 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE coverage at VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Justin Warren. First of all, happy to welcome back to the program. Chris Wall, who's the chief technologist with Rubrik. Chris, great to see you. Hey, good to be back. And first time guest, we have Neal's Groot, who's a virtualization architect and apologies for butchering your name. No problem, great to be on the show. All right, Neal, since our audience all knows Chris. So, I always said, you live in the epicenter of virtualization there. You look through the top virtualization bloggers. I think they're all like your neighbors and things like that. So tell us a little bit about your background and what you do. Yeah, so yeah, it's all about Netherlands, right? And it's a really small country. So we have a lot of VCDXs, a lot of the experts over there. So virtualization really is alive in the Netherlands, right? So I'm myself, MA freelance contractor. So I help my customers by translating business to actual technical infrastructures. So that's what I do on a daily basis. Awesome, love it. It's something magical on those troop waffles, I don't know, the Dutch mafia. I didn't mention the troop waffles. That goes without saying for those that know the Netherlands thing. I heard there was one airline that stopped serving them and people are changing airlines. Yeah, people went mad. Yeah, I know, I know. Chris, just fit a little bit since we've chatted, so give us the update, what's new in your world. Sure, I mean, from a rubric perspective, we launched our 4.2 release, which from a VMware perspective, the big items on that are trying to focus on hybrid cloud. So we actually are VSAN certified now so we can protect, recover all that jazz with virtual sand from VMware. We offer native integration with VCloud Director, which complements our already existing integration with VRealize Automation. So it doesn't matter if you're kind of an MSP looking to offer VCD or VCloud Director as a service to somebody, or if you're doing VRA in the enterprise. Yeah, so one of the questions I've had is, VSAN's an integral piece of all the multi-cloud stuff that VMware's doing. So does that mean that does rubric come along through the ride? Is there more integration work and testing every time that VMware does a different config with a cloud provider or VMC or things like that? There was a lot of work put in there. I mean, to get certified, you have to go through a pretty rigorous set of testing and your developers are talking to one another, the APIs have to be compatible. So there's a lot of work to make sure that regardless, like you said, of the topology that you execute or the environment that you choose to operate within, the solution is pretty much guaranteed rock solid to operate from a backup recovery archive, all that kind of jazz perspective. So two thumbs up, I'm super jazzed. So Nils, on the VSAN thing, we hear from VMware that the growth in VSAN has just been enormous. So what are you seeing in all the customers? What are they using? Are you seeing them just go mad crazy for VSAN? What are they using it to do inside their organizations? That's a great question. And what I tend to see is a lot of customers still are running on, well, if you may say a more traditional storage solution. So storage arrays, but I do see a lot of traction with VSAN and that's, I think primarily because of performance, performance announcements, if you will, obviously the architectures are completely different, right? So you're closing to the CPU, closer to where the actual workload is running. So that helps a lot. On the other end, I see the economics come into place. So we had several customers who were actually looking at it from a cost perspective and they managed to cut down on cost with using VSAN. So yeah, I do see a lot of traction and movement towards HCI solutions. Right. Chris, maybe unpack for us a little bit. You said 4.2, if I remember, Polaris is what it's called. What does that really mean? These shows, customers get bombarded with lots of announcements. So what are the customers excited about? How does it change their businesses? Well, let's divide and conquer here a little bit. We kind of have three tracks now. There's the rubric cloud data management software, which just announced 4.2 recently. Then there's Polaris, which is a complementary solution that goes with that. We launched it in April with GPS, which is the global commanding, like driving your car, beep beep, global command and control where you can deploy policies and see an audit for compliance and all that jazz. Essentially it's a dashboard for everything that we can see and manage. What I'm really excited about, really, like saying the word, is radar, which is a brand new data management application. We just released it. It's generally available today. Just came out within the last month. And what that's doing is actually taking every data point that we have on the backups that we take of your applications, lining those up into a machine learning model. We're actually using no nearest neighbors to look at all those data points across data growth, what's being add, remove, change. Just think of everything that you can see when you back up a workload. We correlate that into the model and then we can detect when are things normal and when are they not normal. And then if we detect there's an encryption of some sort, like ransomware attack is probably the cornerstone use case for this. We alert the security team, the operations team, whoever, they go into an analysis mode and we tell them everything that we see in the environment. We actually can call down to the local running instance of rubric on-prem because Polaris is a SAS model. So we can say, hey, go look deeper into the file. Do we see encryption? Do we see ransomware? What's going on? We give that on a platter to the security professional to say or even the layman to say, here's everything we see wrong with the environment. What would you like to do? Do you want to restore all of it, parts of it to some other location, back to where we found it? And so the idea is that if you get hit or maybe when you get hit with some sort of ransomware or disgruntled employee or in my case, when I accidentally did a star dot star removal of all system 32 files, this was many years ago, it's push button that goes back and play. And the downtime that is the killer for most operations evaporates. That radar is that in VMware environments? Is it multi-cloud? What does that play across? It's pretty straightforward because if we can see it from a backup perspective and index it, which is pretty much anything in the VMware ecosystem, we can then trend on that and put it into radar. So it makes it less about what you're doing from a workload or a platform perspective and more about how often are you backing up? How many data points do you have? And are you feeding that information into Polaris to give you those insights? So really wicked technology, very differentiated in the market. Chris, you said that it provides all of this information to the security professionals for them to make a decision on. We heard from VMware yesterday about the idea of a self-driving data center. So how far could you push this? Could you actually get it to be fully automated so that for example, if it notices an outbreak of malware or a ransomware attack, could it actually step in before it gets too far in there and you have to restore a lot more data? Could it actually just sort of help you as an admin to take over those parts of the management of the environment? The short answer is yes. You can absolutely put full autopilot. The longer answer is we're not so certain everyone wants that at this time. And we have two kind of advantages here. Number one, as the customer data comes in, it's all siloed from a mingling perspective. Each tenant gets their own environment where we keep their metadata. There's no crosstalk or anything like that for security and obviously for warm and fuzzies. But at the same time, if we kind of pull back our lens, we do get to see all the tenants kind of globally. And we can learn across a global set of customer data, even though it's not mingling with one another, which means as we drive radar further down the line and rev up new versions of it, we can add more and more of that automation. And it's kind of a two-way street. We learn from the customers what they feel comfortable with and what they want automated. And then we put that into the product in our basically every other week release cadence. Niels, what customers are comfortable with is a big question. So you're working with a lot of customers. Where are they in this spectrum? We talk about security and multi-cloud and all of these discussions here. What are some of the common things that you're dealing with? What's going well and what's still holding us back? Wow, yeah, there's a lot of things customers are looking into. And I think that's one of the main problems. Well, not to say a problem, but there's so many areas to focus on and so many innovation going on right now. So yeah, data and data security, those are probably in the top three, right? So customers are really looking to adopt new technologies to be able to securely store the data. But at a scale, right? I have several customers and they foresee a immense growth of data. Like, well, it's the transformation we're in as an IT world, right? So I think it's challenging. What is the right path, where to go from here and which technologies to adopt and which technologies you probably should better leave behind? So yeah, it's a quest, I would say. Yeah, it's funny. We talked to lots of customers and it's like, they're like, oh my gosh, how do I keep up? And my answer more recently is like, well, none of us are going to be able to keep up on everything. So you need to have partners and peers and maybe there's educational materials we can talk about. Niels, do we have some experience in some of the educational materials? Well, well, funny that you should ask. So we have this book, This Beauty, and this is actually the heritage of Frank Denerman and Duncan Epping. They started out like 2012, 2011 maybe with a clustering deep dive book. And that's all vSphere related, right? How to actually use vSphere, vSphere HA, DRS for resource management but also for the availability of your applications. And well, yeah, I had another book written with Frank just last year, focusing more on the host resources. It was actually the host resources deep dive. And in case they couldn't see on the video, the big thing, and that's vSphere 6.7. It's big thing. So this is the update for it. You worked with rubric, it was participated in making sure that this happened. It looks like you could hold the door with that book, it's so big. Chris, maybe, you know, we know education is a big part of this community. Why is rubric looking to help with a book like this? No, I mean, this is like my show. I've been coming to this forever. I love the people that are here. I love VMware as a technology and as a company. And one of the things I wanted to do when I joined rubric, which is 2015, was keep that torch lit. So we spend a lot of time focusing on what customers are looking to do, what partners are looking to do, and really just trying to draw the spotlight on really great things like the clustering deep dive book, which is, and they were nice enough to let me write the forward for it too. So I'm not just trying to be nice. It is good content. So from the book itself, all the way through these V All-Star cards that we do to highlight bloggers that are kind of up and coming, or perhaps some of the old guard, you know, a little mixture to help the new folks, talk to the old folks. You know, I guess I'm an old folk now too, but that kind of jazz with it, all the way down to, we throw a huge party every year, really just trying to say thank you to customers and partners. And this year we had the roots and run DMC coming out to kick it old school. So just the whole gamut. I was hoping that John Chambers was going to, you know, come out on stage to introduce them. You've had a lot going on at Rubrik. I mean, we don't have time to go through all of it, but maybe you want to hit a highlight or two, Chris, some of the corporate stuff that's happening. Yeah, having John Chambers as a board advisor, that was, this is like really fresh news that just came out recently was huge. Cause I can't, I've been to so many Cisco live events where John would come out and do the keynote. And it's just, it kind of draws you in. You feel the energy and the passion from Mr. Chambers as he delivers a keynote. And he's just entitan in the networking industry. He is affectionately known as the preacher from people that have worked with him and seen him walk up and down the aisles of Cisco live and other shows. So absolutely. And then we had Avon Puri joined as well. I think he was, he recently just came over from VMware and he's the new chief information officer at Rubrik who's going to really shake up things internally as far as building a strategy around how do we make sure we have Rubrik on Rubrik from an internal perspective, making sure we're customer zero and really showing the things that we do to our customers so they could see, you know, no veneer. This is what it looks like. This is how it's going to execute and join us on that journey. So some pretty exciting announcements from the executive perspective. It's certainly been an exciting watching all of the progress that Rubrik has made over the years. I've been tracking you for a long time and just seeing the growth of the company and just kicking goal after goal. It's been really quite impressive to watch. I appreciate that. It's definitely been weird going from employee 32 to 1200 plus. So there's a lot of people I still have to meet. You have stuff now. So Niels, tell us the truth though from customers. So, you know, Chris isn't listening, you know. What do they think of Rubrik out there? Do I need to be honest? Yes. I think they find Rubrik pretty awesome. Actually, my current customer utilizes Rubrik a lot. And that's all, yeah, well, we talked about data, data integrity and data security, right? So, yeah, it fits right up in that alley. So I think customers will definitely look in technologies like Rubrik and everything that comes along with it, a lot more in the upcoming years. All right, so, Chris, I want to give you the final word. Rubrik, so much things at the show. I believe you got one of the Splash brothers signing autographs in the booth. So people watching this right now is probably a little bit late to run over, but final takeaways you want people to have from the show. I think if I were to pull it back to any particular focal point, what the customers are saying, we just had a user case study slash kind of press announcement with the Museum of London where they're talking about all of the millions of digital assets that they're protecting with Rubrik using our Oracle integration for this large data warehouse. And I think those kind of things speak for themselves. When you see customers willing to come out and extol the virtues of what they put into the environment, especially them with, I think, something like eight or 10 IT professionals running everything. The belagered admin story really hits me in the heart because I was that person for many, many years. So I love seeing that we're changing kind of the lifestyle and the applications that they can deliver because they're not dealing with data protection day to day anymore. And I would say I would highlight that kind of world and that's what we're providing to customers. Neils, first of all, congratulations to you, Frank and Duncan on the book. I remember previous generations, everybody would be getting it and make sure that they had enough room in their luggage to take it back home from VMworld. Always, we know how this community really appreciate this. Chris, thanks so much for the update. Look at you wearing a blazer. I remember when you were the admin and speaking out here and you still seem to know a thing or two about the technology. So always good to catch up with you. Thank you, Steve. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting close to the end of our second of three days, wall-to-wall coverage year from VMworld 2018. Be sure to go to theCUBE.net to see all of the video and thank you for watching theCUBE.