Grey Beards on Systems - 71: GreyBeards talk DP appliances with Sharad Rastogi, Sr. VP & Ranga Rajagopalan, Sr. Dir., Dell EMC DPD

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

Sponsored by: In this episode we talk data protection appliances with Sharad Rastogi (@sharadrastogi), Senior VP Product Management,  and Ranga Rajagopalan, Senior Director, Data Protection Appliances Product Management, Dell EMC™ Data Protection Division (DPD). Howard attended Ranga’s TFDx session (see TFDx videos here) on their new Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) the DP4400 at VMworld last … Continue reading "71: GreyBeards talk DP appliances with Sharad Rastogi, Sr. VP & Ranga Rajagopalan, Sr. Dir., Dell EMC DPD"

Hey everybody, Ray Lucchese here with Howard Marks here. Welcome to another sponsored episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, a show where we get Greybeards bloggers together with storage and system vendors to discuss upcoming products, technologies, and trends affecting the data center today. This Graybeards on Storage podcast is brought to you today by Dell EMC Data Protection Division and was recorded on September 7, 2018. We have with us here today, Sherrod Rastogi, Senior Vice President of Product Management, and Ranga Rajagopalan, Senior Director of Project Management at Data Protection Division. So, Sherrod and Ranga, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves and what's new in Dell EMC Data Protection?

Thanks, Ray. And thanks, Howard. Glad to be on the show here today. So I'm Sherrod Ristogi. I run product management for all of data protection. And I must say, you know, it's a really exciting time to be in data protection today. You know, clearly data is the fuel of the digital economy, and protecting is becoming more and more important. Protecting data has always been important. Yes, but it's also getting more complex, right? Because you are seeing explosion of the data in terms of volume, velocity, and variety. And you're also seeing the data is no longer just in the data

center. It's everywhere, right? It's at the edge with IoT devices. It's in the cloud. So just how you sort of protect that is very, very complex. Yeah, I've also been struck by how much more customers are willing to make changes than they used to be in data protection. I think there's a strategic shift going on in the data protection environment. It's just become explosive. You know, the number of, at VMworld, the number of booths that were associated with it

was pretty impressive, actually. Yep. Yeah, I don't know. We're clearly seeing that, right? We're seeing the market requirements are changing, the customer requirements are changing. So there's a lot of innovation happening in the market, which is great for our customers. And I think that's really interesting.

This is Ranga here. I run product management for the data protection appliances. And listening to this conversation, yes, there are a lot of new vendors. There's a lot of activity. But I think some of the fundamentals have remained unchanged, right? Customers require enterprise-level data protection. They need it with more simplicity. They need to continue protecting all their workloads.

And that, I think, has remained unchanged. What would you think, Howard? Well, certainly the requirements haven't changed in terms of that everything needs to be protected. The changes going on are, first of all, that customers are much more willing to change. I mean, I remember 10 years ago talking to customers who were incredibly unhappy with their backup application, but were not willing to think of switching to a competitor. The appliance-ization. I would say simplicity. Simplification of using data protection services has gone to an order of magnitude better place,

I would say. Ranga, what do you think? Absolutely. Simplicity, appliance, and that brings us to one of our most exciting announcements at VMworld. We launched our integrated data protection appliance, DP4400, which pretty much provides enterprise-class data protection, but with the simplicity that our mid-market customers are really asking us for. And does that, so it's an integrated appliance, so it's got, so what does an integrated appliance

mean to you, Ranga? You know, if I were to describe it in a single sentence, it does all the data protection tasks that customers need it to do, but more specifically, it brings the goodness of data domain from a protection storage perspective, delivers all the efficiencies of deduplication that we've delivered to customers over the past several years. Also, packages in the data protection software that helps our customers to protect a wide

range of workloads, virtual machines, databases. You name the workload, they can protect it with simplicity into the 4400. Traditionally, Dell had Avamar and I'm not sure what the other one was, but it's... NetWorker. NetWorker. So I'm sorry about that. Does it support both of those solutions, or is it somehow combined the two? I'll get started, and I'm sure Sher will have more nuanced views to add on that.

Dell EMC has been at the forefront of protecting all enterprise workloads. You're right. We had Avamar Networker. We also have the ability to protect applications directly with our Boost ecosystem. 4400 brings in all that IP and provides a very simple protection software layer with which customers can protect their virtual machines

or databases, their NAS workloads. The software is the appliance software, and that is prepackaged into the 4400 as well as all the other IDP appliances. But you robbed the back room for technologies, right? So the goodness of Avamar and the goodness of NetWorker are hidden in the background? Yeah. The goodness of our IP is definitely in the product, yes. Yeah, I mean, you know, we built our business on scale, performance, efficiency,

extensive coverage of workloads, and we're bringing all of that into the DP4400, but also making it a lot more simpler to install, to upgrade. And so those are innovations which we are driving in terms of simplicity. The other thing which I think is very exciting about the DP4400 is how it sort of interacts with the cloud, right? We have Cloud Tier for long-term retention. We have Cloud Disaster Recovery where you have two clicks to sort of fail over, three clicks to fail back. So very, very simple workflows and we're leveraging the cloud in a very powerful way

and very simple way here as well. Thank you for saying failback. Did you say two clicks to failover? And three clicks to failback? It takes three clicks to failback? That is correct. If I only had that in my days as a DR consultant.

I think I need this now. Oh, it's impressive. You mentioned Boost as well. So anything that supports Boost is pluggable into this? That is right. Anything that supports Boost. And we made an innovation there with BoostFS, which actually allows any of the NFS targets to be protected. That also is included in the 4400.

So there's a data domain hidden in there. That's a good thing. Among everything else. Well, from where I sit, this whole move to appliances is a great thing because the average enterprise designs a backup system every seven to 10 years. And why have expertise you only do use

every seven to 10 years to know how many media servers and what size data domain and all of those bits and pieces. So Ranga, what's the capacity of the integrated appliance? That's an interesting question, Ray. 4,400 comes with a capacity of 96 terabyte usable capacity. Now, this is post deduplication. So given that we generally are able to get around 55 to 1 dedupe, you can kind of imagine the front end capacity that we are talking about here. The other cool thing about it, just to complete the point is that we offer a very simple solution called grow in place. So customers can actually start at 24 TB usable capacity. And as their needs expand, they can keep growing in 12 TB increments all the way to 96.

So that's just the license key that they need to apply. So it's just a software addition. The product actually ships with the full capacity, but you just add the software capability. Is that how it works? Exactly. You got it right. It ships with all the capacity baked in. And extending to the cloud is also very simple. And in the cloud, we can go up to another 192 TB post-D-loop. It's almost like a front-end capacity of, what, 15 petabytes, Ranga, if you do the math?

Yeah. That's pretty good. So is this all? It's interesting that we ship all the hardware and license capacity in steps model has come and gone a couple of times. It makes a lot of sense to me, but I've seen customers push back on it. Yeah. And the customers push back on it because the hardware is in place. They think they're not getting what they were sold. Yep.

Great. So, gentlemen, I understand that this isn't just an appliance for on-site backup too, but we've got cloud attributes. So, tell us, what do you mean? What's cloud tier? Exactly how does cloud DR work? Yeah, as Ranga mentioned, you know, the DB4400 has a lot of cloud capabilities. You know, at one level, you can just tier to the cloud and use that for additional storage. But I think also, and probably even more interesting,

is the cloud DR aspect, where a mid-market customer can use cloud as a secondary backup site, and you can do disaster recovery from the cloud. Okay, so with Cloud Tier, you're moving the data from backup jobs to the cloud after some period of time? That is correct. And you can sort of set up a policy where it's 14 days or whatever the right date is. You can move the data from on-prem to the cloud with Cloud Tier. Yes. Okay. and so that really means that I've got a larger available capacity,

but if I'm restoring old stuff, it's going to be slower because it comes from the cloud, which is a perfectly fair trade-off. So with Cloud DR, you're sending the data immediately after it's backed up? That's right. You're sending the operational copy into the cloud

so that it becomes more of a DR site in case there is an issue or you want to test something, you can fail over and fail back. Okay. And the data in the cloud is reduced how? It's all taking up the DDoP efficiencies that we have on-prem. So everything that we push to the cloud is post-DDoP. And when I do a cloud DR recovery, what do I do? Spin up a virtual data domain to access the... Exactly. You literally spin up a virtual appliance. You access that copy.

It brings it up in the particular cloud where it's working. All that orchestration is done behind the scenes. From the customer's perspective, it is one click through the UI for failover, three clicks through the UI for failback. Oh, that's even better. So you spin up the virtual data domain for me. I don't have to go to that trouble. Okay. And then can I run VMs directly or do I have to go through a restore process? You would have to go through a restore process because we recover the backup copy and make it available, and you might need to do a VM-level restore.

Or if you want to pull up some application data, that would be possible as well. Okay, and failback is the part that, as a DR consultant, people always forgot about. I remember walking into organizations and saying, yeah, we had a disaster three months ago, and we're still running everything at the DR site because we haven't figured out how to come back. So a couple of clicks for recovery sounds really good to me. That's right. And the important thing is that the data transport layer is working in the

background, making sure that as you use the cloud as your temporary primary site, it's pushing all the data back to the production site and by the time it's ready for a failback, it's all ready to go. Okay, and so you're pushing that data back into the appliance and then again, I have to do a restore, right? You would need to, yeah. Okay, so we've got 96 terabytes of usable capacity, all the backup goodness. Is there a cloud tier for long-term retention, cloud disaster recovery,

or future-proof guarantee? I'm not sure if you've heard about that guarantee, have you? Well, I've heard about guarantees from all sorts of people, and the devil's always in the details. So, you know, we all hate the old model where, you know, every three years, somebody from some big company says, well, if you'd like to renew your maintenance, it goes up by a factor of 10. So why don't you just buy a new one anyway? Yeah, so we made it very simple. We have something called the Clear Price Guarantee. So when you participate in the loyalty program, the renewal rate is going to be fixed for you.

So you're not going to get that sticker price shock in three years later, exactly the scenario that you described. We also provide a data reduction guarantee. Of course, it depends on the workloads and whatnot, but a lot of information available on that. We also ensure that we are going to be future-proof from an upgrades perspective. So all the upgrades that are going to come from a software perspective are always available to our customers. Okay. I assume that sometime in the future, there'll be larger and smaller models, but we're not talking about that yet, right?

We will continuously evolve the product depending on the market needs, yes. Very well said. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about data domain boost and being able to use the appliance for other things, because the single most resistant to my backup application people in the data center have always been Oracle DBAs. Yep. Even SQL Server DBAs insist on, well, we'll write a dump and then you can back that up.

But Oracle DBAs, we have to use RAC. We can't do anything else. So I can, in addition to being the integrated appliance for backing up the things that you are the data mover for, I can use you as a rack target too? Absolutely. So that's the value prop of Boost, available with data domain, available with all our integrated appliances as well. Through the application interface, be it Oracle or be it SQL, we use the native commands to actually drive a dump as a backup into the appliance and you can restore it. So you don't have to introduce yet another paradigm to the administrators. They're just using it through their application interfaces

using their application primitives. Well, that's good because those DBAs are stubborn. For all the right reasons. Well, I mean good because those DBAs are stubborn. For all the right reasons. Well, I mean, it's the same reason backup storage administrators are stubborn. We take the data we're protecting very seriously. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. We're coming to the end of our time. Why don't you give us a last statement and tell the people where they can abuse you on social media. So you can always reach me at, at Sharad Rastogi. Happy to hear from folks. And, you know, just, just in closing, I would say, you know,

we are the market share leader in data protection across appliances and software. You know, we built a business on scale, coverage, efficiency, you know, making sure that it's the lowest cost to protect for our customers. We are bringing a lot of goodness and innovation to the market. And the DP44 is a very exciting product. If you haven't had a chance to look at it, look at it more carefully

and we'll keep you posted as we make further progress and more innovations in the market. I'm looking forward to it. All right. Well, this has been great. Thank you very much, Sherrod and Ranga, for being on our show. And thanks to Dell EMC Data Protection Division for sponsoring this podcast.

Next time, we'll talk to another system storage technology person. Any questions you want us to ask, please let us know. If you enjoy our podcast, tell your friends about it. And please review us on iTunes, as this will also help get the word out. That's it for now. Bye, Howard. Bye, Ray. Talk to you guys next time.