>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas
it's theCUBE,
covering DockerCon 2017,
brought to you by Docker
and support from its eco-system partners.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's presentation of
DockerCon 2017, I'm Stu Miniman
joined by Jim Kabellis.
Happy to have on the program,
my next guest is Chad Thibodeau,
who is the Principle Product Manager with Veritas,
of course we know Veritas,
on the Wikibon side,
back Veritas before the Symantec acquisition back-out,
so thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you, thank you for having me.
>> Alright so, tell us a little bit about your role
and what you do at Veritas.
>> Cheers, so I'm a Product Manager at Veritas
responsible for a new product offering called
HyperScale for Containers.
So it's a software to find storage solution,
we actually just are announcing our beta
at this conference,
and again our inaugural first-time exhibiting
at DockerCon, so very excited to be here.
>> Yeah, and Chad one of the questions
coming into the show is storage seems
to be the thing that is going to
take the longest to mature
when it comes to containers,
so first couple of years watching
everything was stateless,
the Google 2 billion containers,
the average lifespan of the containers.
I think they called those...
Oh gosh, I forget the analogy.
It was like is it the nat that lives for a couple of hours
or is it the dinosaur that might live for years?
When we think of storage we're like
That's stuff I stick in my data center for years, so...
Do we have stable usage of storage?
Can storage be used in production?
So bring us up to speed as to
how your product fits in and what that means
in that whole development.
>> Yeah so, I myself have been actually
working with containers for probably about
the past two years at different capacities,
first within the CTO org at Veritas.
Like you said about two years ago,
I would agree with you,
there was a lot of contemplating;
are you ever going to really need persistent storage?
I would say now what we're finding is
not only is it needed but it's probably
one of the biggest challenges so
with our product the key is it provides
storage persistence but it also
provides quality of service,
and I think the combination of that is actually
something that really is
challenging a lot of these companies that
want to run them in production, so...
>> Alright, talk to us a little bit about your customers,
what are they asking for?
What are those use cases that
your product is going to fill?
>> So a lot of customers that we're talking with
are looking at kind of a container initiative if you will,
so they're trying to figure out,
do I actually take a legacy app,
put it in containers or do I only
limit this to new developments?
We're kind of seeing a mix of both,
I would say in terms of what they're talking about
is they're facing the same challenges
that a lot of people face with virtual machines,
which is how do I get that data protection
from my container
again, how do I get that guaranteed performance
and then I want to have a storage provider
that I can actually trust 'cause
it's my data at the end of the day.
So we kind of feel like we fit all three of those bills.
>> Okay, so your software to find storage,
can you walk us through the stack a little?
Docker is a partner there.
Who else are you working with to
put the whole solution together?
>> Yeah so, it's a software to find storage play,
what's unique and without a visual but I'll just explain it,
is you have a concept of two planes,
you have a compute plane and a data plane.
So in the compute plane you're going to have
basically direct-attach storage nodes,
we would then attach container volumes there
to service the applications so you have
highest performance, it's right there.
And then in the data plane,
that's where all your data management services are,
so snapshots,
replication,
eventually a back-up integration.
>> Stu: Sharding?
>> Could do sharding,
could do erasure coding,
all of that encryption,
all of that would happen down there,
and the idea's so you don't have any
impact to the compute plane,
you have this clear separation so,
in other words think of the
opposite of hyper-converge.
It's HyperScale you're
purposely trying to separate those two.
So I think again with customers
they like that concept and I think
that they are starting to come around
to where everything...
I mean I've seen the transition
from direct-attached to NAS to SAN,
now it seems to be going back again
to direct-attached so that they can really
isolate the storage that's needed
for the application.
>> Well it's a dirge, we at Wikibon,
we have a category we call Server SAN
and we said HyperConversion infrastructure,
we really don't see that.
That software layer is really what
drives a lot of those solutions so
it's not necessarily that HCI can't do this,
but it's how do we really build storage services
with a disaggregated architecture,
it's distributed systems and therefore
it's not about the appliance,
it's about those new models of doing it.
We're not going to do it the old way, right?
I mean I date myself,
I remember back when we tried to do network storage,
the reason we called it Server SAN is
we're going to build it in the server
but it's going to give us all those
features and functions and value propositions
that the external SAN did. So that...
>> Actually I love the idea of Server SAN
because one of the things we're doing is
we are virtualizing that storage within the server
so that you can have different tiers,
all of it gets virtualized,
it's all now a logical storage pool that
you can use, so I like that...
>> Yeah, yeah, we thought about it from
the guy that lives with storage,
when you say DAS and that thing
takes me back 15-20 years,
so we know that we're new but
when we start getting into some
really cool new applications,
whether you're talking some of the
edge applications like IOT,
talking about analytics and
big data stuff that Jim loves,
we need some of these more
distributed architectures to
be able to build that.
>> How would you containerize?
By volumes, by storage drives or whatever?
>> Well, so when you say containerize
are you talking about...
>> Jim: Storage.
>> So for the storage, so...
>> Jim: And what level of animicity?
>> Sure, so to be real clear first,
I think the other thing that's unique is
this is completely delivered as
container images so the HyperScale for Containers,
it consists of basically five different images,
one is a plug-in,
one is IO services,
one is your RESTful API services et cetera.
So what we are then doing is,
we are basically provisioning
container volumes that will get then
attached or signed to the container application,
does that make sense?
>> Jim: Yeah.
>> So you are installing us both on the compute nodes
as well as on the data nodes,
and that way again we kind of control both so...
And then between there's a network layer
that would be required to have the
communication between them so...
>> Chad, anything with those kind of
interesting use cases that you see,
what use cases are you starting with
and where do you see it going in the future?
>> Yeah, you ask a very interesting question
because it's kind of like,
I don't think there's a silver bullet,
in other words as I talk to customers
and I talk to analysts
and I go to conferences,
I'm trying to find out the same thing,
is there specific use cases that are
better than others?
What I can tell you is new applications,
so whether you call them cloud-native,
whether you call them the...
Web-scale, those applications are really highly designed
for container environments,
and that's where they're going to still need
the persistent storage,
but on the flip-side we have customers
that are actually taking legacy monolithic apps
and they're sticking them in containers.
And a great example for you to think of is,
so you're familiar with Veritas,
NetBackup, our product?
We've containerized NetBackup,
you can actually put an entire NetBackup
into a container image.
We haven't refactored per se,
and split it into different services,
it's basically been delivered that way
just for an easier way to consume it so...
>> The other thing when we're talking about containers
is how this fits into the whole cloud picture.
What does cloud mean for your customers at Veritas?
How do your products fit in the world of
Amazon, Microsoft, Google and the like?
>> Yeah so we've done some recent announcements,
so we're definitely very heavily focused
on supporting cloud work-loads
or applications running in the cloud,
whether it's on-premise cloud,
or private cloud, a hybrid or public.
So we have working relationships with Amazon,
with Microsoft, with Google.
What we see is we're starting to see customers
take more of a hybrid approach,
so they like to possibly start with public cloud providers
and then they may want to bring some of that
on-premise for security, resiliency, what-have you,
and then there's the other way around
but I think we're finding
more and more are starting their journey
in the public cloud and then kind of
bringing it to more of a hybrid approach.
But we're very committed.
I guess bottom line is we're committed to cloud, so...
>> Chad, how should people be thinking of Veritas now
as a standalone company,
you're not one of the corporate spokespeople but,
as people think, what do they tell you
from a branding standpoint?
I see the red shirts, I see the logo,
it's something I've known for most of my career so...
>> So we're repositioning ourselves as
truly a data management company,
so if you look at our portfolio of products,
spans from back-up to resiliency,
to archive,
to storage.
All of that taking a three-sixty view,
we're saying it's three-sixty data management.
So we want to be really that single provider
to the customer that manages
all aspects of their data,
whether that's again protection, resiliency et cetera.
>> Okay, so is data the new oil, is it the new gold?
Is it the new money?
>> I was going to say, it's kind of in.
Data's what's in, data's the new thing.
And I think the other thing just to
leave you with is we really are...
We jokingly say we're a multi-billion dollar start-up,
I mean when we split off from Symantec
we had the ability to
really refocus the company,
and so that is where we're now focused,
it's all around data management,
we want to be that provider, so...
Yeah, think of us, what's old is now new again.
>> So data's the new oil and
containers are the new barrels of oil.
>> You got it. >> There you go.
>> Absolutely, distributed oil everywhere.
Something like that.
Alright Chad Thibodeau,
really appreciate you giving us
all the updates on Veritas.
Congratulations on the announcements you're making.
>> Thank you very much.
>> And we'll be back with more
coverage here from DockerCon2017.
You're watching theCUBE.
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