>> Announcer: From around the globe,
it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020
brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. And this is-
We've actually reached the end
of theCUBEs coverage of VMworld 2020.
Hard to believe, 11 years,
We've done lots of interviews here.
It's been great to be able to engage with the audience,
talk to the executives, talk to some customers,
but saving one more for you.
So, happy to welcome to the program,
it's a first time on theCUBE
but we've been talking to him
since they came out of stealth.
So, I have the co-founder and CEO of MinIO,
and that is Anand Babu Periasamy.
AB, so nice to see you.
Thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you, Stu.
Thank you for having me on the show.
>> All right, so we'd love when we get to talk
to the founders of companies.
We're going to dig into your company,
but before we do just frame for us
your really high performance, IO.
IO is in the name of your company.
Min might make me think that there's some miniaturization,
but give us the VMware connection.
Obviously, VMware talked a lot about cloud this week.
They've talked about going deep into AI and edge computing.
So, we know this ecosystem is changed a lot
in the 11 years that we've been covering.
It tell us how you and your company tie in.
>> Sounds good.
Yeah.
So, Min in MinIO stands for minimalism.
Somehow in the enterprise, like,
it has always been shiny, heavy, complex things.
Find complex solutions to simple problems
and charge them a lot,
that has been the trend in the past.
That's what cloud has reset in the enterprise,
and MinIO is actually about solving the data storage problem
at very large scale.
And the solution is, like,
find simple solutions to complex problem.
And we grew in the cloud,
both in the public and private cloud,
and we are now the fastest growing object storage
for the private cloud.
And, now VMware coming into the kubernetes territory
we actually see VMware is set to lead the Kubernetes race.
And in the Kubernetes, if you look for an object storage,
pretty much MinIO is the standard.
And this is where we bring our ecosystem to VMware,
and VMware brings the enterprise market to cloud.
And this is the start of the private cloud.
In the long run,
I think public and private cloud will look alike.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
We've been writing about this for many years.
AB, we saw the enterprise is taking
on more of the characteristics of the hyperscalers.
The hyperscalers, of course,
are coming more to the enterprise.
A lot of discussion about hybrid and multicloud these days.
But I want you to explain a little bit
when your company was formed,
you talk about doing these Kubernetes environments.
You do partner with AWS and Azure,
but a lot of what you do is on-premises
and that strikes people as a little bit unconventional
in the thinking for definitely 2017, and even for 2020.
So, help us understand what it is exactly
that, you know, the technology you bring
and why you think it's the fit for,
as you extend, making private cloud on par with public.
>> Yeah. It's not surprising to us at all,
but it made no sense when we started
to the rest of the world right?
Even the investors, like not our investors,
but the typical venture community to the rest of the world,
they thought that an object storage
if it is not useful inside AWS,
there is no use for an object storage at all.
And, our question was very simple.
With the amount of data the world
will produce in the next 10 years, bulk of the data,
where is it going to be, right?
And it's not going to be in the public cloud.
And it didn't sound obvious back then right?
And we saw that in the long run public and private cloud
will look alike, but bulk of the data,
if it's going to be generated outside AWS
while AWS S3 sets the standard,
the rest of the world, what are they going to do?
So, MinIO was raised to be the S3 for the rest of the world.
And the rest of the world is the biggest market.
And back then there was no private cloud.
There was public cloud and public cloud were meant
to only AWS.
And this was not so long ago.
We are talking like five, six years, right?
And then soon multicloud came from multicloud,
private cloud came.
What really accelerated this
is, basically, kubernetes and containers.
In fact, containers started the trend,
and then Kubernetes accelerated it further.
Nowadays, if you see why it's no longer a dream
, or a faith-based model.
it's actually, we're talking about
like 540,000 Docker pulls a day,
and 412 million or so Docker pulls in aggregate
that shows that the entire industry has changed.
And is already the Kubernetes, even public or private cloud,
it is the one hybrid infrastructure layer.
And now it's no longer the private cloud is the question.
And customers are now able to move
between public and private cloud.
The trend is hybrid cloud.
I think it's irreversible.
>> All right. You talked about Docker pulls
and the code there, so let's make sure
our audience understand exactly what you are.
Sounds like your software sounds like open sources,
piece of it, help us understand how you fit with...
'cause if we're talking about object storage,
there's got to be some infrastructure underneath that.
What does MinIO provide
and where do you turn to the partners?
>> Yeah.
So, just like serverless it means that if there is,
it's not like there is no server, right?
It's about a software problem.
Similarly storage, right?
When object storage is containerized,
we still need drives, right?
That is where VMware vSAN comes.
vSAN job is to virtualize the physical layer
to the basically container layer.
But end of the day,
if you see it is a software problem.
And what MinIO did just like a database
would solve the metadata data store problem,
MinIO will solve the blob data problem.
And in the public cloud object storage
is the foundation of this.
It is the primary storage,
but we saw this as a software problem.
And when customers started building these applications,
they actually containerize their application
and use Kubernetes to roll out
their application infrastructure.
And when they do that,
they cannot possibly buy a hardware appliance
on the public cloud.
And even on the private cloud,
when they completely orchestrate two containers,
they cannot roll out hardware appliances.
This is where the industry,
the cloud native community always saw
this as a software problem.
It was obvious to them.
For the enterprise IT, it was not so clear.
And the storage industry giants,
if you see every one of them is a hardware appliance play
and they are in for a total shock and VMware basically
has reset with their 7.0 update one.
There's a lot of interesting things to come.
>> Alright. So, if I understand here you sit
from a VMware environment, I've got vSAN underneath,
I've got Tanzu above,
and you're providing that object service in between.
So, for our friends in the, in the channel market,
and when they're thinking about gear,
anything that vSAN can sit on.
You just can come along for the ride.Do I have that right?
>> Yeah. So, underneath vSAN is basically bunch of Jboards.
These are like Dell and HP servers with the drives in them.
And this is not a hardware appliance anymore right?
You look at the storage market,
it is SAN or NAS appliance.
That is how the enterprise IT operated not
in the cloud world.
And as VMware moves into the cloud world,
everything looks cloud native. And in this case,
the SAN NAS appliance have no role to play.
Even the object storage hardware appliance
has no role to play.
Because VMware becomes VMware vSAN becomes
the new block storage layer.
And then they have positioned object, storage database,
everything as a data data store,
or a data persistence layer.
So, only the software that is containerized,
gets to play on top of VMware in the new world,
including the storage itself.
And it's not, there is no appliance here.
>> All right. So, and, and your,
your solution is listed as Kubernetes, Kubernetes native.
So, now you mentioned vSphere 7, vSphere 7 update
one that has full Kubernetes support.
I'm assuming then you can plug into Tanzu,
You can plug into Amazon, Azure,
other Kubernetes options out there, is that the case?
>> Yeah. So, from a customer point of view, right?
If you are on the enterprise IT environment,
now from an IT administrator point of view,
nothing changes much other than from
the vCenter console itself. You now get to see MinIO,
in the Persistent Data services,
you click and deploy it entirely as a software
without even learning to spell Kubernetes.
As you can build a private cloud storage multitenant,
exactly like how public cloud storage operates.
And that is from the private cloud point of view right?
And it's purely software.
You're not waiting for six months for the hardware to arrive
in long procurement cycles and provisioning all that.
is now provisioned as a software container.
In just five minutes,
you can actually set up a private cloud infrastructure.
That's part of the private cloud, right?
But why,
the reason why customers want this to be a software problem
is they roll out their software on the,
on the private cloud,
on the public cloud for burst workloads.
And it's sustained workloads on private cloud,
burst workloads on public cloud non-critical jobs
are anything that needs fast moving and convenience based,
they push it to public cloud.
Customers do want to have one leg here and one leg there.
And nowadays given edge and de-centralized
from the telco space to video and other, other areas,
even the edge is now growing.
So, they want a pure software solution
the entire data center software is now containerized,
they can roll out public cloud or private cloud
or on the edge.
And with MinIO we solved the data side.
The compute side, VMware already has done a wonderful job
on the networking side. They've done it.
And on the storage side,
they did the physical to container layer through vSAN.
Now the data storage part is what we solve.
now what does this do to the end user?
Now they can build software and truly deploy on
public, private or edge without any modification
and entirely it is a software problem.
>> Great.
What do you find are some of the more prevalent use cases,
you know, sitting on top?
What, what, what applications are the key ones that.
People are deploying your solution for?
>> Yeah. So, in the public cloud,
if you see that that's actually a good place to start.
If you see in the public cloud, right?
Starting from even simple static website hosting,
to AML, big data workloads, to even the modern databases
like Snowflake, for example, is built on object storage.
In the public cloud,
it has become a truly horizontal play,
and that is how it started, right?
AWS started with S3 and then came everything else.
And now that trend is beginning to percolate
into the enterprise.
And surprisingly, we found that the enterprise,
was the explosion of data growth
is actually not about like cat videos, right?
What, what are they storing mostly?
We found that bulk of the data
that is drowning the enterprise is machine generated data.
And these are basically like some kind of log data,
event data, data streams that are continuously produced.
And that actually can grow from 10 terabytes to 10 petabytes
in a very short time.
This is where clearly object storage
has become the right choice, just like in the public cloud.
But customers are now adopting object storage
as the primary storage, and now multiple applications,
whether it is that cloud native application,
and like the Tanzu application service, like spring boot,
and like all the Cloud Foundry stack from there ,
to all the AML/ big data workloads,
pretty much, everybody's been converging to object storage
as their foundation.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
We've seen some of those use cases,
very prevalent here in the VMware community.
I heard you talking about it.
I was expecting to hear you talk about Splunk,
data protection is something that's been a big topic
of conversation in the last few years.
Obviously VMware has a number of key partners so,
I'm assuming many of those are who you're also working with.
>> Okay. So, good you brought Splunk.
Splunk itself is actually, is an important move for ...
what we did recently with VMware.
Finally, we can run Splunk natively
on VMware at large scale and without any performance penalty
and at a price point that it becomes really attractive.
Now comparing Splunk cloud versus Splunk on Prem.
We can actually show like at least like one third
of what it would cost to run on Splunk cloud.
So, I don't know Splunk themselves would like it,
but I think Splunk as a company
would like what customers like, right?
And this is where Splunk actually now can sit on MinIO.
MinIO has all that all of the data stores,
they call it SmartStore.
Underneath, underneath MinIO,
in the previous original vSAN incarnation,
we couldn't actually store huge amounts of data.
But now with the vSAN Direct,
we actually have access to the local drives
and you can attach as many drives as you want.
Then if you want more capacity, more number of servers,
so you can pack thousands and thousands of drives,
at a price point that
even public cloud cannot be anywhere closer.
And this is actually an important requirement
for the Splunk customers,
because for them not only the cost, right?
Even the data is sensitive for them.
They cannot really push it to the public cloud.
Data is generated outside of the public cloud.
If data is generated inside public cloud,
probably Amazon has their own solution
and Splunk cloud makes sense.
But when data is produced outside,
these are sensitive data and it's huge volume,
and they produce on an average,
like the kind of users we see is 10 terabytes a day,
and then it's only growing at an accelerated pace.
And this is where the vSAN Direct and MinIO,
you can now bring that workload onto VMware,
Finally, the IT can control the the Splunk deployment.
This is something important for IT.
And in the past,
If you see big data workloads
always ran on bare metal and silos,
Something, IT hated right?
This time, it is fixable.
It's not just fixable it actually gets better.
>> Well, it sure sounds like a, the,
the technology maturation has finally caught up
on the VMware standpoint
with the vision that you and the team had.
So, give us a little bullet forward now that you've got
Kubernetes really being embraced by VMware
and starting to see maturation in this space,
where do we go from here?
>> So, VMware, actually,
if you see what they brought to the table this time,
they didn't actually catch up with the others. Right?
Typically the innovation in the recent times happened
in the open source space.
And then the large vendors will come and innovate. The startups
and open source started the innovation
large vendors coming later.
But this time around
VMware actually did the innovation part.
And vSAN Direct is actually a big step forward
in the Kubernete CSI space.
And the reason why it's a big step
is CSI that traditionally is designed for SAN NAS vendors
and using the same CSI model,
VMware was able to bring in large workloads.
And that allowed entirely to use the local drive
a possibility.
Now moving forward, what we will see-
what we are set to see is the cloud native work load
actually ran as a silo in the enterprise, right?
There was big data workload,
There was the applications team that ran
Kubernetes and Containers on their own,
and they ran their own DevOps shop
and enterprise IT run the IT infrastructure.
These three are not connected.
And finally this time around by bringing Kubernetes native
into the IT infrastructure,
there is going to be a convergence.
You will not-
the silos will get eliminated. The big data,
big data workloads, AML workloads on bare metal
will now come to MinIO VMware
that is the Kubernete combination.
And you will see the cloud native application space,
they will hand over the physical layer infrastructure
onto the VMware IT and everybody coming together,
I think it's the best big step forward.
>> Well, AB I sure hope you're right.
We would love to see the breaking down of silos,
things coming together.
We've been a little bit concerned over the last few years
that we are rebuilding the silos in the cloud.
We've got different skill sets different there,
but we always love some good tech optimism here
to say that we're going to move these sorts of-
Thank you so much.
Great to catch up with you and definitely look forward to
hearing more from you and your customers in the future.
>> Thank you Stu.
It was wonderful to be on the show.
>> Alright. We want to thank everybody for joining VMworld 2020
for Dave Volante, John Folier ,
big thanks to the whole production team, of course,
VMware and our sponsors for helping us
to bring this content to you.
As always I'm Stu Miniman.
And thank you for joining us on theCUBE.
(upbeat music)