Red Hat Summit 2024 | Gaurav Rishi | Veeam & Stu Miniman | Red Hat

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Stu Miniman

Senior Director of Market Insights, Hybrid Platforms

Red Hat

Gaurav Rishi

VP Product

Veeam

Resilient virtualization: Red Hat and Veeam’s partnership in the era of containers and OpenShift

With disparate cloud operations, edge computing, open-source software supply chains and artificial intelligence the norm, data protection and resilience have become top-of-mind enterprise concerns. To address those concerns, Red Hat Inc. has partnered with Veeam Software Group GmbH for advanced data protection solutions for workload virtualization.“We have 450,000 customers [and] a lot of them use virtual machines and that’s what we back up,” said Gaurav Rishi (pictured, left), vice president of product at Veeam. “One of the tenets for us has always been data freedom. Here we are as Kasten, which was a Kubernetes-centric product, and now we are seeing virtual machines come in there

play_circle_outline Exploring the Synergistic Potential: Red Hat Summit Unveils AI, Open Source, and Virtualization; Welcomes Gaurav Rishi and Stu Miniman as Keynote Speakers

play_circle_outline Veeam-Kasten-Red Hat partnership and data protection discussed, focusing on OpenShift Virtualization

play_circle_outline Importance of cyber resilience and integration to combat ransomware

play_circle_outline New features in Veeam-Kasten Version Seven: cyber resilience and enterprise solutions discussed

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Gaurav Rishi | Veeam & Stu Miniman | Red Hat

Stu Miniman

Senior Director of Market Insights, Hybrid Platforms Red Hat

Gaurav Rishi

VP Product Veeam

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to day three of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit here at the Colorado Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, lots of buzzwords this week. AI, of course. Open source, because we're at a Red Hat summit. Virtualization is another one we're hearing a lot about this week.

>> Absolutely. And I think, again, looking at how you actually productionalize it and keep it running is a big thing, to put it mildly.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. And a great segue to introduce our next two guests. We have Gaurav Rishi. He's the VP of product at Veeam.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Hello.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much for coming on, Gaurav.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Pleasure to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> And making a triumphant return to theCUBE, former host and analyst, Stu Miniman. He is the senior director of market insights hybrid platforms at Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on, Stu.

Gaurav Rishi

>> I'm glad to be here with our partners here at Veeam. And Rebecca and Rob, awesome to be on camera with you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. Indeed, indeed. So Gaurav, I want to start with you, talk a little bit about why you're here and talk about this Veeam-Kasten-Red Hat partnership.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Absolutely. So first of all, the quick summary around Veeam, for the customers who might not or our listeners who might not know about Veeam, we actually are the number one market leader for data protection. Laser-focused on that. In fact, we have 450,000 customers. A lot of them use virtual machines, and that's what we back up. And you talked about OpenShift Virtualization. We are at a point where we are getting calls from customers saying, "Hey look, I want to keep my options open." One of the tenants for us has always been data freedom. And so here we are as Kasten, which was a Kubernetes-centric product, and now we are seeing virtual machines come in there. And so right time, right place, and no better partner than Red Hat to be able to go enable that. So that's the reason I'm here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. And actually I love how Gaurav said, "Right time, right place," because a lot of the conversations, it's like we've talked about Veeam in containers for a long time. OpenShift Virtualization, not a new product. The open source project underneath it, been there. Rob, you've been at the KubeCons.

>> Yeah.

>> We've been talking about this for a couple of years. But there's certain industry events that are now having everybody look with a fresh eye. And as Gaurav said, absolutely, when I think virtualization, one of the main things I think underneath it is like, "Hey, how am I doing in my backup, my disaster recovery, and all those pieces?" And Veeam was one of the earliest and biggest partners in that virtualization ecosystem. And when you talk to go to a more modern environment, Kasten was the first backup partner for OpenShift Virtualization, which has been a super hot topic here at this show to be sure.

>> Oh, to put it mildly. I think, again, when you start to look at it, and Gaurav, you kind of talked about it, the elephant in the room is that there's licensing changes about with VMware and things like that, and people are starting to look. In fact, I sat with a set of customers yesterday during lunch, and we were having a conversation. And they're looking at that, and automation and being that... what is Kasten really leaning into with OpenShift Virt right now? And how is that really... what are you seeing the take-up on it? And how are you seeing that go?

Gaurav Rishi

>> Yeah. No, I think first of all, I've heard the word OpenShift Virtualization about 100 times over the last two days, so you are absolutely right. That's top of mind. We want to meet customers where they are. I think that's the key point. And I think we were always saying, "Customers first, partners always." And so really the point out here is, we've got serious customers now who are actually virtual machine customers and now have containers running in OpenShift platforms. So we've talked about the US Navy, for example. It doesn't get more serious than that, to be honest. Multi-year deal. They use virtual machines, and now they have containers on OpenShift. We have customers like Zenseact, which is a Volvo company, which has virtual machines. Also have containers. Again, OpenShift platform. I could go on on a long list. So I think, first of all, we are at the tip of the iceberg, I want to say, at this point of time. But like I said, the fact that you have customers knocking on your doors, amazing. In terms of the technology piece of it, Stu said it, we started off as a startup, as Kasten, five years ago. One of our first partners actually was Red Hat. We've been contributing to KubeVirt, which is the open source project under the covers. OpenShift Virtualization is going ahead and providing the trust to these customers to say, "Look, out of this universe of 800 partners that might be in the CNCF ecosystem, how can you go ahead and actually get the handholding that you might require?" And that's where the integrations have come in. So whether it's going ahead and making sure we have the right scale, whether it's about going ahead and having a migration plan, that's really where we are collaborating and bringing it to market.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, you talked about the various different customers you have, including the US Navy. How are you coming to terms with a set of best practices? I imagine that, as you were saying, meeting customers where they are. Some are further along in their journey, some require more handholding. How are you, or are you in fact seeing that there are certain commonalities between these customers? Or are they really their own ships?

>> Yeah. So Rebecca, the challenge we face right now is many customers that say, "Hey, I need to make a change fast." Unfortunately, those of us in the IT world know migration is neither simple nor fast to be able to do.

Rebecca Knight

>> It's a journey.

>> But when you talk about best practices, if you look at, first of all we have tooling to help. There's one of the tools we talked about in the keynote stage: Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, which is part of the Conveyor open source tools out there. That has built into it the insights from years, and thousands of customers can do analysis of your VM estate and say, "These ones are good." Maybe it's 20% to 50% of the ones would say, "Hey, these are great. We can actually migrate. These other ones, we need a little bit of work." So it's not something that we can do overnight, but Migration Toolkit for Virtualization to scan and understand. And then we've actually been doing some deep integration between Ansible and what we've been doing on the OpenShift side to help with that migration, because we know we need to automate this, because otherwise that long migration will take even longer. And a lot of customers are sitting on the clock and trying to make these things. So we are all learning fast in this environment. I wish it was only 100 times I'd heard this topic because it's been a little bit overwhelming for everyone. The good news is we've got a broad ecosystem. Not just our important ISV partners like Kasten, but the channel partners, many of them who have a lot of experience. We've got great things even from Dell with the Dell Apex Cloud. I know you talked about them. They know a thing or two about virtualization. And we have a wonderful offering that we announced last year and is going full bore this year, as well as, hey, if you want to accelerate what you're doing in the cloud, we can run OpenShift Virtualization on the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS Rosa. And by the way, it's a reminder, people. It's like, "Hey, what's this OpenShift Virtualization?" It is a feature of OpenShift. It's another operator and there's no extra cost. It's something that you get there. It goes together and you can take advantage of all these modern cloud-native architectures. So there's some new learnings that people need to have. We've been doing a lot of labs. The labs have been... I'm sure you've heard. Some of the sessions, some get a lot in there, some get attrition. The labs are full. My team that's been doing labs, it's like, "Yep, today they're doing the extra third lab because they are all full and there's wait lists because people want to get hands-on and understand to help that education process and spread that knowledge and leverage what everybody else is doing to your best practices."

Rebecca Knight

>> It's part of the community, which is such a big selling point for Red Hat.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Yeah. No, that's a lot. I was just going to add two quick points in there, which is, A, I think first of all, how we move customers, everyone has in a different place, like you said, and you need to build that trust. So for example, Kasten announced that we have the only solution right now, which is FIPS compliant. Now, that's really important if you're a federal customer. We talked about, for example, the Navy. So now that comes in and is an important part in addition to the scale requirements. So not to geek out too much, but we are the only ones who might have block mode support. Why is that important? Because you want to go ahead and enable things like VMotion-like capabilities when you get to an OpenShift environment, because that's what you might be used to. The second part is I think what you touched on: when you're working with partners, Kyndryl for example. Good Veeam partner, good Red Hat partner. They're taking this solution and actually going ahead and interfacing with the customers. So you get that continuity in there. So I think that ecosystem point is also really important.

>> Yeah. And to your point about meeting them where they are, and Stu kind of went through all of the different deployment methodologies where you can be OpenShift. Are you seeing that you have customers that are using all of the above and using that as their strategy and to you for that data protection and cyber resilience?

Gaurav Rishi

>> Oh yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you used the word cyber resilience, because that's the other thing despite the OpenShift Virtualization, and it's something which cuts across almost any kind of deployment. It's one of the number one concerns in boards and CIOs, CSOs, name your favorite roll out here. So I think that's the other part which we are focusing a lot on. It's not just about the FIPS compliance part of it. We've also done a bunch of integrations to go ahead and make sure, when it comes to ransomware, which is still stealing the headlines out there, that backup is not just your last line or defense, but ultimately your backup is only as good as your restores. So how do you go ahead and make sure you have immutability? So that you can actually depend and get back on something that you can actually trust can't be touched on? But we've also added capabilities by integrations into things like ACS, ACM. So you get early detections when integrations into vendors when somebody tries to go ahead and mess around with your backups. So I think that is a truly important part and goes hand in glove to make OpenShift Virtualization a reality. And that's really a focus area for us.

>> So what was new in the announcement? You guys announced Veeam 7 or Kasten 7. Sorry. I know it's the same company and everything but-

Gaurav Rishi

>> Actually I'm glad you said that because actually that gives me a segue to say, one of the branding changes which we did talk about was the official name. And I know we never talked about it, but you got it right, which is Veeam Kasten. That's what it is. So we have Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, just like we have other Veeam products. So it's really important. Back to that 450,000 customers. So people can get the brand continuity but also get the specialization of the fact that Kasten is, actually the fourth time running, number one recognized leader as a leader and an outperformer in the GigaOm Kubernetes Data Protection Report. So now what's new in Version Seven? Actually it's two themes. You hit on one, which was cyber resilience. And I think things like FIPS, the things like we go ahead and have immutability are all new in there. We actually have support for image stream, for the geeks on the listening side. That's the way to go protect OpenShift images when you want to go ahead and have automated backups and roll back into some points. The other theme we have is around enterprise solutions. I think both Stu and I were hitting on the fact that wide ecosystem partnership, but I think customers are looking for simplicity and trusted partners out here. So we've doubled down on relationships with some of our key partners. Red Hat, the fact that we are here in full force is a testament to that. And what that means is actually we've got this solution which includes these site integrations we've been talking about to help you move to an OpenShift Virtualization, to help you go ahead and start cloud-native and make sure you can move to things like OpenShift Plus, or have a hybrid story so you can go ahead and have things like ARO or ROSA as well as on premises. So I think those are the key pieces we see across data protection, cyber resiliency, as well as application mobility.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. Unfortunately everybody would love, and they say, "Hey, I just want that easy button. Just tell me, "One, two, three. Isn't there a wizard that did this?"" The reality is that, every company, how deep they do the integration, what APIs they have, what storage they have beyond those, there's a lot of pieces of that. And in the data center, I remember a CIO said, "Every application, we really built a Taj Mahal, and it would be nice if you could be more off the shelf for these kind of environments." But we've got tooling. The ecosystem, which Kasten has been there from day one, is building out. And we can help you there. It is going to take a little bit of time. So hopefully as a customer you want to give yourself that time. If there is a forcing function and it's too near term, figure out how to be able to extend that a little bit longer because we can work through that over some time. We are all learning and companies like Kyndryl and the like are absolutely going to be huge partners to be able to help get over that hump and get you to the new environment, because there is that translation that you need between, this is the way I used to do it and this is the way I want to do it which, to be honest, I've been talking to VM admins about this for the last five years, about like, "Hey, what's the next thing that I'm going to work on?" It's automation. Or like, "Hey, maybe I want to make sure that, for the longevity of my career, how do I take advantage of this whole AI thing that everybody is?" That's where I've been spending a lot of my time this week. And to be honest, if you stayed in that older environment, you're not ready architecturally to take advantage of AI. And we're all diving into this from a career standpoint because this is where it's going to go for the next 10 to 20 years.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, speaking of that, I'm curious about how you talk with customers about that. You're just talking about it even from an individual standpoint of, hey, I got to be working for a bit longer. I need to know this stuff, get cool with it, experiment, learn, understand it. How do you talk with customers about really diving in and making sure that they're learning it but then also ultimately seeing something back in the ROI?

>> Yeah. Rebecca, I love it. You do great work on talking about the future of work and everything like that. And from a career standpoint, what are the things that are going to get me excited? People watched our keynote. Our CEO is reinvigorated. We're all digging in because there's so much that we've learned here. So automation is a key toolset and skill set that, there's lots of room here. Ansible Fest has been buzzing, and lots there that will help along that technology because, every organization, I'm being asked to do AI. It's not new headcount and new budget for it. So you are taking some existing people and helping to train them up and skill them up to take advantage of that. So again, I almost look at it, this virtualization move and AI adoption go related together, because I need scalability. I need to be able to do things even more and interact with it. So if I don't move along that journey towards modernization, I can't take advantage of the opportunity of AI.

>> Well, I was going to say, since you brought it up, I think it's only fair to say to Gaurav and understanding, because if we don't talk about AI I think we'll get kicked off the internet here.

Gaurav Rishi

>> I know. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

Rebecca Knight

>> talked about. talk about AI.

>> How do you see people protecting it? Because they got to protect the models, they got to protect the data. It's about the ecosystem. And again, we saw it from all on stage. And in fact the demos that were done by Chris Morgan and all of this around all of those pieces, from when it's on the laptop to all the way when it's in production on OpenShift AI, how are you seeing customers protecting their AI?

Gaurav Rishi

>> That's a great question. First of all, to Rebecca's point, the number one skill, just to close on that from my perspective because I have kids, and it's not just a question of the people here but it's the next generation too. And I think learning to learn is probably the number one skill I would go ahead and advocate for. All of us need to do it and we need to do it better than we've ever done before. So great time to be alive and to be learning, but that would be my general point. I think, to your specific question though, what AI has really done, I've never seen so much experimentation in my career that's going on with our companies and all our customers right now, to be able to go and create different types of models. It's brought to the forefront the importance of data and how it can be used for not just automation, tasks, and things of that nature, but productivity gains as well as differentiation. So now that's important. What's come to the next step is essentially people saying, "Well, I might be using vector databases, for example, in this particular world. How do I go ahead and protect those vector databases?" So we work with companies like EDB, who might have a vector interface. Or there's a next generation of companies coming in play. So Kasten actually has gone ahead and contributed a project called Kanister to CNCF as an open source, which allows you to go ahead and create these blueprints to be able to build protection mechanisms for a lot of these databases. So that's number one. And the second one, actually I love this chart which I know IDC came up with, which is essentially asking customers, where are you experimenting and deploying these models? And it's like a pie chart with equally sized blocks about, "I'm trying it in the cloud," "I'm trying it on premises." So I think we both talked about freedom of choice and data freedom and being able to work in hybrid environments. I think Kasten's really known, in addition to data protection for, is the data freedom part of it. So that's the other part. We really see customers being super conscious of saying, "Well, Kubernetes came with the promise of portability. Kasten can actually go ahead and make that a reality. And that's really where we work."

>> So many of these things echo what we saw in the overall cloud adoption. When I first went into the cloud, "Oh, do I still need to think about data protection? And how about security?" Those can't be an afterthought. And some things are a little bit different when we talk about AI. We're talking about some massive bits of data and making sure that security is absolutely a piece of it. And even if we talk about... we've talked about open source in AI this week. At the end of the day, if there's proprietary data, I want to make sure that's controlled. Many of our customers, that's why I'm getting a small GPU farm, I'm doing it in my data center, because I don't understand well enough what some of the large solutions are doing if I don't do it in my four walls. Those that have been around long enough, it was really nice when you could just lock the door and not have it connected to the internet and felt safer. Today, of course, security, there are no moats anymore. But we do need to think about many of the same things.

Gaurav Rishi

>> That's right.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exciting times. I love it. Learning to learn. I love it. Great.

Gaurav Rishi

>> All right, that's great.

Rebecca Knight

>> Stu and Gaurav, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really enlightening conversation.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Thank you very much. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. I stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in technology enterprise coverage and analysis.

Gaurav Rishi | Veeam & Stu Miniman | Red Hat

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to day three of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit here at the Colorado Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, lots of buzzwords this week. AI, of course. Open source, because we're at a Red Hat summit. Virtualization is another one we're hearing a lot about this week.

>> Absolutely. And I think, again, looking at how you actually productionalize it and keep it running is a big thing, to put it mildly.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. And a great segue to introduce our next two guests. We have Gaurav Rishi. He's the VP of product at Veeam.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Hello.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you so much for coming on, Gaurav.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Pleasure to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> And making a triumphant return to theCUBE, former host and analyst, Stu Miniman. He is the senior director of market insights hybrid platforms at Red Hat. Thank you so much for coming on, Stu.

Gaurav Rishi

>> I'm glad to be here with our partners here at Veeam. And Rebecca and Rob, awesome to be on camera with you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. Indeed, indeed. So Gaurav, I want to start with you, talk a little bit about why you're here and talk about this Veeam-Kasten-Red Hat partnership.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Absolutely. So first of all, the quick summary around Veeam, for the customers who might not or our listeners who might not know about Veeam, we actually are the number one market leader for data protection. Laser-focused on that. In fact, we have 450,000 customers. A lot of them use virtual machines, and that's what we back up. And you talked about OpenShift Virtualization. We are at a point where we are getting calls from customers saying, "Hey look, I want to keep my options open." One of the tenants for us has always been data freedom. And so here we are as Kasten, which was a Kubernetes-centric product, and now we are seeing virtual machines come in there. And so right time, right place, and no better partner than Red Hat to be able to go enable that. So that's the reason I'm here.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. And actually I love how Gaurav said, "Right time, right place," because a lot of the conversations, it's like we've talked about Veeam in containers for a long time. OpenShift Virtualization, not a new product. The open source project underneath it, been there. Rob, you've been at the KubeCons.

>> Yeah.

>> We've been talking about this for a couple of years. But there's certain industry events that are now having everybody look with a fresh eye. And as Gaurav said, absolutely, when I think virtualization, one of the main things I think underneath it is like, "Hey, how am I doing in my backup, my disaster recovery, and all those pieces?" And Veeam was one of the earliest and biggest partners in that virtualization ecosystem. And when you talk to go to a more modern environment, Kasten was the first backup partner for OpenShift Virtualization, which has been a super hot topic here at this show to be sure.

>> Oh, to put it mildly. I think, again, when you start to look at it, and Gaurav, you kind of talked about it, the elephant in the room is that there's licensing changes about with VMware and things like that, and people are starting to look. In fact, I sat with a set of customers yesterday during lunch, and we were having a conversation. And they're looking at that, and automation and being that... what is Kasten really leaning into with OpenShift Virt right now? And how is that really... what are you seeing the take-up on it? And how are you seeing that go?

Gaurav Rishi

>> Yeah. No, I think first of all, I've heard the word OpenShift Virtualization about 100 times over the last two days, so you are absolutely right. That's top of mind. We want to meet customers where they are. I think that's the key point. And I think we were always saying, "Customers first, partners always." And so really the point out here is, we've got serious customers now who are actually virtual machine customers and now have containers running in OpenShift platforms. So we've talked about the US Navy, for example. It doesn't get more serious than that, to be honest. Multi-year deal. They use virtual machines, and now they have containers on OpenShift. We have customers like Zenseact, which is a Volvo company, which has virtual machines. Also have containers. Again, OpenShift platform. I could go on on a long list. So I think, first of all, we are at the tip of the iceberg, I want to say, at this point of time. But like I said, the fact that you have customers knocking on your doors, amazing. In terms of the technology piece of it, Stu said it, we started off as a startup, as Kasten, five years ago. One of our first partners actually was Red Hat. We've been contributing to KubeVirt, which is the open source project under the covers. OpenShift Virtualization is going ahead and providing the trust to these customers to say, "Look, out of this universe of 800 partners that might be in the CNCF ecosystem, how can you go ahead and actually get the handholding that you might require?" And that's where the integrations have come in. So whether it's going ahead and making sure we have the right scale, whether it's about going ahead and having a migration plan, that's really where we are collaborating and bringing it to market.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, you talked about the various different customers you have, including the US Navy. How are you coming to terms with a set of best practices? I imagine that, as you were saying, meeting customers where they are. Some are further along in their journey, some require more handholding. How are you, or are you in fact seeing that there are certain commonalities between these customers? Or are they really their own ships?

>> Yeah. So Rebecca, the challenge we face right now is many customers that say, "Hey, I need to make a change fast." Unfortunately, those of us in the IT world know migration is neither simple nor fast to be able to do.

Rebecca Knight

>> It's a journey.

>> But when you talk about best practices, if you look at, first of all we have tooling to help. There's one of the tools we talked about in the keynote stage: Migration Toolkit for Virtualization, which is part of the Conveyor open source tools out there. That has built into it the insights from years, and thousands of customers can do analysis of your VM estate and say, "These ones are good." Maybe it's 20% to 50% of the ones would say, "Hey, these are great. We can actually migrate. These other ones, we need a little bit of work." So it's not something that we can do overnight, but Migration Toolkit for Virtualization to scan and understand. And then we've actually been doing some deep integration between Ansible and what we've been doing on the OpenShift side to help with that migration, because we know we need to automate this, because otherwise that long migration will take even longer. And a lot of customers are sitting on the clock and trying to make these things. So we are all learning fast in this environment. I wish it was only 100 times I'd heard this topic because it's been a little bit overwhelming for everyone. The good news is we've got a broad ecosystem. Not just our important ISV partners like Kasten, but the channel partners, many of them who have a lot of experience. We've got great things even from Dell with the Dell Apex Cloud. I know you talked about them. They know a thing or two about virtualization. And we have a wonderful offering that we announced last year and is going full bore this year, as well as, hey, if you want to accelerate what you're doing in the cloud, we can run OpenShift Virtualization on the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS Rosa. And by the way, it's a reminder, people. It's like, "Hey, what's this OpenShift Virtualization?" It is a feature of OpenShift. It's another operator and there's no extra cost. It's something that you get there. It goes together and you can take advantage of all these modern cloud-native architectures. So there's some new learnings that people need to have. We've been doing a lot of labs. The labs have been... I'm sure you've heard. Some of the sessions, some get a lot in there, some get attrition. The labs are full. My team that's been doing labs, it's like, "Yep, today they're doing the extra third lab because they are all full and there's wait lists because people want to get hands-on and understand to help that education process and spread that knowledge and leverage what everybody else is doing to your best practices."

Rebecca Knight

>> It's part of the community, which is such a big selling point for Red Hat.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Yeah. No, that's a lot. I was just going to add two quick points in there, which is, A, I think first of all, how we move customers, everyone has in a different place, like you said, and you need to build that trust. So for example, Kasten announced that we have the only solution right now, which is FIPS compliant. Now, that's really important if you're a federal customer. We talked about, for example, the Navy. So now that comes in and is an important part in addition to the scale requirements. So not to geek out too much, but we are the only ones who might have block mode support. Why is that important? Because you want to go ahead and enable things like VMotion-like capabilities when you get to an OpenShift environment, because that's what you might be used to. The second part is I think what you touched on: when you're working with partners, Kyndryl for example. Good Veeam partner, good Red Hat partner. They're taking this solution and actually going ahead and interfacing with the customers. So you get that continuity in there. So I think that ecosystem point is also really important.

>> Yeah. And to your point about meeting them where they are, and Stu kind of went through all of the different deployment methodologies where you can be OpenShift. Are you seeing that you have customers that are using all of the above and using that as their strategy and to you for that data protection and cyber resilience?

Gaurav Rishi

>> Oh yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you used the word cyber resilience, because that's the other thing despite the OpenShift Virtualization, and it's something which cuts across almost any kind of deployment. It's one of the number one concerns in boards and CIOs, CSOs, name your favorite roll out here. So I think that's the other part which we are focusing a lot on. It's not just about the FIPS compliance part of it. We've also done a bunch of integrations to go ahead and make sure, when it comes to ransomware, which is still stealing the headlines out there, that backup is not just your last line or defense, but ultimately your backup is only as good as your restores. So how do you go ahead and make sure you have immutability? So that you can actually depend and get back on something that you can actually trust can't be touched on? But we've also added capabilities by integrations into things like ACS, ACM. So you get early detections when integrations into vendors when somebody tries to go ahead and mess around with your backups. So I think that is a truly important part and goes hand in glove to make OpenShift Virtualization a reality. And that's really a focus area for us.

>> So what was new in the announcement? You guys announced Veeam 7 or Kasten 7. Sorry. I know it's the same company and everything but-

Gaurav Rishi

>> Actually I'm glad you said that because actually that gives me a segue to say, one of the branding changes which we did talk about was the official name. And I know we never talked about it, but you got it right, which is Veeam Kasten. That's what it is. So we have Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, just like we have other Veeam products. So it's really important. Back to that 450,000 customers. So people can get the brand continuity but also get the specialization of the fact that Kasten is, actually the fourth time running, number one recognized leader as a leader and an outperformer in the GigaOm Kubernetes Data Protection Report. So now what's new in Version Seven? Actually it's two themes. You hit on one, which was cyber resilience. And I think things like FIPS, the things like we go ahead and have immutability are all new in there. We actually have support for image stream, for the geeks on the listening side. That's the way to go protect OpenShift images when you want to go ahead and have automated backups and roll back into some points. The other theme we have is around enterprise solutions. I think both Stu and I were hitting on the fact that wide ecosystem partnership, but I think customers are looking for simplicity and trusted partners out here. So we've doubled down on relationships with some of our key partners. Red Hat, the fact that we are here in full force is a testament to that. And what that means is actually we've got this solution which includes these site integrations we've been talking about to help you move to an OpenShift Virtualization, to help you go ahead and start cloud-native and make sure you can move to things like OpenShift Plus, or have a hybrid story so you can go ahead and have things like ARO or ROSA as well as on premises. So I think those are the key pieces we see across data protection, cyber resiliency, as well as application mobility.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. Unfortunately everybody would love, and they say, "Hey, I just want that easy button. Just tell me, "One, two, three. Isn't there a wizard that did this?"" The reality is that, every company, how deep they do the integration, what APIs they have, what storage they have beyond those, there's a lot of pieces of that. And in the data center, I remember a CIO said, "Every application, we really built a Taj Mahal, and it would be nice if you could be more off the shelf for these kind of environments." But we've got tooling. The ecosystem, which Kasten has been there from day one, is building out. And we can help you there. It is going to take a little bit of time. So hopefully as a customer you want to give yourself that time. If there is a forcing function and it's too near term, figure out how to be able to extend that a little bit longer because we can work through that over some time. We are all learning and companies like Kyndryl and the like are absolutely going to be huge partners to be able to help get over that hump and get you to the new environment, because there is that translation that you need between, this is the way I used to do it and this is the way I want to do it which, to be honest, I've been talking to VM admins about this for the last five years, about like, "Hey, what's the next thing that I'm going to work on?" It's automation. Or like, "Hey, maybe I want to make sure that, for the longevity of my career, how do I take advantage of this whole AI thing that everybody is?" That's where I've been spending a lot of my time this week. And to be honest, if you stayed in that older environment, you're not ready architecturally to take advantage of AI. And we're all diving into this from a career standpoint because this is where it's going to go for the next 10 to 20 years.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, speaking of that, I'm curious about how you talk with customers about that. You're just talking about it even from an individual standpoint of, hey, I got to be working for a bit longer. I need to know this stuff, get cool with it, experiment, learn, understand it. How do you talk with customers about really diving in and making sure that they're learning it but then also ultimately seeing something back in the ROI?

>> Yeah. Rebecca, I love it. You do great work on talking about the future of work and everything like that. And from a career standpoint, what are the things that are going to get me excited? People watched our keynote. Our CEO is reinvigorated. We're all digging in because there's so much that we've learned here. So automation is a key toolset and skill set that, there's lots of room here. Ansible Fest has been buzzing, and lots there that will help along that technology because, every organization, I'm being asked to do AI. It's not new headcount and new budget for it. So you are taking some existing people and helping to train them up and skill them up to take advantage of that. So again, I almost look at it, this virtualization move and AI adoption go related together, because I need scalability. I need to be able to do things even more and interact with it. So if I don't move along that journey towards modernization, I can't take advantage of the opportunity of AI.

>> Well, I was going to say, since you brought it up, I think it's only fair to say to Gaurav and understanding, because if we don't talk about AI I think we'll get kicked off the internet here.

Gaurav Rishi

>> I know. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."

Rebecca Knight

>> talked about. talk about AI.

>> How do you see people protecting it? Because they got to protect the models, they got to protect the data. It's about the ecosystem. And again, we saw it from all on stage. And in fact the demos that were done by Chris Morgan and all of this around all of those pieces, from when it's on the laptop to all the way when it's in production on OpenShift AI, how are you seeing customers protecting their AI?

Gaurav Rishi

>> That's a great question. First of all, to Rebecca's point, the number one skill, just to close on that from my perspective because I have kids, and it's not just a question of the people here but it's the next generation too. And I think learning to learn is probably the number one skill I would go ahead and advocate for. All of us need to do it and we need to do it better than we've ever done before. So great time to be alive and to be learning, but that would be my general point. I think, to your specific question though, what AI has really done, I've never seen so much experimentation in my career that's going on with our companies and all our customers right now, to be able to go and create different types of models. It's brought to the forefront the importance of data and how it can be used for not just automation, tasks, and things of that nature, but productivity gains as well as differentiation. So now that's important. What's come to the next step is essentially people saying, "Well, I might be using vector databases, for example, in this particular world. How do I go ahead and protect those vector databases?" So we work with companies like EDB, who might have a vector interface. Or there's a next generation of companies coming in play. So Kasten actually has gone ahead and contributed a project called Kanister to CNCF as an open source, which allows you to go ahead and create these blueprints to be able to build protection mechanisms for a lot of these databases. So that's number one. And the second one, actually I love this chart which I know IDC came up with, which is essentially asking customers, where are you experimenting and deploying these models? And it's like a pie chart with equally sized blocks about, "I'm trying it in the cloud," "I'm trying it on premises." So I think we both talked about freedom of choice and data freedom and being able to work in hybrid environments. I think Kasten's really known, in addition to data protection for, is the data freedom part of it. So that's the other part. We really see customers being super conscious of saying, "Well, Kubernetes came with the promise of portability. Kasten can actually go ahead and make that a reality. And that's really where we work."

>> So many of these things echo what we saw in the overall cloud adoption. When I first went into the cloud, "Oh, do I still need to think about data protection? And how about security?" Those can't be an afterthought. And some things are a little bit different when we talk about AI. We're talking about some massive bits of data and making sure that security is absolutely a piece of it. And even if we talk about... we've talked about open source in AI this week. At the end of the day, if there's proprietary data, I want to make sure that's controlled. Many of our customers, that's why I'm getting a small GPU farm, I'm doing it in my data center, because I don't understand well enough what some of the large solutions are doing if I don't do it in my four walls. Those that have been around long enough, it was really nice when you could just lock the door and not have it connected to the internet and felt safer. Today, of course, security, there are no moats anymore. But we do need to think about many of the same things.

Gaurav Rishi

>> That's right.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exciting times. I love it. Learning to learn. I love it. Great.

Gaurav Rishi

>> All right, that's great.

Rebecca Knight

>> Stu and Gaurav, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. A really enlightening conversation.

Gaurav Rishi

>> Thank you very much. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. I stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in technology enterprise coverage and analysis.