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>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage
of VeeamON 2022 at the Aria.
It's nice to be at the Aria.
My co-host Dave Nicholson here.
We spend a lot of time
at the Venetian Convention Center, formerly the Sands.
So, it's nice to have a more intimate venue.
I really like it here.
George Axberg is joining us.
He is the vice president of data protection at VAST Data
a company that some of you may not know about.
George Welcome.
>> A pleasure, thank you so much for having me.
>> So VAST is smoking hot, raised a ton of dough.
You've got great founders, hard charging, interesting tech.
We've covered a little bit on the Wikibon research side
but give us the overview of the company.
>> Yeah, if I could please.
So we're here at, you know, the Veeam show and
you know, the theme is modern data protection
and I don't think there's any company
that epitomizes modern data protection more than VAST Data.
And the fact that we're able to do an
all flash system at exabyte scale
but the economics of cloud object based deep, cheap
and deep archive type solutions
and an extremely resilient platform
is really game changing for the marketplace.
So, and quite frankly, a marketplace
from a data protection target space that I think
is ripe for change and in need of change based
on the things that are going on in the marketplace today.
>> Yeah. So, you know, a lot of what you said
is going to be surprising to people
wait a minute, you're talking about
data protection and all flash?
>> Sure.
>> I thought you'd use cheap and deep disc or, you know
even tape for that or, you know, spin it up in the cloud
in a deep archive or a glacier.
Explain your approach in architecture at a high level.
>> Yeah. So great question.
We get that question every day and got it
in the booth yesterday, probably about 40 or 50 times.
Right? How could it be all flash
that at an economic point that is befitting
that of you know, data protection?
>> Yeah. What is this Ferrari minivan of which you speak?
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The minivan that goes 180 miles an hour right?
That, you know,
it's really all about the architecture, right?
The componentryis somewhat similar
to what you'll see in other devices.
However, it's how we're leveraging them in the architecture
and design, you know, from our founders years ago
and building a solution that just not
was not available in the marketplace.
>> So yeah, sure.
>> We're using, you know all flash QC drives,
but the technology, you know
the advanced next generation algorithms or erasure coding
or rage striping allows us to be extremely efficient.
We also have some technologies
around what we call similarity,
some advanced data reduction.
So you need less capacity if you will
with the VAST system.
So that obviously help obviously helps us out
tremendously with their economics.
But the other thing is I could sell a customer
exactly what they need.
If you think about the legacy data protection market
purpose built backup appliances, for example
you know, ALA, Adele, Veritas, and HP, you know,
they're selling systems that are somewhat rigid.
There's always a controller in a capacity.
It's tied to a model number, right?
Soon as you need more performance, you buy another
soon as you need more capacity, you buy another
it's really not modular in any way.
It's great model.
>> If you want to just keep billing the customer.
>> Yeah if that, yeah.
And, I think at this point, the purpose
you know, Dave, the purpose built backup appliance market
is hungry for a change.
Right? You know, there's not anyone that has one.
It doesn't exist.
I'm not just talking about
having two because of replication.
It's because of organic growth,
ransomware needs to have a second unit, a second copy.
And just scalability.
>> Well, you guys saw that fatigue
with that model of, oh you need more buy more, right?
>> Oh, without a doubt.
>> You said we're going to attack that.
So yeah.
>> Yeah. Sorry, that's great without a doubt.
So, we can configure a solution exactly to the need.
'Cause let's face it.
Every single data center, every single vertical market
it's a work of art.
You know, everyone's retention policies are different.
Everyone's compliance needs are different.
There might be some things that are self mandated
or government mandated
and they're all going to be somewhat different.
Right?
The fact of the matter
is the way that our architecture works,
disaggregated shared everything architecture
is different because when we go back to those model numbers
and there's more rigid purpose built back of appliances,
or maybe arrays designed specifically for data protection
they don't offer that flexibility.
And, I think
our entry point is sized to exactly what the need is.
Our ease of scalability, you need more performance.
We just added another compute box
what we call our C box.
If you need more capacity, we just add another data box
a D box, you know, where the data resides.
And, you know, especially here at Veeam
I think customers are really clamoring
for that next generation solution.
They love the idea that there's a low point of entry
but they also love the idea that it's easy to scale
on demand, you know, and as needed basis.
>> So, just
I want to go down another layer on that architecturally.
'Cause I think it's important for people to understand.
>> Sure.
>> Exactly what you're saying.
When you're talking about scaling,
there's this concept of the sort of devil's triangle
the tyranny of this combination of memory, CPU and storage.
>> Sure.
>> And if you're too rigid, like in an appliance
you end up paying for things you don't need.
>> Correct.
>> When all I need is a little more capacity.
>> Correct.
>> All I need is a little more horsepower.
Well, you want to horsepower?
No, no.
You got to buy a bunch of capacity.
>> Exactly. >> Oh, need capacity.
No, no,
you need to buy expensive CPUs that suck a bunch of power.
All I need is capacity.
So go through that just a little more detail in terms of,
>> Sure.
>> how you cobble these systems together.
>> Yeah. Sure.
>> The way my brain works, it's always about Legos.
So feel free to use Legos.
>> Yeah, so with our disaggregated solution, right.
We've separated basically hardware from software.
Right. So, that's a good thing, right?
From an economic standpoint
but also a design and architecture standpoint
but also an underlining underpinning
of that solution is we've also separated the capacity
from the performance.
And as you just mentioned, those are typically
relatively speaking for every other solution on the planet,
Those are tied together. Right?
>> Right.
>> So we've disaggregated
that as well within our architecture.
So we again have basically three tier,
tier's not the right word,
three components that build out a VAST cluster.
And again, we don't sell
like a solution designed by a model number.
And that's typically our C boxes connected via NVMe
over fabric to a D box.
C is all the performance D is all the capacity.
Because they're modular you can end up like
our baseline product would start out as a one by one,
one C box one D box, right?
Connected again, via d
different size and NVMe fabrics.
And that could scale to hundreds.
When we do have customers with dozens of C boxes
meeting high performance and requirements
keep in mind when VAST Data came to market
our founders brought it to the market
for high performance computing machine learning
AI data protection was an afterthought
but those, you know,
foundational things that we're able to build
in that modularity with performance at scale
it behooves itself, it's perfect fit for data protection.
So we see in clients today, just yesterday
two clients standing next to each other
in the same market in the same vertical.
I have a 30 day retention.
I have a 90 day retention.
I have to keep one year worth of full backups.
I have to keep seven years worth of full backups.
We can accommodate both
and size it to exactly what the need is.
Now, the moment that they need one more terabyte,
we license into 100 terabyte increments.
So they can actually buy it in a sense,
almost in arrears, we don't turn it off.
There's not a hard cap.
They have access to that capacity
within the solution that they provide
and they can have access, immediate access.
And without going through, let's face it.
A lot of the other companies that we're both thinking
of that have those traditional again
purpose-built solutions or arrays.
They want you to buy everything up front, in advance,
signing license agreements.
We're the exact opposite.
We want you to buy for the need as, and as needed basis.
And also because the fact
that we're multi-protocol multi-use case
you see people doing many things
within even a single VAST cluster.
>> I want to come back to the architecture if I can
and just understand it better.
And I said, David Floyer has written a lot about this
on our site, but I've had three key meetings
in my life with Mosia.
And you've obviously know.
The first week showed up in my office is at IDC
in the late 1980s said tell me everything,
you know about the IBM mainframe, IO subsystem.
I'm like, oh, this is going to be a short meeting.
And then they came back a year later
and showed us symmetric.
I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive.
The second one was, I gave a speech at 43South
and 42South that came up and gave me a big hug.
I'm like, wow he knows me.
And the third one, he was in my offices
in Marlborough several years ago.
And we were arguing about the flash versus spinning disc.
And he's like, I can outperform an all flash array
because we've tuned our algorithms for spinning disc.
Everybody else is missing that.
You're basically saying the opposite.
>> Correct.
>> We've turned tuned our algorithms to 4QLC.
David Floyer says Dave, there's a lot of ways
to skin a cat in this technology industry.
So I wanted to make sure I got that right.
You basically you're skinning the cat
with a different approach.
>> Yeah. We've also changed really the approach of backup.
I mean, the term backup is really legacy.
I mean, that's 10, 12 years of our recovery.
The story today is really
about restore resiliency and recovery.
So when you think about those legacy solutions, right
they were built to ingest fast, right?
We want to move the data off our primary systems,
our primary applications
and we needed to fit within a backup window.
Restore was an afterthought.
Restore was, I might occasionally need to restore something.
Something got lost, something got corrupted.
I have to restore something today with the, you know
let's face it, the digital pandemic of cyber threats
and ransomware it's about sometimes restoring everything.
So if you look at a legacy system, they ingest, I'm sorry,
they write very fast.
They can bring the data in very quickly
but their restore time is typically about 20 to 25%.
So they're reading at only 20-25% of their write speed,
you know, is their read speed.
We flip the script on that.
We actually read eight times faster than we write.
So I could size again to the performance that you need.
If you need 40 terabytes
an hour 50 terabytes an hour, we can do that.
But those systems that write
at 40 terabytes an hour are restoring at only eight.
We're writing at a similarly sized system
which actually comes out about
51 terabytes an hour, 54 terabytes.
We're restoring at 432 terabytes an hour.
So we've broken the mold of data protection targets.
We're no longer the bottleneck.
We're no longer part of your recovery plan
going to be the issue right?
Now you got to start thinking about network connectivity.
Do I have, you know, you know,
with our Veeam partners, do we have the right data movers
whether virtual or physical, where am I going to put the data?
We've really helped customer, aided customers
to rethinking their whole DR Plan, because let's face it.
When ransomware occurs, you might not be able
to get in the building, your phones don't work.
Who do you call right?
By the time you get that all figured out
and you get to the point where
you want to start recovering data.
If I could recover 50 times faster
than a purpose built backup appliance.
Right? Think about it.
Is it one day or is it 50 days?
Am I going to be back online?
Is it one hour?
Is it 50 hours?
How many millions of dollars,
tens of thousands of dollars will that cost us?
And that's why our architecture though our thought process
and how the system was designed lends itself
so well for the requirements of today, data protection
not backup it's about data protection.
>> Can you give us a sense as to how much
of your business momentum is from data protection?
>> Yeah, sure.
So I joined VAST as we were talking chatting
before I come out about six months ago.
And it's funny, we had a lot of VAST customers
on their own because they wanted to leverage the platform
and they saw the power of VAST.
They started doing that and then as our founders,
you know decided to lean in heavily
into this marketplace with investments, not just in people
but also in technology and research and development
and also partnering with the likes of, of Veeam.
We don't have a data mover right.
We require a data mover to bring us the data.
We've leaned in tremendously.
Last quarter was really our probably our first quarter
where we had a lot of marketing
and momentum around data protection.
We sold five X last quarter than we did all of last year.
So right now the momentum's great pipeline looks phenomenal
and you know, we're going to continue to lean in here.
>> Describe the relationship with Veeam,
like kind of sort of started recently it sounds like
as customer demand, but what's that like
what are you guys doing
in terms of engineering integration?
Go to market?
>> Yeah, so we've gone through all the traditional
you know, verifications and certifications
and I'm proud to say that we kind of blew
the roof off, the requirements of a Veeam environ.
Remember Veeam was very innovative.
10, 12 years ago, they were putting flash in servers
because they want a high performing environment
a feature such as instant recovery.
We've now enabled.
When I talked about all those things about about restore.
We had customers yesterday come to us
that have tens of thousands of VMs.
Imagine that I can spin them up instantaneously
and run Veeam's instant recovery solution,
while then in the background restoring those items,
that is powerful
and you need a very fast high performance system
to enable that.
Instant recovery's not new.
It's been in the market for very long
but you can ask nine out of 10 customers walking the floor.
They're not able to leverage that today
in the systems that they have, or it's over architected
and very expensive and somewhat cost prohibitive.
So our relationship with Veeam
is really skyrocketing actually, as part of
that success and our, our last quarter.
We did seven figure deals here in the United States.
We've done deals in Australia.
I happened to be in Dubai
and we did a deal there, with the government there.
So, you know,
there's no specific vertical market.
They're all different.
It's really driven by, you know
they have a great, you know, cyber resilient message.
I mean, you get seen by the last couple of days today
and they just want that power that VAST gives.
Now there are other systems
in the marketplace today that leverage all flash
but they don't have the economic solution that we have.
>> Your design anticipated the era that we're in right now.
It anticipated the ability
to scale, you know in a variety.
>> Well, listen, anticipation of course
coincidental architecture.
It's a fantastic fit- >> Either way.
>> Either way, I mean, it's a fantastic fit for today.
And that's the conversations that we're having
with all the customers here,
it's really all about resiliency.
And they know, I mean, one of the sessions
I think it was mentioned 82 or 84% of, of all clients
interviewed don't believe that they can do a restore
after a cyber attack or it'll cost them millions of dollars.
So that there's a tremendous amount of risk there.
So time is ultimately equals dollars.
So we see a big uptick there, but we're actually
continuing our validation work and testing with Veeam.
They've been very receptive, very receptive globally.
Veeam's channel has also been very receptive globally
because you know, their customers are, you know,
hungry for innovation as well.
And I really strongly believe VAST brings that.
>> George, we got to go, but thank you.
Congratulations, pleasure on the momentum.
Say hi to Jeff for us.
>> We'll do so,
can I leave you with one last thought?
>> Yeah. Please do give us your final thought.
>> If I could, in closing, I think it's pretty important
when customers are evaluating VAST
if I could give them three data points,
100% of customers that try VAST,
test VAST, POC VAST, buy VAST, 100%.
Gartner Peer Insights recently did a survey.
You know, they do it with our, you know, blind survey
dozens of VAST customers and never happened before
where 100% of the respondents said,
"Yes, I would recommend VAST and I will buy VAST again."
>> It was more than two respondents?
>> It was more, it was dozens.
They won't do it if it's not dozens, dozens, not dozen.
>> Just checking.
>> And last but not least
our customers are are speaking with their wallet.
And the fact of the matter is
for every customer that spends a dollar
with VAST within a year, they spend three more.
So, I mean, there's no better endorsement
if you have a customer base,
a client base that are coming back and looking
for more use cases, not just data protection, but again
high performance computing machine learning AI
for a company like VAST Data.
>> Awesome. And a lot of investment in engineering,
more investment in engineering than marketing.
How do I know?
Because your capacity nodes, aren't the C nodes,
they're the D nodes somehow.
So the engineers obviously won that naming.
>> They'll always win that one,
and we let them, we need them. Thank you.
>> Product and sales, it's the golden rule. All right.
Thank you, George. Keep it right there.
VeeamON 2022, you're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back.
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