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>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022.
Dave Vellante with David Nicholson.
Brian Schwarz is here.
We're going to stay on cloud.
He's the director of product management at Google Cloud.
The world's biggest cloud, I contend.
Brian, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thanks for having me.
Super excited to be here.
>> Long time infrastructure as a service background,
worked at Pure,
worked at Cisco,
Silicon Valley guy,
techie.
So we're going to get into it here.
>> I love it.
>> I was saying before, off camera.
We used to go to Google Cloud Next every year.
It was an awesome show.
Guys built a big set for us.
You joined, right as the pandemic hit.
So we've been out of touch a little bit.
It's hard to...
You know, you got one eye on the virtual event,
but give us the update on Google Cloud.
What's happening generally and specifically within storage?
>> Yeah. So obviously the Cloud got a big boost
during the pandemic because a lot of work went online.
You know, more things kind of being digitally transformed
as people keep trying to innovate.
So obviously the growth of Google Cloud,
has got a big tailwind to it.
So business has been really good,
lots of R&D investment.
We obviously have an incredible set of technology already
but still huge investments in new technologies
that we've been bringing out over the past couple of years.
It's great to get back out to events
to talk to people about 'em.
Been a little hard the last couple of years
to give people some of the insights.
When I think about storage, huge investments,
one of the things that some people know
but I think it's probably underappreciated
is we use the same infrastructure for Google Cloud
that is used for Google consumer products.
So Search and Photos
and all the public kind of things
that most people are familiar with,
Maps, et cetera.
Same infrastructure at the same time
is also used for Google Cloud.
So we just have this tremendous capability
of infrastructure.
Google's got nine products that have a billion users
most of which many people know.
So we're pretty good at storage
pretty good at compute, pretty good at networking.
Obviously a lot of that kind of shines through
on Google Cloud for enterprises to bring their applications,
lift and shift and/or modernize,
build new stuff in the Cloud
with containers and things like that.
>> Yeah, hence my contention
that Google has the biggest cloud in the world,
like I said before.
Doesn't have the most IS revenue
'cause that's a different business.
You can't comment,
but I've got Google Cloud running at $12 billion a year
run rate.
So a lot of times people go,
"Oh yeah, Google they're third place going for the bronze."
But that is a huge business.
There aren't a lot of 10, $12 billion
infrastructure companies. >> In a rapidly
growing market.
>> And if you do some back of napkin math,
whatever, give me 10, 15,
let's call it 15% of that, to storage.
You've got a big storage business.
I know you can't tell us how big, but it's big.
And if you add in all the stuff that's not in GCP,
you do a lot of storage.
So you know storage,
you understand the technology.
So what is the state of technology?
You have a background in Cisco,
nearly a networking company,
they used to do some storage stuff
sort of on the side.
We used to say they're going to buy NetApp,
of course that never happened.
That would've made no sense.
Pure Storage, obviously knows storage,
but they were a disk array company essentially.
Cloud storage, what's different about it?
What's different in the technology?
How does Google think about it?
>> You know, I always like to tell people
there's some things that are the same and familiar to you,
and there's some things that are different.
If I start with some of the differences,
object storage in the Cloud,
like just fundamentally different.
Object storage on-prem, it's been around for a while,
often used as kind of like a third tier of storage,
maybe a backup target, compliance, something like that.
In the cloud, object storage is Tier one storage.
Public reference for us, Spotify,
okay, use object storage for all the songs out there.
And increasingly we see a lot of growth in--
>> Well, how are you defining Tier one storage
in that regard?
Again, are you thinking streaming service?
Okay. Fine. Transactional?
>> Spotify goes down and I'm pissed.
>> Yeah. This is true.
(Dave laughing)
>> Not just you, maybe a few million other people too.
One is importance, business importance.
Tier one applications like critical to the business,
like business down type stuff.
But even if you look at it for performance,
for capabilities, object storage in the cloud,
it's a different thing than it was.
>> Because of the architecture that you're deploying?
>> Yeah. And the applications that we see running on it.
Obviously, a huge growth in our business in AI
and analytics.
Obviously, Google's pretty well known in both spaces,
BigQuery, obviously on the analytics side,
big massive data warehouses and obviously--
>> Gets very high marks from customers.
>> Yeah, very well regarded, super successful,
super popular with our customers in Google Cloud.
And then obviously AI as well.
A lot of AI is about getting structure
from unstructured data.
Autonomous vehicles getting pictures and videos
around the world.
Speech recognition, audio is a fundamentally analog signal.
You're trying to train computers to basically deal
with analog things and it's all stored in object storage,
machine learning on top of it, creating all the insights,
and frankly things that computers can deal with.
Getting structure out of the unstructured data.
So you just see performance capabilities,
importance as it's really a Tier one storage,
much like file and block is where have kind of always been.
>> Depending on, right, the importance.
Because I mean, it's a fair question, right?
Because we're used to thinking,
"Oh, you're running your Oracle transaction database
on block storage."
That's Tier one.
But Spotify's pretty important business.
And again, on BigQuery,
it is a cloud-native born in the cloud database,
a lot of the cloud databases aren't, right?
And that's one of the reasons why BigQuery is--
>> Google's really had a lot of success taking technologies
that were built for some of the consumer services
that we build and turning them
into cloud-native Google Cloud.
Like HDFS, who we were talking about,
open source technologies came originally
from the Google file system.
Now we have a new version of it that we run internally
called Colossus,
incredible technologies that are cloud scale technologies
that you can use to build things like Google Cloud storage.
>> I remember one of the early Hadoop worlds,
I was talking to a Google engineer and saying,
"Well, wow, that's so cool that Hadoop came.
You guys were the main spring of that."
He goes, "Oh, we're way past Hadoop now."
So this is early days of Hadoop (laughs)
>> It's funny whenever Google says consumer services,
usually consumer indicates just for me.
But no, a consumer service for Google
is at a scale that almost no business needs
at a point in time.
So you're not taking something and scaling it up--
>> Yeah. They're Tier one services--
for sure. >> Exactly.
You're more often pairing it down
so that a fortune 10 company can (laughs) leverage it.
>> So let's dig into data protection in the Cloud,
disaster recovery in the Cloud, Ransomware protection
and then let's get into why Google.
Maybe you could give us the trends that you're seeing,
how you guys approach it, and why Google.
>> Yeah. One of the things I always tell people,
there's certain best practices and principles from on-prem
that are just still applicable in the Cloud.
And one of 'em is just fundamentals
around recovery point objective and recovery time objective.
You should know, for your apps, what you need,
you should tier your apps, get best practice around them
and think about those in the Cloud as well.
The concept of RPO and RTO don't just magically go away
just 'cause you're running in the Cloud.
You should think about these things.
And it's one of the reasons we're here at the VeeamON event.
It's important, obviously,
they have a tremendous skill in technology,
but helping customers implement the right RPO and RTO
for their different applications.
And they also help do that in Google Cloud.
So we have a great partnership with them,
two main offerings that they offer in Google.
One is integration for their on-prem things to use,
basically Google as a backup target or DR target
and then cloud-native backups they have some technologies,
Veeam backup for Google.
And obviously they also bought Kasten a while ago.
'Cause they also got excited about the container trend
and obviously great technologies
for those customers to use those in Google Cloud as well.
>> So RPO and RTO is kind of IT terms, right?
But we think of them as sort of the business requirement.
Here's the business language.
How much data are you willing to lose?
And the business person says,
"What? I don't want to lose any data."
Oh, how big's your budget, right?
Oh, okay.
That's RPO.
RTO is how fast you want to get it back?
"How fast do you want to get it back if there's an outage?"
"Instantly."
"How much money do you want to spend on that?"
"Oh."
Okay. And then your application value will determine that.
Okay. So that's what RPO and RTO is
for those who you may not know that.
Sometimes we get into the acronym too much.
Okay. Why Google Cloud?
>> Yeah. When I think about
some of the infrastructure Google has
and like why does it matter to a customer of Google Cloud?
The first couple things I usually talk about is networking
and storage.
Compute's awesome, we can talk about containers
and Kubernetes in a little bit,
but if you just think about core infrastructure, networking,
Google's got one of the biggest networks in the world,
obviously to service all these consumer applications.
Two things that I often tell people
about the Google network,
one, just tremendous backbone bandwidth across the regions.
One of the things to think about with data protection,
it's a large data set.
When you're going to do recoveries,
you're pushing lots of terabytes often and big pipes matter.
Like it helps you hit the right recovery time objective
'cause you, "I want to do a restore across the country."
You need good networks.
And obviously Google has a tremendous network.
I think we have like 20 subsea cables
that we've built underneath the the world's oceans
to connect the world
on the internet. >> Awesome.
>> The other thing that I think is really underappreciated
about the Google network is how quickly you get into it.
One of the reasons all the consumer apps
have such good response time
is there's a local access point
to get into the Google network somewhere close to you
almost anywhere in the world.
I'm sure you can find some obscure place
where we don't have an access point,
but look Search and Photos and Maps and Workspace,
they all work so well
because you get in the Google network fast,
local access points
and then we can control the quality of service.
And that underlying substrate is the same substrate we have
in Google Cloud.
So the network is number one.
Second one in storage,
we have some really incredible capabilities
in cloud storage, particularly around our dual region
and multi-region buckets.
The multi-region bucket, the way I describe it to people,
it's a continent sized bucket.
Single bucket name, strongly consistent
that basically spans a continent.
It's in some senses a little bit of the Nirvana of storage.
No more DR failover, right?
In a lot of places, traditionally on-prem
but even other clouds, two buckets, failover, right?
Orchestration, set up.
Whenever you do orchestration,
the DR is a lot more complicated.
You got to do more fire drills, make sure it works.
We have this capability to have a single name space
that spans regions
and it has strong read after write consistency,
everything you drop into it you can read back immediately.
>> Say I'm on the west coast
and I have a little bit of an on-premises data center still
and I'm using Veeam to back something up
and I'm using storage within GCP.
Trace out exactly what you mean by that
in terms of a continent sized bucket.
Updates going to the recovery volume,
for lack of a better term, in GCP.
Where is that physically?
If I'm on the west coast, what does that look like?
>> Two main options.
It depends again on what your business goals are.
First option is you pick a regional bucket,
multiple zones in a Google Cloud region
are going to store your data.
It's resilient 'cause there's three zones in the region
but it's all in one region.
And then your second option is this multi-region bucket,
where we're basically taking a set
of the Google Cloud regions from around North America
and storing your data basically in the continent,
multiple copies of your data.
And that's great because if you want to protect yourself
from a regional outage, right?
Earthquake, natural disaster of some sort,
this multi-region,
it basically gives you this DR protection for free
and it's...
Well, it's not free 'cause you have to pay for it of course,
but it's a free from a failover perspective.
Single name space, your app doesn't need to know.
You restart the app on the east coast, same bucket name.
>> Right. That's good.
>> Read and write instantly out of the bucket.
>> Cool. What are you doing with Veeam?
>> So we have this great partnership,
obviously for data protection and DR.
And I really often segment the conversation into two pieces.
One is for traditional on-prem customers
who essentially want to use the Cloud as either a backup
or a DR target.
Traditional Veeam backup and replication
supports Google Cloud targets.
You can write to cloud storage.
Some of these advantages I mentioned.
Our archive storage,
really cheap.
We just actually lowered the price for archive storage
quite significantly, roughly a third of what you find
in some of the other competitive clouds
if you look at the capabilities.
Our archive class storage,
fast recovery time, right?
Fast latency, no hours to kind of rehydrate.
>> Good. Storage in the cloud is overpriced.
>> Yeah.
>> It is.
It is historically overpriced despite all the rhetoric.
Good. I didn't know that.
I'm glad to hear.
>> Yeah. So the archive class store,
so you essentially read and write into this bucket
and restore.
So it's often one of the things I joke with people about.
I live in Silicon Valley,
I still see the tape truck driving around.
I really think people
can really modernize these environments
and use the cloud as a backup target.
You get a copy of your data off-prem.
>> Don't you guys use tape?
>> Well, we don't talk a lot about--
>> No comment.
Just checking.
>> And just to be clear,
when he says cloud storage is overpriced,
he thinks that a postage stamp is overpriced, right?
>> No.
>> If I give you 50 cents,
are you going to deliver a letter cross country?
No. Cloud storage, it's not overpriced.
>> Okay.
(David laughing)
We're going to have that conversation.
I think it's historically overpriced.
I think it could be more attractive,
relative to the cost of the underlying technology.
So good for you guys pushing prices.
>> Yeah. So this archive class storage, is one great area.
The second area we really work with Veeam
is protecting cloud-native workloads.
So increasingly customers are running workloads
in the Cloud, they run VMware in the Cloud,
they run normal VMs, they run containers.
Veeam has two offerings in Google
that essentially help customers protect that data,
hit their RPO, RTO objectives.
Another thing that is not different in the Cloud
is the need to meet your compliance regulations, right?
So having a product like Veeam
that is easy to show back to your auditor, to your regulator
to make sure that you have copies of your data,
that you can hit an appropriate recovery time objective
if you're in finance or healthcare, energy.
So there's some really good Veeam technologies
that work in Google Cloud to protect applications
that actually run in Google Cloud all in.
>> To your point about the tape truck
I was kind of tongue in cheek,
but I know you guys use tape.
But the point is you shouldn't have to call the tape truck,
right, you should go to Google and say,
"Okay. I need my data back."
Now having said that sometimes the highest bandwidth
in the world is putting all this stuff on the truck.
Is there an option for that?
>> Again, it gets back to this networking capability
that I mentioned.
Yes. People do like to joke about, okay, trucks
and trains and things can have a lot of bandwidth,
big networks can push a lot of data around, obviously.
>> And you got a big network.
>> We got a huge network.
So if you want to push...
I've seen statistics.
You can do terabits a second
to a single Google Cloud storage bucket,
super computing type performance inside Google Cloud,
which from a scale perspective,
whether it be network compute, these are things scale.
If there's one thing that Google's really, really good at,
it's really high scale.
>> If your's companies can't afford to.
>> Yeah, if you're that sensitive,
avoid moving the data altogether.
If you're that sensitive,
have your recovery capability be in GCP.
>> Yeah. Well, and again--
>> So that when you're recovering
you're not having to move data.
>> It's approximate to, yeah. That's the point.
>> Recovering GCV, fail over your VMware cluster.
>> Exactly.
>> And use the cloud as a DR target.
>> We got very little time
but can you just give us a rundown of your portfolio
in storage?
>> Yeah. So storage, cloud storage for object storage
got a bunch of regional options and classes of storage,
like I mentioned, archive storage.
Our first party offerings in the file area, our file store,
basic enterprise and high scale, which is really
for highly concurrent paralyzed applications.
Persistent disk is our block storage offering.
We also have a
very high performance cash block storage offering
and local SSDs.
So that's the main kind of food groups of storage,
block file object, increasingly doing a lot of work
in data protection and in transfer
and distributed cloud environments
where the edge of the cloud is pushing
outside the cloud regions themselves.
But those are our products.
Also, we spend a lot of time with our partners
'cause Google's really good at building
and open sourcing and partnering at the same time
hence with Veeam, obviously with file.
We partner with NetApp and Dell and a bunch of folks.
So there's a lot of partnerships we have
that are important to us as well.
>> Yeah. You know, we didn't get into Kubernetes,
a great example of open source, Istio, Anthos,
we didn't talk about the on-prem stuff.
So Brian we'll have to have you back
and chat about those things.
>> I look forward to it.
>> To quote my friend Matt baker,
it's not a zero sum game out there
and it's great to see Google pushing the technology.
Thanks so much for coming on.
All right. And thank you for watching.
Keep it right there.
Our next guest will be up shortly.
This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson.
We're live at VeeamON 2022 and we'll be right back.
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