live from Miami Beach Florida it's the cute covering beam on 2019 brought to you by beam welcome back to the Fontainebleau Miami everybody my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host for this segment Justin Warren Justin's great to see you this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage day two of our coverage of v-mon 2019 here in Miami jason Buffington @j buff is here is a vice-president of solution strategy congratulations on the on the promotion and great to see you again my friend Nikki very much and Nathan Hughes who is the IT Director at flexin gate great to see you thanks for coming on we'd love to get the customers perspective so welcome great to be here okay so Jason let me start with you you former analysts you've been a team now for long enough to well a get promoted but also get the kool-aid injection yeah we're in the green and what are the big trends that you're seeing in the market that are really driving this next era what do you guys call it act to serve data protection so you know I preached on this even before I joined beam that every 10 years or so when the industry shifts the platform of choice the Data Protection vendors almost always reset right the people that LED and NetWare don't lead in Windows the people that lead in Windows didn't lead invert the next wave is we're moving from servers to services right we're going from on-prem into cloud and so and every time the problem is the secret sauce doesn't line up right so you got to reinvent yourself each time and what we saw in the past generation is what we learned from is you can't be so busy taking care of your install basis you forget to keep innovating on what that next platform is and so for us acts two is all about cloud we're going to take everything you know about reliability but we're moving it into cloud the difference is that in virtualization there was one hero scenario VMs right this time around it's I as its as its paths it's using cloud storage it's bass and razz there's not a single hero scenario which means we have a lot more innovation to do that's that's round two and you made that point today you you use the Archimedes quote can be a lever and a fulcrum I'll change the world you use the the analogy of backup is now becoming much more than than just back up it's data protection it's it's data management we're gonna get into that and test some of that with Nathan so Nathan tell us tell us about flexin gate what what is the company do and what's your role is IT director entail okay so flex and gate is a Tier one automotive supplier which means that we provide parts most of the things that go into a car besides electronics and glass to the final automotive makers so most of the companies that you're familiar with when you go to buy one okay so you guys are global I think you got about 24,000 associates worldwide 64 locations so what are some of the things that are fundamental drivers of your business that are rippling through to your IT strategy well our business is varied in the sense that we do a lot of different things in-house so we do obviously manufacturing that's a big big part of what we do and then even that is broken down into sort of different kinds and then beyond manufacturing we have advanced product development and engineering and so we do a lot of lad in house you support it all yes so you got diverse lines of business you've got different roles and personas you know engineers versus businesspeople races finance people yes and you got to make them all happy we got to make them all happy so one things I love about manufacturing examples is if you think about it it's the two extremes of high tech and low tech right on the low tech side of things you've got this manufacturing floor and it's just producing real stuff not the zeros and ones that we live with but real things come off this line and then you have the engineering and R&D side where they're absolutely focused on stuff that comes out of some engineers head into a computer which is truly unique data so one things I love about the about the story is talk about the downtime challenges you have around the manufacturing floor because I learned some things when we first met that I think is phenomenal when it comes to manufacturing things that I didn't realize sure so we have we have a lot of different kind of manufacturing environments some of them are more passive and some of them are more active the most active environments are a form of manufacturer known as sequencing and it's sort of where you bring final assembly of parts together right before they go to the customer the way that customers order up parts at these days it's not like they used to back in the 70s and 80s where they would warehouse huge volumes of everything sort of on their site and then just draw it down as they needed it and you just kept the queue full now they want everything just in time delivery so they basically want parts to come to the line right when they're needed and actually in the order they're needed so a final carmaker they're not necessarily making you know 300 of the same thing in a row they're gonna make one one of this in blue and one of that in red and they're all gonna be sequenced behind each other one right after the other on the assembly line and they want the parts from the suppliers to come in the exact right order for that environment so the challenge with that from our perspective is that we have you know trucking windows that are between 30 maybe 60 minutes on the high end and if anything goes badly you can put the customer down and now now you're talking about you know stopping production that a Ford Chrysler GM whatever and and and that's a lot of money and a lot of other suppliers impacted so this is a data problem isn't it yeah and it's an interesting point because it you talk about sequencing them has their own kind of sequence about how customers used the product and they start with backup everything starts with backup and then they move to the further to the right so that you get ideally two fully automated data protection so what are you actually using them for today and where do you see yourself going with V so right now we're using Veeam primarily as backup and recovery that's how we started with it we came from another product that was great conceptually but in the real world it had terrible reliability and its performance was very poor as time went on and so you know when Veeam came on the scene it was a breath of fresh air because you know we got to the place where we knew that what we have was dependable it was reliable we to understand how the product work and to improve the way that we diplom nted it and so one of the key features and beam that really actually excited us especially in those sequencing environments are these instant recovery options right so we were used to the idea of having to write down a vm motive out of snapshot storage and then being put in a position where it might take an hour two hours three hours before you could you could get that thing back online and now or again to be able to launch that right out of snapshot storage was a was a blessing in the industry we're in yeah did you see the tech demo yesterday where they were showing off how you could do an instant recovery directly from cloud storage yes get you excited yeah no that's it that is exciting yeah is it are you using cloud at the moment or is this something that you're looking to move to cloud is something we're sort of investigating but it's not something that we're actively utilizing right now so this instance recovery you guys obviously make a big deal out of that I was talking to Danny Allen yesterday offline about it he claims it's unique in the industry that and I asked him a question I said specifically if you lose the catalog can I actually get the data back and he said yes and I'm like that sounds like magic so I guess my question maybe Volta was is instant how instant and and how does it actually work it just works it's just met I guess you tightly I guess you don't have to get into the weeds but but when you say when I hear instant recovery we talking like instantaneous recovery was like very very you know short rtos to us what that means is that in practice we can expect to have a VM from snapshot data back into production in about a five minute window five minutes and okay and that that is sufficient for our needs in any environment okay so now we're talking RTO right yeah and then and then what about so is it so we said 64 sites across the world 24,000 associates it is Veeam you're kind of enterprise-wide data protection strategy or are you kind of rolling it out now or where no IV m-- beam I mean we started within a handful of key sites we were using it specifically to back up you know SharePoint and a few other platforms but once we understood what the product was capable of and we were sort of reaching the end of a rope with this former product yeah we began an active rollout and we've now had beam in our facilities for five six years so you kind of swept the floor of that previous product and what did it how complicated was it for you to move from the legacy product to Veen it was it was a challenge just rethinking the way that we do things the previous product one thing that I really had going for it if if this could be considered a positive I guess is that it was very very simple to set up so you know you can take an entry-level IT administrator and they just next next next next next and it would kind of do all the things that they needed it to do but the problem was that in the real world that was sort of the Achilles heel because it meant that it wasn't very well customized and it meant also that the way that they developed that product it became performance it had poor performance so the reason I asked that question is because so many times customers are stuck yeah it's like they don't want to move yep because it's a pain but the longer they go the more costly it is down the road yeah so I'm always looking to IT practitioners like you know advice that you would give in terms of others things that you might do differently if you had a mulligan I don't know maybe you would have started sooner or maybe there were some things that you'd do differently what would you yeah I mean if we if we dunder stood you know the whole context of what was happening with that other product we would have moved sooner and the one thing that I will say Boheme is that it is it's it's not clicking point it does involve a little more setup but the Veen team is excellent when it comes to support so there's nothing to fear in that in that category because they stand behind their product and it's very easy to get qualified technicians to help you out by design I don't I mean well the the being great to work with yes that's why I asked about the interface theme because there is that always that tension between making it really really simple to use but then it doesn't have any norms to change our gap actually comes a little bit later in the process right so you asked earlier about you know what in what ways to use beam and we think of vemma as a progression right so everybody if they're using VM at all they're using it for being backup and replication and and because foundationally until you can protect your stuff right until you can reliably do that all the other stuff that you'd like to do around data management is aspirational and unattainable at best right so so we think the journey comes in that yeah it is pretty easy to go next next next finish there's a few tweaks right to get back up going but then when you go beyond that now there's a whole range of other things you can do right so Danny I'm sure talked about data labs yesterday the orchestration engine those are not next next next finished but anything that's worthwhile takes a little bit of effort right so as we pivot from now that you've solved back up then you can do those other things and that's where we really start going back into something which is really really more expertise driven well in its early days - and as you get more data and more experience you can begin to automate things yeah absolutely so Justin was asking Nathan sort of where the where the direction is today it's really back up you've seen the sort of stages where you're talking about full automation is that something that is on the on the horizon is it sort of near-term mid term long term I mean coming to the conference our experience with backup or Veeam is primarily back up in recovery operations but I've seen a lot of things in the last few days that have sort of piqued my interest particularly when it comes to the cloud integration you know that's that's being baked actively baked into the product now and you know some of the some of the automated API stuff that's being built into the product any any place where I can get to where we simplify our procedures for recovery that's a plus so I'm really excited about the idea you know of the the virtual labs being able to actively test backup on a regular basis without human intervention and have reporting out of that those those are things that I don't see in any other product that's out there you know there's another piece of the innovation that we should think through and so we've talked about the sequencing side which is where you focus on RT o how fast can you big back in the running again and when you and I talked earlier the example that we kind of worked on was think like a zipper right you've got to Pete the bumpers coming into a line of cars and if either side slows down everything breaks and at the end by the way is the truck right it everything has to come at the same time at the same rate if there's downtime on either side of the source you're done but that's an RTO problem the engineering side for high tech is an RPO problem right you have unique stuff coming out of somebody's brain into a PC and it will never come out that way again and so that so the we look at backup and replication that should be the next pieces to go on and then as you mentioned data labs becomes really interesting and orchestration so yeah speaking of human brains and you kind of touched on it Nathan that you came here to learn some things and you've learned things from from different sessions so what is it about coming to VM on that is worth the time for IT practitioners like yourself yeah I think it's all those imeem we were talking about veem doing you know backup and recovery operations fairly straightforwardly you know in terms of getting in but once once you see some of this stuff here at a conference like this you get a better sense of all the more elaborate aspects of the product and you wouldn't get that I think if you were just sitting in front of it using it conventionally this is a good place to really learn the depth and the level that you can go with it and you're like most your peers here is that right highly virtualized yes there are a lot of Microsoft apps yep and it's a midsize global organization actually kind of bumping up into a big yeah cool I asked about the data problem before it sounds like you know the zippers coming together that's some funky math that you got to figure out to make sure everything's there so talk about the the data angle how important data is to your organization we always we know how much data date is growing and data is the new oil all those bromides but but what about you your organization specifically as it relates to a digital strategy it's a buzzword that we hear a lot but does it have meaning for you and what does it mean and data is vital in any organization now I mean we were referencing earlier how you've you've got sort of low tech in manufacturing or at least people you know think of it as lower tech and then high tech in R&D and how those things merged together in a single company but the reality is that all of that is data driven right even when you go to a shop floor all your scheduling all your automation equipment all this stuff is talking and it's all it's all laying down data you know we you're putting rivets in two parts you're probably taking pictures of that now with imagers when you're in manufacturing and you do that so that if you get you know 300 bad ones you can see exactly when that started and what happened at the Machine level right so that's it we're just constantly collecting massive of volumes of new data and and being able to store that reliably is it's everything well the reason I'm asking is you guys been around for a while and you're highly distributed organization so in the old days even still today you'd build you get a server you for an application you'd harden that application you'd secure that box and the application running on it you'd lock the data inside and what I'm what my question is is can the backup approach the data protection approach the data management or whatever we want to call it can it help solve that data silo problem is that part of the strategy or is it just too early for that I'm sorry I'm gonna get you to repeat that question so if a leader am I correct that you've got data in silos from you know all the years and years and years of building up yeah we application and we have and can you use something like Veeam to help you know unify that datum oh yeah I think a lot of that has it's more on the hosting side right so it depends on how those systems were rolled out originally and all that kind of thing right but yeah as as we've moved towards Veen we've necessarily rebuilt some of those systems in such a way that they are more aggregated and the beam can pick them up in an integrated kind of way you see that as a common theme as Themis sort of one of the levers of the fulcrum to the new data architecture we're getting there so here's the trick so first you guys solve for basic protection right but the next thing along the way to really get towards data management is you got to know what you got right you got to know what's actually in those zeros and ones and so some of the things that you've already seen from us are around what we do around GDP our compliance some of the things we do around sanitization of data for devops scenarios and reuse scenarios all of that opens up a box of okay now that the data is curated now that it's ingested into our system what else can you do with it you know when I talk to c-level execs what I tell them is you know data protection no matter who it comes from including beam is really expensive if the only thing you do is put that data in a box and wait for bad things to happen right now the good news is bad things are gonna happen so you're gonna get ROI all right but but better is don't just leave your data in a box right do other stuff with that data unlock the value of it and some of that value comes in now that I'm more aware of it let's reduce some of the copies let's reduce some of the compliance mandates let's only put data that has sovereignty requirements where it goes but to do all of that you gotta know what you got right all right go ahead there was some impressive demo yesterday about exactly that so yeah we have the data you can use the API to script it and you can do all kinds of it basically you're limited by your imagination so it's gonna be fascinating to see what customers do with it once I've put it in place they've got their data protected and then they start playing with things come to a conference like this and learn oh I might just give that a try or migrate when I get back home that's right I will give the customer the last word Nathan impressions of vemma and 2019 oh it's been great and like I say you know if you're a if you're a company that's been using Beam even for a while and you sort of have your entry level set up for backup and recovery and I think there's a lot of probably companies out there that use beam in that kind of way this is a great place to have a better understanding of all that's available to you in that product and there's a lot more than just meets the eye and it's fun good food fun people that thank you guys for coming up really appreciate it yeah thank you all right keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest you're watching the cube Dave Volante Justin Warren and Peter Burris is also here v-mon 2019 we'll be right back