Joe D'Angelo Veritas - VMware Explore 2022
Transcript
>> Welcome to VMware Explorer 2022 with the CTO Advisor Studio. Come on in and consume some content. >> Welcome to another episode of the CTO Advisor Studio here at VMware Explorer 2022. I'm coming off an exciting keynote, packed house, Raghu Raghuram, CEO of VMware, super excited. Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, they're in the audience. Obviously a big talking point of the show, so much about data. Literally right before my current guest, Joe D'Angelo, Director of Product Management at Veritas, thanks for sponsoring the CTO Advisor Studio at WMware 2022.
>> Our pleasure. >> Right before you got on, I was talking to a VMware customer, 25 gigs of data per element and that element is a plant. They do organic berries, et cetera, 200 acres, tremendous amounts of data, data's growing. There's not many companies that understand data more than Veritas. >> First of all, Keith, thanks for having me on the show. This is fantastic. I'm really enjoying the conference so far. And certainly, I don't think there really is many companies out there that embrace the need for securing and protecting and optimizing your data like Veritas.
>> So let's get right off, data protection, backup and recovery, solved problem, right? Veritas is a staple. I remember one of my first IT projects, one of my first major IT projects was rolling out a Veritas solution. >> Sure, well, I guess I could say, more data, more problems, you could say, as we like to think of it. As applications grow, as the diversity of applications grow, as the amount of data grows, so does its significance to your business, and with Veritas, our goal is really to help you keep pace with that growth and ensure that it's protected, it's optimized, and it's available whenever and wherever you need it.
>> So let's talk about this optimizing and making it available whenever and wherever you need it. I was just half joking when I said data protection is a solved problem. Data is becoming more dispersed. The nature of where we're storing data is just changing, whether it's the public cloud or the data center. When I think about Veritas, I think about COTS software or package software. I'm deploying it on-prem, on servers, et cetera. How has Veritas changed its product portfolio to meet the needs of the modern data infrastructure?
>> Well, it's a fantastic question, Keith, and the reality is, is data is not in just the data center anymore. Data's all over the place. It's in wearables. It's in the cloud. It's in endpoints. It's in your kitchen. It's everywhere. And we are evolving our technologies to meet that demand by embracing cloud native architectures, by embracing as a service model for a number of different platforms, by delivering on the promise of the applications and the data that is needed to deliver on the services and really the business models that our customers have.
>> So we have this saying, at the CTO Advisor, this model rather, that IT is accumulative. We don't get rid of applications and platforms over a period of time. I'll go into an environment where they have an AS/400. It will have Unix, Solaris, AIX, VMs, containers, serverless, SaaS. How is Veritas ensuring that as I'm backing up this new sets of data, that I can still rely on the governance and compliance that I've built around my existing Veritas products? >> Sure, I mean, you pointed out that it's like the Cheesecake Factory menu of applications and services.
You never know which one to choose from. And the great thing about Veritas is that we pride ourselves on a consistent message across those platforms. So whether it's data protection, whether it's governance, whether it's the availability and disaster recovery of those workloads, whether it's in a Unix environment, a Windows environment, a Linux environment, a hyper-converged workload, a virtual workload, on-prem, in the public cloud, you have the same consistent user experience, you have the same ability to meet the RPOs and RTOs that your customer's demand and operationally, it makes for a much more seamless experience.
>> So talk to me a little bit about that experience, because one of the things that I've lamented over the past couple of years, this stuff is hard. There's a perception that moving to the public cloud, moving to cloud makes it easier, it simply doesn't. It just becomes more complex. And as we look at solutions such as data protection, the temptation is to say that let's pick on a product in the portfolio, a product like NetBackup, which is massive, too complex. I can't get my arms around it.
I need this elasticity of feature set, but it takes too much overhead to train my people on how to use NetBackup. How has Veritas kind of turned the knob and helped with complexity versus capability? >> Well first, we like to pride ourselves in the fact that there's a difference between something being complex and something being complicated. So we appreciate that customers' environments are very complex, but we want to deliver on an automated and optimized solution like a NetBackup or like an InfoScale, where we actually take an inside-out approach, where we look at the individual workload, and we allow customers to be able to protect those different environments to meet the needs of those particular ecosystems.
So if it's a Nutanix or a VMware type platform, if it's a cloud-based platform, we've evolved our user experiences so that you can take full advantage of those environments much more directly. Whereas before, it was more of an adaptation where it's like, hey, we're taking something that may have been built for, let's say a physical Unix server, and we're trying to shoehorn it, that concept is long gone. We've evolved the technology. we've containerized the technology. We're using it in a cloud native format, so that really can meet the demands of those new workloads but do so in an easy and intuitive way.
>> So let's dig into the RPO, RTO conversation a little bit. Back in the day when I did disaster recovery, site-to-site disaster recovery, we'd have like-for-like hardware. It was very simple when a business application user would say, "I need these app RPO and RTO requirements," simple conversation, it was easy for me to quote out. Now it's a bit more difficult. I have more options. When I think of RTO and RPO built around the ability to fell over from on-premises data center to the public cloud or public cloud to the public cloud, how is Veritas approaching that new capability and problems set?
>> Well, that's my sweet spot. That's where I spend most of my time is in being able to architect and develop solutions that solve for that specific challenge. And I think what it comes down to is that across the portfolio at Veritas, we recognize there's no one-size-fits-all approach to application recovery or data protection. But in reality, what is available is a strategic approach where you can take a portfolio that Veritas has, whether it's a NetBackup or an InfoScale or a resiliency platform, and you can actually right-size the recovery process for your particular application.
So if you've got a very stringent RPO and RTO requirement, our platform allows you to be able to recover that. If you've got something a little bit more, I would say in the tier two to tier three category, you can recover that using our technologies as well. And certainly, anything that's tier four and beyond, we allow you to essentially establish a policy that will choose the right type of solution to recover it to. So whether that's moving from a VMware environment to another VMware environment, whether it's taking that virtual machine and refactoring it for the public cloud, or even taking the constituent application that's living inside of a virtual machine and refactoring that so that it now can live inside of an EC2 or Azure or VMC-type workload, or type ecosystem, all of that is through a centralized dashboard.
>> So let's talk about making this real a little bit, because from a high level, I get the marchitecture picture, the ability to back up anything from a cloud native application to application to EC2 and recover to another one. In reality, I have a lot of Windows stuff. I have a lot of Unix stuff. And as a backup provider and a data protection provider, I have to serve a huge swath of developers, people developing for those legacy applications and people developing in a need, and I need to be able to offer up these levels of protection.
I need to design a data protection offering that serves the entire landscape. How does Veritas bridge the gap when you're talking about a huge provider environment like that so I can offer up my developer that's developing a Kubernetes, a gold platinum, diamond interior of RPO and RTO? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to the fact that you have the different levels of recoverability that are needed. So if an application, as service, needs something that's a tier zero tier one, we have the ability to coexist that recovery with a tier two or tier three type workload.
So if it's a containerized environment, we've taken and we've actually containerized NetBackup in a way that you can address the needs of Kubernetes or OpenShift or a Tanzu type workload, but at the same time, you can also address the needs of the application that needs to say, a persistent stateful storage layer with our InfoScale for Kubernetes. So the idea is that we're taking the different layers of technology that we have, we're addressing the different, I would say, aspects of the customer's environment that they're actually going to touch upon, and it's going to be in a unified experience.
It's going to be from a strategic partner, like Veritas to come in and understand the needs at all those different points along the way. >> So let's talk about Net New customers. If I've been using NetBackup or any of the solutions to that for the past 20 years, chances are, I'm not changing. I got too much historical data. I'm pushing on you specifically to support the new stuff in addition to continuing to support the new stuff. But if I'm a cloud native shop, why Veritas?
>> Why Veritas? Well at the end of the day, whether it's cloud native, whether it's legacy, the resiliency and the obligation you have to your customer doesn't go away. And in many cases, when you have an environment that is both cloud native, it may not be 100% cloud native. It may be a mixture. It may be a hybrid. It may also require you to look at it from the perspective of is my cloud native app going to be portable across the different providers?
In many cases, the conversations we've had, customers are a little concerned about developing an application that's written for one cloud provider, because it's not necessarily going to be portable for them to do another cloud provider if they use some of those native services. But, if they can benefit or take advantage of the platforms that we have, whether it's the NetBackup or InfoScale, and all those different pieces or NSP and SaaS offerings, they find that they can actually bridge that gap, and they can take advantage and really fully exploit those services in that particular cloud provider, but then they have an exit strategy or reverse gear to say, you know what, today doesn't not working for me in this particular location, I want to be able to repurpose that somewhere else, but I don't have to redesign and account for an entirely new operational process.
It's consistent across all those different environments. >> All right, and now I'll be remiss if I don't ask this last question around security and malware. It's keeping CIOs up at night. >> Joe: Indeed it is. >> How is Veritas helping to reassure CIOs, CTOs, that they can recover an event or even prevent malware infection? >> Well, certainly that is the top of mind. It is without question, one of the most important topics, and Veritas takes that as serious as any issue that's ever come about in the data center.
And with our technologies, you can understand that a malware attack. You can easily recover from that malware attack. You can scan and identify whether or not there is a corrupt or a bad actor, so to speak, within your environment. You're able to understand that when I want to recover, the first is really to always block the malware from coming in. That's always the first step, the first line of defense, but if a malware penetration does happen, we give you the ability to scan and determine at any given point, whether or not that recovery operation is simply just going to overwrite you with that malware once again, we'll be able to jettison and remove those particular infected areas but also give you an air gapped environment where you know that that image has been protected, and you know that it is safe from any malware penetration.
But at the same time, we talk about the data as being so critical to malware recovery. What about those services and applications that consume that data? We do the same thing for that. So we give you that ability to recover, not just the data, but the consumers of that data, the delivery vehicle for that data. So we really understand that a malware recovery or a ransomware recovery, we see it as a comprehensive process. >> Yeah, malware is getting more and more complex.
We're at VMware Explorer, and we're seeing malware designed specifically to impact the VMware vSphere Underlay. That needs to be protected and being able to be recovered, super critical topic. Joe D'Angelo, Director of Product Management at Veritas, we appreciate you coming on to the show. >> Thanks for having me, Keith. This was great. com. You want to learn more about the CTO Advisor, and specifically I didn't ask Joe the hard-hitting enough questions you can DM me on Twitter. DMS are open at CTO Advisor.
stay tuned for more coverage from VMware Explorer 2022.
