 I'm from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back to Las Vegas here at EMC World 2016 at the Sands Expo live on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here from EMC World 2016. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls and we're joined here on theCUBE by another first-timer, Anthony Kessel, who's a Senior Director of Product Management at SunGuard Availability Services. Anthony, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. Yeah, we'd like to hear maybe a little bit, tell folks at home first off, maybe a little bit about your background, but about SunGuard and core competencies and if you would go ahead and take the table and go from there. Sure, absolutely. So first of all, thank you very much. It's been a great show here at EMC World and enjoy talking to you guys and everybody else. I'm one of the 10,000 professionals collected in one convention hall at some point. That's pretty exciting. At SunGuard Availability Services, we provide IT services, both in the production running of our customers' production workloads, but also come from a long heritage of disaster recovery. Over three decades ago, SunGuard invented the industry and became the leader in it and has remained the leader in it ever since. By disaster recovery, when our customers have an outage, whether it's due to some natural disaster, some security issues, or somebody pulled a plug they shouldn't pull, we're there to give them an infrastructure to bring their applications up at time of need. So Anthony, SunGuard's had a long partnership with EMC. Can you talk about how disaster recovery's changed over the last few years and what kind of solution you're helping to jointly deploy with the EMC technology? Yeah, and technology has changed a lot. When we started, like I said, 30 years ago or so, we were doing some recoveries based upon punch cards and tapes on mainframes, moved up to client server and i-series and AIX stuff. Through the X86 and VMware and Cloud now and whatever's happening 10 years from now, a lot of technology's changed, but we always recognize there's three steps to disaster recovery. The first step, the key, the core of everything we do is what we call protect my data. And EMC plays a huge role in that. That is a simple step of taking data from where it's vulnerable at our customers location and making sure we have a good copy for recovery is every good recovery starts with a good copy of your data. So between data domain, Avamar, networker, recover point, these are the technologies that we base upon our recovery for protect my data. Now once we have the data, data is no good without compute power. So Sun Guard has thousands of dollars of computers that are plugged in, patched, networked and ready to give to our customers so they can connect to that data from the first step. We also have our cloud for recovery where we could take your virtual machines or your physical machines, turn them into virtual machines and quickly recover not just your OS but we can go into the application, the database and the network swing as well. Can you talk a little bit about how the cloud coming into the picture has changed things? This week EMC has talked a little bit about using their virtual stream solution for disaster recovery. How does that all fit into the picture? Well, our partnership with EMC starts and actually our offering that we have announced recently around our shared multi-tenant secure data domain service was built with virtual stream where we actually have a data domain in our facilities. So if you have a data domain at your corporate spot and want it to place the point it for disaster recovery, we offer that to you. We develop the product in partnership with virtual stream so that you can get a copy of your data to our facilities next to all that compute power I just recognized. From a cloud perspective, whether it's onto one of the clouds we've built, whether it's protecting one of the clouds that we built for production, where we're hosting our customers production revenue generating workloads or whether it's a cloud that we're building for recovery or using infrastructure in more prevalent public clouds, we still believe that that three-tier concept of protecting the data, orchestrating connection to compute and the third tier is making sure we understand how to bring up the applications, the database, the networks. It's still the same one, two, three step, kind of that swing motion and golf they talk about that is always the same and that's what we bring to the technology irregardless of the platform. Okay, can you talk about customer mindset, how they think of disaster recovery? You know, in the past it was sometimes, oh, it's an insurance policy, sometimes customers would set a part of it but not really test it all out. You know, what's the state of customer mindset for disaster recovery today? Yeah, and you could add to that list and say, customer is that test for success. They're only going to run a test if they know it works and if they know it's not going to work, they wouldn't even test. We're like, guys, one of the rules of disaster recovery is you have to test and with virtualization, with some of the solutions we've brought to market, some of which in conjunction with EMC, it allows customers to test more often. So it's becoming more of a standard thing that they do try out. You are right. Historically, some people have disaster recovery as an insurance policy and for those companies that never tested, they probably, if they had an issue, would be unsuccessful. Through our managed recovery program, which is an umbrella program across all the different technologies that we could toss at disaster recovery, we ensure that their applications and their business workloads are recoverable. As part of that, we focus on one of the most causes of errors which is change in production. Some guy in prod changed the tape release, didn't tell the DR guy. They added some servers, they didn't tell the DR guy. So what we do, we inject ourselves into their change control management at production so that when there is a change, we are ready at DR for anything that might happen. And that's really a change in the customer mindset. They understand the importance of downtime. They see the cash that goes out the door when they are down. And they have found that while things are easier with virtualization, sometimes they're less stable. I talked to one of our customers which is a utility company and we were going there helping him transform from mainframe to a VM environment. And I'm walking in, talking to this guy, and he's been in the business for a long time. And I said, well, this is a great day for you, right? You're getting rid of your mainframe and you're moving to the VM cloud that you're building on-prem and we're backing it up for your SAP work. He says, are you kidding? This mainframe has worked for 30 years. It stays up, it is ironclad. With VMs now, I'm planning for when it goes down. So our customers are realizing that outages happen, service interruptions happen, and because of that they're testing more often. And we've had to respond with solutions that allow them to test more often to be sure that they're ready. So how do you get people to prepare for failure then, almost, right? That's what you're doing is to accept it and understand that you've built redundancies and the protections and it's going to be okay. But as you said, someone's been going down this track for a long time thinking about security, right? I could sleep well at night. I don't have to worry about my issues. And all of a sudden you're introducing a whole new way of thinking for folks. So how do you handhold them through that? Well, some of the things that we've done is making sure that we understand we have these 10 laws of disaster recovery. One of which is we make sure that all gigabytes are not created equal so we don't treat them equally. And what that means is make sure that we develop solutions that meet the security needs as well as the RTO RPO per gigabyte almost, not per customer. Like this is a healthcare customer, therefore it all has to be dedicated and highly secure, which is excellent. Some of their aspects of it may not have to come up in two hours. Maybe some things can wait a day because they're non-mission critical to topics. So we develop solutions to make sure we hit those security and performance needs of every application at the customer's location as opposed to treating this customer as all in one. So we help them prepare for that way by doing assessments up front and doing what's called tiering your applications. If you don't tier your applications then you're either going to spend too much money for things that aren't needed right away or you can spend too little money and not recover the important things that drive your business. So for example, and how would that work in... Well, I'll let you pick the customer or whatever, but how do they assign priorities and then how do you divvy it up and then organize all that offside? Working with them, we have some tools and we have interviewed, so first of all, I should say this. Before we had tools, we had interview techniques and assessment professional services that can go in and understand not just what apps are important because people say, oh, my web presence can't be down. Okay, that's fine. Does your web presence run on the back end of some AS 400 that you didn't realize was connecting there? So we go into our customer's production environment and work with them to do what's called dependency mapping. So we talk about what infrastructure runs on what applications run on what infrastructure and then work with them to do what's called a business impact analysis to let them know that this app, according to everything we found, will cost you $5,000 a minute if it's down. This app, you could wait three days. I was talking with one CIO out of Florida and she was saying that I need everything replicated inland because I have some problem with flooding in Florida. And I was looking, I'm familiar with Florida and she wasn't too close to the water and I'm like, well, why do you have flooding? He says, well, the sprinklers keep coming on. I'm like, okay, so that's interesting. So we went out and we said, okay, I'll replicate everything. We actually was EMC, SRDF at the time and we replicated everything real-time 40 miles inland and came back in a week or so after all the specs and designs and here's your bill for X amount of money. She's like, whoa, that's not what I was expecting. Do you realize that I could run off the cash in the till for three days, paying my suppliers and paying my employees? Okay, we missed a step there. That step was understanding the need of doing a business impact analysis before we rush out and say, here's what you need to buy. Here's a bright, shiny thing on the front. Yeah, so it sounds like you've got a good view into the applications your customers are running. Wonder how kind of some of the application modernization, microservices and the like and SaaS applications fit into how you deal with your customers. We have some specific solutions around very SAP and SAP HANA now. When we started working on our SAP HANA disaster recovery, SAP themselves didn't really have a set way to do recovery. Well, we had to approach it because our customers were demanding of us. They said, SunGuard, you've got the decades of experience. Tell us how you would recover this. We had to work with EMC at the time using RecoverPoint as part of our overall solution to develop an application-specific, application-aware replication and even the newer in-memory databases like HANA to make sure we could bring them up in a timely fashion. As applications become more API-driven, we're writing more application-specific ways to capture data, transmit data, and make sure that we store it in a very efficient way so we can recover them quickly. I should mention, as we talk about recovery here, SunGuard does have almost half of our customers also relies upon us for the production services. We've invested in highly automated public cloud offerings within our own facilities where customers run in a dedicated cloud model, a hosted private cloud model, or a shared enterprise cloud model. They're most important workloads. So what we've done is we've taken our legacy of making sure we can bring customers up very quickly in the worst possible cases and brought that same kind of mindset of operational excellency to the production workloads. Which again, like you talked about the applications, we have certain clouds built for certain applications. So last question I have for you, Anthony, is you can speak to the business value you see from leveraging the EMC data protection products, and what does that mean to your ultimate end customer? Well, EMC brings a lot of the technology that our services are based upon. I believe that with our, again, I've highlighted some things around AFMR and data domain recovery point as well as the storage, which is the back end driving a lot of our production workload clouds. We've been able to deliver that world-class service and be able to keep us at the very top of the analyst ratings that are out there. In working with EMC and now with Virtustream and the new Dell technologies, we see this as continuing on as we move towards more tiering of the application. If you look at some of the speeches we've had in this general showroom here around putting things where it belongs, putting the public stuff in the public cloud, putting the high IOPS stuff local, making sure that's a hybrid solution. One of our models this year is hybrids the new normal. That's what we build our services upon and we're using EMC technology to help us do that. And as people, let's look at markets that haven't been tapped yet and are looking at making these conversions that you've been talking about, what's your selling point to them in terms of dealing with the pain and dealing with the headaches and taking on a lot of problems. But ultimately I guess maybe the sell is you're going to sleep better at night ultimately if you trust me. Yeah and having our legacy of not being like a brand new born in the cloud kind of company but having those decades of serving our customers again at some of the worst possible moments in their history and coming through for them time after time and taking that into the new technologies based upon cloud gives them the confidence as they move from, like I mentioned this guy who was on mainframe from a utility moving to VMware, he turned to Sun Guard because he trusted us for his recovery. Well I will bring that trust as I converge as well. And as we move deeper into the production space we can help our customers translate from legacy platforms into newer, more cloud-enabled or even hybrid production workloads. Well I want to thank you for the time and I still, I can't help but be struck by the problem of the sprinkler system. I think there was a simpler solution. Oh there is a, exactly, move, right? All right, Anthony thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. All right, thank you very much. And theCUBE continues from Las Vegas here at EMC World 2016 right after this.