater granularity and the greater ability to drive data reduction ratios, assuming the workload is favorable for that. Exactly right. If you were to compare the same workload across the two algorithms, the less aggressive and the more aggressive, the more aggressive is going to do better on that workload than the less aggressive. And again, I know it depends on the workload, but are we talking about on a percentage basis, 10% better, 20%, 50%, 100%? Multiple is better. Some cases five to 10 times better. So even an order of magnitude is better, yes. In some cases, that's right. What about encryption? What's the state of encryption these days? What are you advising customers with regard to encryption? Sure, well, for years, we've been under the impression that everything's going to have to be encrypted at some point. It's been a slow journey. There's PCI compliance, HIPAA compliance. Obviously there's been some pretty infamous hacks that have happened and so on. So the way we look at encryption, we have encryption solutions, the self-encrypting appliances. And we recommend to customers, even if you don't need encryption today, if there is a slight chance that you'll need it in the future, then go with our encrypting line of appliances. The cost difference is nominal. It's in single digit, low single digit percentages. And it's there when you need it. So you don't have to potentially swap after that. We also do encryption anytime we move data over the WAN. So we're fully ready for all of these compliances. It's certified encryption, federal level certification, et cetera. So... Yeah, Mark, you'll let us know what companies aren't aware of the need for encryption and I'm going to short those stocks, right? Okay, you got it. Yeah, you might want to change your bank. All right, got to ask you. Brady, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? Absolutely not. That's a unanimous here. Three for three on that. Okay, why not? What would the rationale be? I think he's got a lot more to give yet. I think it would have been on par with the Babe Ruth trade. You know, it would have been a historical disaster. You know, he got us to the Super Bowl last year, granted, you know, Philly inched us out. But I still think he's the goat and he's going to stay the goat. As Giselle said, Tom Brady can't catch the ball. I would say also he can't play defense. So... I would agree with that as well. All right, well, what about Garoppolo? Do you think it was the right move to hold on to him as essentially as an insurance policy in case Brady went down before the trade deadline or should they have been more proactive and gotten more for him? I think it probably would have been the right move for the Patriots to hang on to Garoppolo. However, for Garoppolo himself and for the fact that they needed to get at least something for him, I think it was the right move at the right time. He needs to play. He's a great quarterback. He's already turning that San Francisco franchise around. So I'm happy to see him play. I actually now start watching 49ers games because I want to root for him. Me too, I'm a fan. He's the son of the Patriots. Of Garoppolo. I actually think, I agree. I think it was the smart move, Stu, to keep him as an insurance policy just in case. You don't know. I mean, Brady, you know, 40 plus years old. I mean, look what happened last year. It's the economics, Dave, though. They weren't going to pay him what he needed to be able to be a backup. And I agree with Mark, you know, he was ready to play, obviously. And it is fun to watch. No, we agree. One of them had to go, right? Yeah. Okay. And I were three for three. So Peter McKay, Patrick Osborne and now Mark Gresby all say, Brady should stay right move. We'll see, hey, they're the favorite to win the Super Bowl next year. Hopefully they can get there. Sounds like I'm in good company. Yeah, Mark, thanks very much for coming back. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to see you guys. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE from Veeamon, 2018.