(upbeat music)
>> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel
who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi.
Hey, Drew.
Good to see you again.
Thanks for coming back in theCUBE.
>> Dave, great to be here.
Great to see you.
>> All right. Let's get into it.
Drew, prior to the pandemic,
Zero Trust just like digital transformation
was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing,
almost a mandate.
What's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust?
>> So absolutely right.
It's been around a while
and now people are paying attention.
Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing.
There are too many places where the bad guys are getting in.
And I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness.
It takes a little work.
It takes some planning, but done properly
and using the right technologies,
using the right vendors,
the rewards are of course tremendous.
You can put to rest the fears of ransomware
and having your systems compromised.
>> Well, and we're going to talk about this,
but there's a lot of process and thinking involved
and design and your Zero Trust
and you don't want to be wasting time
messing up with infrastructure.
So we're going to talk about that.
There's a lot of discussion in the industry Drew
about immutability and air gaps.
I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view
on these topics.
How do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different?
>> So in terms of air gap and immutability,
the beautiful thing about object storage
which is what we do all the time
is that it makes it that much easier
to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace
that's easy to access
and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg
to get your data back.
We're working with some of the best
partners in the industry.
We're working with folks like Veeam, Commvault,
Arc, Marquis, MSP360,
all folks who understand that you need
to have multiple copies of your data.
You need to have a copy stored offsite
and that copy needs to be immutable.
And we can talk a little bit about what immutability is
and what it really means.
>> I wonder if you could talk a little bit more
about Wasabi's solution
because sometimes people don't understand.
You actually are a cloud.
You're not building on other people's public clouds
and then your storage is the one use case
where it actually makes sense to do that.
Tell us a little bit more
about Wasabi's approach and your solution.
>> Yeah, I appreciate that.
So there's definitely some misconception.
We are our own cloud storage service.
We don't run on top of anybody else.
It's our systems.
It's our software deployed globally.
And we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard.
We interoperate with practically hundreds of applications.
Primarily in this case,
we're talking about backup and recovery applications
and it's such a simple process.
I mean, just about everybody who's anybody
in this business protecting data has the ability now
to access cloud storage.
And so we've made it really simple.
In many cases, you'll see Wasabi as listed
in the primary set of available vendors
and put in your private keys.
Make sure that your account is locked down properly
using let's say multifactor authentication
and you've got a great place to store copies
of your data securely.
>> We just heard from David Friend.
If I did my math right,
he was talking about 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month.
Maybe even a little better than that.
How are you able to achieve such attractive economics?
>> Yeah.
I can't remember how to translate
my fractions into percentages,
but I think we talk a lot about being 80% less expensive
than the hyperscalers.
And we talked about this at VeeamON.
There's some secret sauce there.
And we take a different approach
to how we utilize the raw capacity
to the effective capacity.
And the fact is we're also not having to run
a few hundred other services.
We do storage.
Plain and simple.
All day, all the time.
So we don't have to worry about overhead
to support up and coming other services
that are perhaps going to be a loss leader.
Customers love it.
They see the fact that their data is growing
40, 80% year over year.
They know they need to have some place to keep it secure.
And folks are flocking to us in droves.
In fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount
of migration actually right now.
Multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi
because folks have figured out
that they can't afford to keep going
with their current hyperscaler vendor.
>> And immutability is a feature of your product.
What's the feature called?
Can you double click on that a little bit?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So the term in S3 is Object Lock.
And what that means is your application
will write an object to cloud storage
and it will define a retention period.
Let's say a week.
And for that period that object is immutable, untouchable,
cannot be altered in any way, shape or form.
The application can't change it.
The system administration can't change it.
Wasabi can't change it.
Okay. It is truly carved in stone.
And this is something that it's been around for a while,
but you're seeing a huge uptick in adoption
and support for that feature by all the major vendors.
And I named off a few earlier.
And the best part is that with immutability
comes with not just a sense of security.
It is security.
When you have data that cannot be altered by anybody.
Even if the bad guys compromise your account,
they steal your credentials,
they can't take away the data.
And that's a beautiful thing.
A beautiful, beautiful thing.
>> And you look like an S3 bucket.
Is that right?
>> Yeah, yeah.
We're fully compatible with the S3 API.
So if you're using S3 API based applications today,
it's a very simple matter of just redirecting
where you want to store your data.
Beautiful thing about backup and recovery.
That's probably the simplest application.
Simple being a relative term as far as lift and shift.
Because that just means for your next full,
point that at Wasabi,
retain your other fulls for whatever 30, 60, 90 days.
And then once you've made that transition
from vine to vine, you're off and running with Wasabi.
>> I talked to my open about the allure
of object storage historically,
the simplicity of the get put syntax,
but what about performance?
Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable
to other storage formats?
>> Oh yeah, absolutely.
And we've got the performance numbers
on the site to back that up,
but I forgot to answer something earlier.
You said that immutability is a feature
and I want to make it very clear
that it is a feature, but it's an API request.
So when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth,
the comment you made earlier about being 80%
more cost effective or 80% less expensive,
that API call is typically something
that the other folks charge for.
And I think we used the metaphor earlier
about the refrigerator,
but I'll use a different metaphor today.
You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup.
It gets as big as you want
to store as much coffee as you want
and the coffee's always warm.
And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge.
You want to pop the lid
and see how much coffee is in there, no charge.
And that's an important thing
because when you're talking about millions
or billions of objects
and you want to get a list of those objects
or you want to get the status
of the immutable settings for those objects,
anywhere else that's going to cost you money
to look at your data.
With Wasabi, no additional charge.
And that's part of the thing that sets us apart.
>> Excellent. Thank you for that.
So you mentioned some partners before,
how do partners fit into the Wasabi story?
Where do you stop?
Where do they pick up and what do they bring?
Can you give us maybe a paint a picture
for us example or two?
>> Sure.
So again, we just do storage.
That is our sole purpose in life,
is to safely and securely store our customer's data.
And so they're working with their application vendors
whether it's active archive, backup and recovery,
IoT, surveillance, median entertainment workflows.
Those systems already know how to manage the data,
manage the metadata.
They just need some place to keep the data
that is being worked on, being stored and so forth.
So just like plugging in a flash drive on your laptop.
You literally can plug in Wasabi
as long as your applications support the API.
Getting started incredibly easy.
We offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte.
And most folks find that within,
probably a few hours of their POC,
it's giving them everything they need
in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility,
in terms of sovereignty.
I'm guessing you talked to Dave Friend earlier
about data sovereignty.
We're global company.
So there's got to be, probably wherever you are
in the world some place that will satisfy
your sovereignty requirements
as well as your compliance requirements.
>> We did talk about sovereignty, Drew.
This is really, what's interesting to me.
I'm a bit of a industry historian.
When I look back to the early days of cloud,
I remember the large storage companies,
their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer
for the cloud and they would go out.
And for instance, I know one bought a competitor
of Carbonite and then couldn't figure out
what to do with it.
They couldn't figure out how to compete
with the cloud in part because they were afraid
it was going to cannibalize their existing business.
I think another part is because they just didn't have
that imagination to develop an architecture
that in a business model that could scale.
To see that you guys have done that is I love it
because it brings competition.
It brings innovation and it helps lower client's cost
and solve really nagging problems,
like ransomware, mutability, and recovery.
I'll give you the last word, Drew.
>> Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
The on-prem vendors they're not going to go away anytime soon.
There's always going to be a need
for incredibly low latency,
high bandwidth.
But not all data's hot all the time.
And by hot, I mean, extremely hot.
Let's take real time analytics for maybe facial recognition.
That requires submillisecond type of processing.
But once you've done that work,
you want to store that data for a long, long time
and you're going to want to also tap back into it later.
So other folks are telling you that you can go to these
like cold glacial type of tiered storage.
Yeah. Don't believe the hype.
You're still going to pay way more for that
than you would with just a Wasabi like
hot cloud storage system.
And we don't compete with our partners.
We compliment what they're bringing to market
in terms of the software vendors,
in terms of the hardware vendors.
We're a beautiful component
for that hybrid cloud architecture.
And I think folks are gravitating towards that.
I think the cloud is hitting a new gear if you will,
in terms of adoption and recognition for the security
that they can achieve with it.
>> All right, Drew. Thank you for that.
Definitely we see the momentum.
In a moment, Drew and I will be back
to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda
who's the Director of Information Technology Services
at The Hotchkiss School.
Keep it right there.
(upbeat music)