(upbeat techno music)
>> Welcome to The Cube.
It's a wonderful Tuesday
and we're here talking to Craig Nunes
who's the VP of marketing at Datrium.
>> Good to be here.
>> And Craig, you guys had an announcement today
and the announcement particularly refers
to the further convergence or the opportunity
to further converge not only hardware
but now increasingly operating environments
specifically bringing some of the Red Hat ecosystem
over to the Datrium product set.
So why don't you tell us what happened?
>> Sure, we've been making a great business
with customers in the VMware environment.
We debuted our new generation
of convergence back last year
and as we were picking up customers in vSphere,
we're running into a number of them who were saying,
"You know, God, this is awesome. I do have
"some Linux stuff going on.
"Can you guys help me out there?
"I can't seem to find a modern converged platform
to really take on both environments."
And so that's precisely what we've done.
We are announcing today that we've partnered with Red Hat
to use their stack, Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
and their full Red Hat virtualization stack,
run that on our DVX on our compute nodes
alongside vSphere servers.
Beyond that,
because we observed
there is a lot of activity going on in the container space.
>> Peter: Just a little bit.
>> CICD is becoming something
that more and more folks are moving to.
We've also partnered up with Docker
and we're also going to provide bare metal container support
with persistent volume plug-in for the platform.
So this is all in one go, you now have really
for the first time,
a modern converged system that can
handle what you're doing today with vSphere,
probably handle what you're already involved in,
but you're looking for way to bring this stuff together
in your Red Hat environment.
But then more importantly, you're kind of set up for
where you're going with containers.
>> So, when you say handle,
Datrium has made some interesting decisions regarding
how to solve some of the engineering problems
associated with convergence.
>> Craig: Yeah, yeah.
>> Take us through a little bit about
what it means to handle.
>> Craig: Sure.
>> What were you doing on VMware
that you're now especially doing on the Red Hat ecosystem
and will be doing as you move
more closely towards containers?
>> In the world of converged infrastructure,
of course we started with kind of packaging convergence
with arrays and servers.
Hyper-convergence came along, really bringing storage
into the x86 architecture,
super cool idea in principle.
The challenge with that is
because storage is now part of your server,
everything is stateful.
Everything is a storage node and it's tougher to scale,
it's tougher to service.
Taking nothing away from the hyper-converged guys,
it's great for single use case, great for edge,
but we're really aiming for what people are
trying to get done in the private cloud data center.
So for that, we found that by separating
the persistence, the durable capacity
from the IO processing on the server,
we could provide this wonderful converged platform
that scales, that you can use any server you like,
you can bring your blades,
you could use our own compute nodes, whatever.
It gives folks just a lot more freedom to get the job done.
Servers are stateless like they were with your arrays
but have all the benefits you're desiring
with converged infrastructure.
So, we brought that to vSphere
and what folks have taken away is, "Wow, since everything
"runs local on the server and Flash,
"it's faster than an all-Flash array."
Sure, cause there's no SAM,
but it's all VM-based
and brings all the simplicity
you would expect from a hyper-converged platform
only at scale and so what we're doing
is taking that model to Linux and containers.
Now, one relatively new thing we did just recently
in addition to taking on VM consolidation and acceleration,
we built right in all the data management capabilities
you would need for back up and instant recovery,
disaster recovery, archive, compliance, search,
analytics, copy data management, right into the platform.
So, really the virtualization guy, the DevOps guy or gal,
whoever is running the applications
can not only run them but protect them, share them,
et cetera from one cockpit, one UI.
So, we're really taking a whole load of stuff
that folks have had to deal with,
and tossing that for one very simple platform
that scales as you grow.
>> So are you bringing new services
to the basic management console
of Datrium and expanding that set of services
across platforms.
>> Exactly, that's correct.
>> So talk to us about how you see this evolving
as the whole world of containers comes out.
Containers means, more of them, new security models.
Today, most communication takes place through the VM.
When you start talking about adding storage flexibility,
data flexibility you guys are providing,
it suggests that you've got some new ways
of looking at containers.
You've cooked up some new stuff.
>> Craig: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
>> Talk to us a little bit about that.
>> Here is where a modern platform
really is important.
Again, not to knock hyper-converged,
but five or six years ago when that was born,
it was pretty cool to manage things at a VM level,
error virtualization was hot and heavy.
As we move into containers,
VM's are just not granular enough.
In fact, folks want to be able to manage
at this per container level.
Arrays, we're talking about lens there.
Hyper-converged is going to stop short at VM's.
What we're bringing folks is a way to manage,
in the VM side, VM's, V-discs, files that make up VM's,
individual container persistent volumes
so you can protect and share the way you need to.
What we do, cause it's kind of a double-edged sword,
you can manage everything at that level
but now you've got thousands and thousands of them.
We actually give you an opportunity
to group those, what we call protection groups.
Think of it as a policy group
and you set it up around your applications.
You set your policies per group.
Through naming conventions,
if you spin up a new VM or container,
it's going to get included as a part of that group
without you having to manually go in and assign it.
So, we're effectively putting the capabilities in
so you can manage tens of thousands
of objects very simply.
That is the world of containers, right?
If you thought there were a lot of VM's,
there's a whole lot more in the way of containers
that will be there.
>> One of the things that Datrium has done,
correct me if I have this wrong
but I believe I got it right,
is one of the things Datrium has done
is facilitated the kind of ANI addressability
between storage or compute resources
and data resources.
>> Craig: Right.
>> You know, the various of types of nodes that are in there.
It used to have all the data inside of your server
and that created some segmentation along those lines.
In many respects, you created networks of resources
that Datrium would manage in that way.
Are you doing something similar now
as we think about containers where you're literally
describing a network of containers as part of
that resource mix and being able to add things to that?
Is that effectively what the group becomes?
>> Yeah, the group of containers
is completely independent of the servers
that are hosting them so you can literally
group a collection of containers
across all of your Linux servers
and treat that in a special way.
You've got great flexibility.
It's something that's really intended to scale.
We've got some very powerful search tools
as a part of that so if you do need
to find things quickly and get it rolling.
When it comes to containers,
it's all about speed,
keeping up the pace.
Partly what we bring to the party is
great data reduction capabilities,
so when you're doing development
in like a, let's pick on a Jenkins development environment,
and you've got master/slave and you are collecting data
as part of every object,
all of that stuff has to move through the master.
The better you are at handling data efficiency,
the faster your runtime is going to be.
We're observing about a 30% faster runtime for developers
in that Jenkins environment,
and capacity-wise, we're probably consuming 95%
less capacity than you otherwise would have to do
in your more traditional storage environments, so--
>> 95% reduce?
>> It is a 20 to one reduction
cause there's so many copies in development
and we can dedupe all of that away.
It's fundamentally a break-through for guys thinking
about development tests, DevOps, et cetera.
>> So you talked about the capacity improvements
that you get in the (mumbles) improvements,
but as you said,
when we start going to containers,
we increasingly start thinking about
how fast we can add new function,
how fast we can bring new capabilities together.
One of the things we're fascinated about in this world,
you tell me if this is a benefit that you see,
is that it dramatically accelerates the entire process
of doing development.
Four, five, seven, 12 times speed
in the development process.
You not only get better runtime and do you get
dramatically better utilization of resources
but you are also accelerating the productivity of people
that are actually doing the work.
Are you seeing that as well?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, there are two things going on here.
One is, as part of the platform,
when you clone a container,
you do that on your dev-server or wherever,
that clone is immediately available
to all other servers in the cluster.
There is no copying and moving around.
It is immediately available for the developers
who just can go.
The other interesting thing is there are,
in development environments, depending on
the number of developers and executors
involved in development,
you can have problems maintaining
the state that you desire.
Part of what we are doing here
with these very efficient cloning capabilities,
we can spin up a new environment for folks
that is got pristine state which means down the line,
quality is better and you're not going to thrash
on those iterations on your QA cycle.
From end to end, it's all faster,
runtime, QA, the whole nine yards.
>> Datrium's a relatively new company?
>> We began shipping in February '16.
We've had a great 2017, in fact, well,
of course it was great.
We had a wonderful fundraising in December '16,
one of the largest of last year
so that's really propelled us in the market.
We had a wonderful set of announcements
just about a quarter ago with the
data management capabilities, and we added
these Datrium compute nodes,
and just last quarter alone,
our install base which had been
already showing record adoption,
grew a whopping 50% in a single quarter.
One of the most interesting statistics that--
>> Peter: Sequentially or year-to-year?
>> Sequentially.
>> Sequentially, that is whopping.
>> Sequentially.
The end of Q one to the end of Q two, boom.
Not only that, one out of every three of our customers
already has multiple DVX's deployed.
That's a huge testimony to they're liking what they've got.
Yeah, so it's been a sprint and like I say,
we've been very vSphere-focused.
Our founders are a couple of Diane Greene's.
They're early principal engineers at VMware.
But, customer demand, customer is king,
and they're looking for the same kind of capability
in their Linux and container environments so here we are.
>> Hey, speed is important to infrastructure people too.
>> Craig: Right on, yeah.
>> So, Craig, thanks very much
for joining us here on The Cube.
>> My pleasure.
>> Once again, great to have Datrium talk
a little bit about an announcement that they did today,
about adding the Red Hat environment
to the great work you've been doing in VMware and vSphere,
and the future of how containers,
the way technology will start getting folded
into that whole thing.
>> Yep.
>> Great results, good early start, keep it up.
>> Thank you, alright, see you, Peter.
>> I'm Peter Burris, good to have you
once again with The Cube.
We've been talking to Datrium
about their new announcement.
Craig Munes, er, Craig Nunes (laughs).
Craig Nunes of Datrium, Vice President of Marketing,
thanks for being here, Craig.
>> Craig: My pleasure.
(techno music)