 From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to Chicago everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days. Veritas used to have a big tent event last year. This year they're going out to I think seven cities around the globe, probably touching more people than they would have with a single event, but they're road warriors and we're here with them. The Cube is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Roger Dombrowski is here. He's a data protection specialist at DC Vast. One of Veritas' big solution partners based here in Chicago. Roger, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, Dave. You're very welcome. So data protection specialist, so you're into it. Data protection is changing quite dramatically. There's cloud, there's the edge, there's, we just talked to Jyoti about AI. And so lots is changing. What, from your perspective, how are customers responding to those change? What are some of the key drivers? A lot of the key drivers, used it to be able to differentiate with backups and things like that. Now it's table stakes, it's an insurance policy. And that's kind of the old classic way of looking at it, but I think what today what we're finding, and I think Veritas is doing such a great job of, is mining value out of stuff that's even been around a while. So while the workloads have changed, our best practices haven't changed, our strategies haven't changed, it's where things are going, but it's also mining that metadata to get more value out of the backups than to just be an insurance policy. So I mean one of the obvious things is I've talked about it as DR, but DR is still insurance, it's just more insurance and maybe you're killing two birds with one stone. But when you talk about mining data and analytics and getting more out of the metadata, give us some other examples of how customers are exploiting and leveraging that investment in what used to be just backup pure insurance. Yeah, and in fact it's kind of interesting because InfoMap's been out for a little while and I think we've been going around to the customer base with a slide deck, maybe a couple slides and really underselling the value and what I've had a great opportunity to do with a couple of customers here very recently is get into some deep use cases and it's been an eye-opening experience and what's so amazing is that the data we're and the information we're gathering has been in their backups for years, right? It's like the data's been there, we're tapping that with InfoMap, finding stale data, ransomware, age data, all kinds of better ways to tier. Some of the discussions were around cloud and hey, do you really want to put cat videos in the cloud? Well, we can find those things with the backups and we've been looking at that data for years. We're finally now pulling the value out of that data. One of the speakers earlier today talked about, he took us all the way back to the federal rules of civil procedure and bringing together IT and legal. So those discussions now with GDPR, et cetera, coming back to the fore, it's important, you don't want data that could be a legal risk hanging around everybody says, oh, big data, I can keep all the data and then general counsels go, eh, I want to keep all the data. So the backup corpus is a way you're saying to investigate that and reduce risks and also potentially identify diamonds in the rough that you can keep in mind. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, let's talk about, I want to ask you about, there was a little company called Network Appliance, I think they were founded back in the 80s. They changed their name in the 2000s to NetApp, kind of got out of that appliance. But appliances are still strong in the marketplace. Everybody's talking about software defined. I think even Veritas uses it as part of its description of who they are and yet they continue to announce appliances as do others. Why appliances, from your practitioner perspective, what's going on there? Well, actually, there's a customer who's actually here at the event today and one of the things that really sold them on that whole form factor was, the larger the company gets, the more siloed different aspects of your business are. You've got that, if you wanted to make a change or implement something, you'd have the network team, you'd have change control, you'd have the OS team, the application teams. The appliance form factor is allowing the backup to kind of wrangle in a lot of that crazy, hey, I've got to have 20 groups involved in something. Purpose built and performance tuned. I mean, we see it all the time. Customers are still, they still look at us and go, well, I think I can do it cheaper and I've seen them try to do it and maybe they'll save a few bucks, but the soft cost in terms of headaches and problems and tuning and just limitations of building your own versus the appliance form factor. It's still going to run on hardware. Yes. So you're saying, let the vendor do the integration. That's sort of the appeal of the appliance. There are use cases for pure software-based solutions, but if you just want to set it and forget it. It really is that, yeah. If the appliance comes into play. What are some of the other big things and trends that you see, but let's talk about cloud, the whole, I've often said renting is always more expensive than owning. You don't necessarily want, if you want to rent a car for a day, we'll go for it, but if you want to drive at 100,000 miles, you can probably make sense to buy it or even lease it. We heard today about cloud repatriation. I mean, that's certainly a narrative that a lot of the on-prem guys want to talk about. What are you seeing in the marketplace? I'm seeing, I mean, even before, I mean, we'll go back even four or five years. Everyone's asking me, Roger, I want to get off a tape. Let's go to the cloud. And what's been so interesting is to do those calculations. And I think some people kind of fly over that 100 miles an hour. And Veritas was one of the first ones to actually preserve deduplication all the way through the process. So it really changed, I kind of call it that cost versus rent, or own versus rent ratio, where depending on how long you're keeping data, how well the data dedupes, things like that, that's going to affect your cost model. And that's really, in my role at DCVast, that's a big part of what I do is to take the feature sets that Veritas brings to the table and apply them and say, hey, does this make sense to put this in the cloud? Should this be on-prem? And the great thing again is, Veritas isn't, this isn't your dad's backup anymore. I mean, the access appliance, the flex appliance, some of these things we're bringing to the table, InfoMap, these other tools, we're not just doing backups, we're doing ancillary things to all of them. Just to get out a little bit, you're talking about dedupe through the whole process. You mean without having to rehydrate the data, Exactly, exactly. Which is just time consuming and complicated process. Absolutely. That's a technology that they're pretty proud of, they talk about it a lot. Very, very, very much so. And I mean, if you look at it, we've always been able to do it, but it's been, it's the cost, right? If I have to virtualize an appliance in the cloud, it's a very expensive proposition. But if I can dedupen all I'm doing is storing small fragments in a cheap storage target in the cloud, that's all better for the economics, for the customer. All right, Roger, I'll give you the last word, takeaways from today and any other thoughts. Oh, I loved hearing about the telemetry. There's some new features coming in. I've heard some of this material before, but again, to hear the different perspectives, customers talking about the technology and where we're going, it's, I'm glad we got to go and participate. All right, Roger Debrowski, thanks very much for sharing your perspective. Excellent, Dave. Great to see you. Take care. All right, keep it right there. Everybody at theCUBE will be back at Veritas Vision in Chicago right after this short break. I'm Dave Vellante.