 From Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with my partner in crime this week, Stu Miniman, senior analyst at Wikibon, also co-host of many events across the world in terms of networking, storage, cloud, you name is Stu, he's on the developers with me. Stu, thanks for seeing you. Stefan Renner, technical director, Global Alliances at Veeam Software with us, with Darren Williams, Mr. Hyperflex, that's his Twitter handle, go check him out. Hyperflex, lead at Cisco. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. I just want to love the Twitter handle. I live the brand. You've got to live the brand. That's got some longevity to it, so it's evergreen. So congratulations on that. You guys are together with Cisco Veeam. What's the story? What's going on in Europe with Cisco and Veeam? Yeah, I would say there is a lot of stuff going on between Cisco and Veeam, especially around the Hyperflex story, obviously sort of topic, topic of this session, right? So having integration, Hyperflex, having, I would say a good go-to market, having really a good relationship between the two companies. And we just choked about how often we've been in front of cameras talking about this exact same topic. So that shows that the relation between the two of us is really moving forward and in a good shape, huh? I think we're in good shape in terms of, you think about not just my product, Hyperflex, but you look at what Veeam can do for the rest of Cisco data center products and be that backup, a safe pair of hands around what we need in terms of that data protection layer, but also then what we can add in terms of that target to be the server of choice for backups so you get the benefits of the speed, performance, and more importantly, you get quicker restores because that's the important bit, you need to be able to do the quicker restores. Yeah, if we talk, you know, at Veeam we usually talk about availability, right? We don't talk about backup, sorry, recovery. Even if recovery is maybe the most important part of availability, still we talk more about availability than about anything else. And as he said, the good thing on Cisco is they actually can deliver what we need in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, in terms of compute resources. So yeah, that's really a benefit. It's such an interesting time. I mean, we look back at history, go back 10 years ago, maybe around or more, backup recovery, it's like, oh yeah, that's like, oh, we forgot to talk about that in our RFP, kind of bolted on, kind of retrofitted in, but now we've seen it come to the main center. But more importantly, with AI and cloud and all the action happening with DevOps on-premises, you hear CIOs and CXOs and developers saying, we're data-driven, okay? So if you're data-driven, you have to be data protection-driven too. So those things go hand in hand. So the question for you guys is, how does a data-driven organization, whether it's in the data center, all the way up to the business units or business processes, become data protection built in? How do they design in from day one, the data protection system up and down the stack? Yeah, so maybe I start to answer that question. I think when I'm going to customers, and I fully agree on what you just said, most customers 10 years ago, we were focusing on getting you with the realization platforms, getting you storage systems. It has been isolated projects, right? Now in those days, when I go to customers, I try to convince them to include data protection every project they do in data center, because at the end, as I said, data protection is one of the core elements. So 10 years back. So designing in early at the front end. Yeah, designing in early, right? So I say whenever you go about having a new hyper flex system, or whenever you talk about replacing your existing history environment, whatever you do, right? Just look into data protection, look into your availability story. Because right now, and you mentioned that, it's about the data services, right? We don't really talk about restoring a VM. We don't restore just a single file. It's about the customer wants to have a data availability in terms of a service availability. And that includes more than just a VM, and that includes more than just a single thing, right? So they need to include data protection and the design of that in the whole project. From the beginning. At your point. Yeah, we look at it from a similar thing in terms of where you've got changes happening in terms of the way people are looking at how they want to design their applications, where they want their data to live. And that's the whole message in around 3.0 is that multi-cloud readiness platform. Being able to think about an application to go, do I want to design in the public and house privately, or vice versa? Do I want to house the data of the application in a private location, and the actual application in the public? Having that being able to be transparent to a user in terms of the way they design it and then position. But also as we look at other applications, not all people on this journey are going to go, we're going to put everything in the cloud. They're going to look about, I'm going to have maybe a little bit in the cloud, a little bit of the traditional apps that we need to manage and protect. And it's all about that 3.0, that we've delivered the pre-multi-cloud offering around hyperconvergence. We've now brought the multi-cloud element. It's given you the choice of where you want to position things, where you want to house things, how you want to design things, and keeping it nice and simple for customers and the agility in performance. Darren, some really interesting points that you just had there. When I think back to a few years ago, hyperconverge, pretty strong in North America, but it was project-based. It was like, let's take a VDI or some virtualized environment. It wasn't a cloud discussion. Take us inside what you're seeing in Europe here, because today, hyperconverge is a lot about cloud, how that kind of hybrid or multi-cloud environment fits. So what do you hear from your customers? And I think if you look at what's happened in terms of hyperconvergence up to this point, it's the initial building block of this multi-cloud. And we're seeing more and more customers now. I think the latest IDC surveys, so in the 87% of all customers have a multi-cloud strategy. And we're seeing now more of the ability to think of hyperconvergence as that multi-cloud strategy and have that simplicity that people have done in terms of the initial thoughts around a simple application, how they can collapse the layers. They can now utilize that experience into the multi-cloud experience. And we're seeing more and more that... So we've now got 2,500 users around the world, around Hyperflex, and about 700 to 800 in Amir. And the majority of those are utilizing it as a private cloud experience. They're getting the benefits of what they've had in the cloud and getting away from the sovereignty issues and the shadow IT issues that they all face. They can now bring it back into their own data center. They can start small. They can spin up applications very quickly. They get the benefit of that cloud message, but locally now, yeah. And I think that perfectly aligns with the beam story because as you know, we are also focusing on the cloud. We recently changed our slogan to any app, any data, any cloud, and also did some acquisitions on the cloud side. So we are also moving forward in the cloud story, in the hyper cloud area. And that's more or less what CISCO multi-cloud story is all about, right? And I think one thing we should also mention here, coming a bit back to how to implement and how to design such solutions. As I said, having a more of a broader view on all the projects, I think one important thing for customers is the CVD CISCO have, right? And we do have CVDs also available to Veeam and CISCO on the data protection layer. So we try to make it really easy for customers and for partners to design, implement, and actually do the right decisions for those projects. Yeah, so Stefan, at Veeamon of course, a lot of partners, a lot of them talk about the multi-cloud. Of course Veeam has a long history of VMware, but what you talk about Microsoft, I believe there's some things you've been doing lately with Hyper-V and the like, what's the update? Yeah, so obviously with HyperFlex 3.0, there is Hyper-V coming, right? That's one of the biggest things coming in HyperFlex. Now for us, when we started to talk with CISCO, when actually CISCO told us that Hyper-V is next in 3.0, we said, you know, that's fine for us because as you said, we were dealing with Hyper-V like we deal with VMware since a couple of years. So there is no big difference in terms of features and what we can do with Hyper-V. Overall on the Microsoft side, obviously it's around Azure Stack, which also is a big story with CISCO and Veeam because there is an Azure Stack solution, so we try to get the Azure Stack fully integrated in the Veeam portfolio and it's about Azure, right? Getting, as we just talked about, making this cloud journey even easier for the customer, making sure we have data protection for Azure, or making sure you can actually use our cloud solutions in Azure to provide the full experience in the cloud. So the question on European audience, just looking at some Twitter tweets here, getting in some feedback, is ask the GDPR question, which basically is code words for the sophistication between data protection, you know, the saying, we say as you get bitten in the butt if you don't prepare. And this is one of those things where, I mean, literally there's so much data out there, people can't even understand their own tables. I mean, if you have accounts, how do I know a user uses, you know, a certain name in this one, I got a certain name in this database? I mean, it's just a nightmare, even understand what data do you have, nevermind taking someone out of a database. So the challenges are massive. This is coming down and it really highlights the bigger trend is, what do I do with the data? What is my protection? What's my recovery? How do I engage in real time? GDPR issue is on HANA, so we'll talk about the GDPR issue and then what it really is going to mean for customers going forward. I think if you think about GDPR and people, I've got the misdemeanor that is just an EMEA thing, it's not, it's a worldwide thing. Any data that relates to a European citizen anywhere in the world is covered under the GDPR. So you've got to think about the multinationals we work with have to have this GDPR thoughts. Even if they're not based in EMEA, they may house data based around the European citizen. So it's a massive thing. Now, not one person or one organization can fix GDPR. We're all part of a bigger framework. So it looks like if you look at the Hyperflex offering, having self-encrypting drives, having good data protection and replication of the data, so it's protected, that protects the actual content of a record, but it doesn't solve everything around GDPR. There's no one organization that can do that. It's about having that framework of you do the right decisions around the architecture and the data protection, you'll get in there in terms of the protection. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm just going to rant here and just say whoever came up with GDPR doesn't do anything about databases, okay? Yeah. I mean, just, I get the concept, but I mean, just think about how hard it is to deal with unstructured data and structured data in and of itself within a company, never mind inside a company, what's happening externally, it is a technical nightmare. Absolutely. And so, yeah, just hand waving, hey, someone came to your website, well, did they come in anonymously? Did they log in? Which identity did they log in on? Is there's no seamless identity? I mean, it's a nightmare. This is a huge problem. Yeah. What do customers do? I think, you know, if you talk about GDPR, it's first of all not about a single solution, right? It's not an issue of just one company or one vendor or one solution. It goes across different databases, different applications, different software. So as you said, it's database solutions you need to delete maybe a single entry, a single table entry, which is almost impossible right now, especially if that's in a backup, right? How are you going to do that? And I think between Cisco and us, and he mentioned that one important part of GDPR is data protection itself, right? So the customers need to make sure they can actually promise and they can show to the government that they have a proper data protection in place so they can showcase, you know, what does my DR plan look like? How do I recover? What is my RTO, my RPO? So we can already solve those issues. Well, it changes your game because for you, it turns you into a insurance policy, to a proactive- Kind of. Because in order to do data protection, you actually have to know what the data is. So it kind of creates an opportunity to say, hey, this is an opportunity to say, we're going to start thinking about kind of a new e-discovery model. Yeah. And I was going to say, in terms of you, if you look at 3.0, the multi-cloud platform, we were discussing around how hyperconvergence started very small in certain apps. But when you actually then expand that out into the multi-cloud, security's a major pillar. And you've got to have the security elements and Cisco have some great security offerings in the data center and outside of the data center. They're all form part of that GDPR message, but it's been baked into multi-cloud 3.0 as a key component to allow customers that confidence. It's going to be a hyperconvergence of databases. So this is coming. Yeah. I mean, this is going to force, I think the compliance is going to be more of a shot across the bow, if you will. I mean, I don't know how hardcore they're going to be enforcing it, but... It's going to be interesting the first one. Because at the moment, I think a lot of customers are thinking, well, we'll wait till we see how big the fines are, and then we'll decide. They're going to create shell corporations on the Cayman Islands with... Yeah. All right, so we've talked a little bit about some of the headwinds that we're facing in IT. Talk about the tailwinds. A lot of things in the Hyperflex 3.0, we've got 700 or 800 customers. What's going to drive adoption, get that into thousands of customers here in 2018? So I think it's the simplicity message. Customers want ease of use of technology. They want to get away from what they've had before, where they've had tough times standing up applications, where they've had to invest time around different skill sets for the infrastructure, be it networking, be it storage, be it compute, having three teams battling against each other and change windows. So the simplicity message of Hyperflex is, you can have a three node cluster up and run in 34 minutes, including the network. We're the only ones that incorporate the network into the solution, and we do it for good reason, because we can get predictability and performance, and we can grow the solution very, very easily. And that's the whole point of what they're doing is, they want to be able to start small and add more nodes when required around what applications they're going to deploy on. We see, our tagline is, any application anywhere now, in either a private location or into that multi-cloud location. Gives customers choice, and I think, as we start seeing more and more customers, 700 in just under two years is a phenomenal amount in Amir and 2,500 worldwide. We've had some great traction, and it's just going to get faster and faster, yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of customers are obviously talking about moving to the cloud completely or at least the majority of the data. So for the customers that stay on-premise for them, and I talked about with some customers actually today, and they told me, no, for us right now, we can't focus any more on a data center itself. We do have much, much more difficult and more important topics to talk about and to cover in our IT business than the basic data center itself, right? That includes compute, that includes utilization. So it's great to hear you can actually set up a hyper-flex system, no matter if that's hyper-V or VMware, whatever, in less than an hour, right? And if I tell you now that if you add Veeam on that, on top of that to provide the availability for just installed hyper-flex environment, that's also less than an hour, right? So if you know how to configure that, you can be done in a couple of hours and you have more or less a whole data center setup. Bring up a really good point. What are customers concerned about? I have to worry about my application portfolio. I have my security issue, my whole cloud strategy piece. So if the infrastructure piece is just invisible and I don't have to touch it, tweak it and do that, I'm going to have time to actually grow my business. Yeah, yeah. The more integrated it is, the more easy it is to set up and to maintain and troubleshoot, by the way, that's also a important thing, right? What if it doesn't work? So if there is a consistent layer, a consistent way to get all this information and to get troubleshooting thing done, the barrier is for our customers because again, they don't want to care anymore what's happening in the back of this. And that's the next challenge we're addressing around our product or insight. It's taking that management solution into the cloud to make things easier for customers and being able to take a lot of the things we have in point products into a cloud model. So the likes of analytics, the likes of smart tack, not customers get fed up when if they have an issue, they have to go and roll the logs up into tack and then go and FTP them. They get away from that. They don't need to do that in insight. And it's all about, we're talking about the deployment of technology. Well, one of the first benefits of insight is hyperflex. We can roll out sites without even visiting them. You just do a cloud deployment and a cloud management and it's job done. And this is the whole point we were kind of getting at early connect back to the compliance issue. These agile like things are happening, it's throwing off data too. So now you got to organize the data. You can't protect what you don't understand. Correct. I mean, that is ultimately the bottom line for what's happening. Yeah, yeah. You can't protect what you don't understand. I think that's a good conclusion of the whole thing. And I think for us... By the way, when you guys use that tagline I want royalty. But it's true. I'm going to notice that. We'll get back to you on that. No, this is the big problem. Protection is inherently assuming you know where the data is. Yeah. Yeah, there it is. That's for sure the case. And one thing we were gone and, you know, we announced that a couple of months ago is to be mobility orchestrator, which is another layer on top of it. So he just talked about how they can deploy within the site, multiple sites of hyperflex very easily, right? And for us it's about, you know, getting the customer an easy solution all this disaster recovery and failover scenarios across the data centers with the availability orchestrator. Data is the competitive advantage. Data is messy. If you don't control it, reign it in. Of course theCUBE's doing their part in bringing the data to you guys here in theCUBE with Veeam and Cisco partnership. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, breaking down here at Cisco Live in Europe 2018. Live coverage with theCUBE. We'll be back with more after the short break.