So we'll make it small and very personal. I think it's going to be a very friendly conversation. Wealready planned it as such kind of session. Um session. Um to be honest, I've done I've been doing sessions at insight since around something around 2013. So I would probably say that those nice and smaller sessions are very good because there's always a good banter between people and you can listen and you can really ask also the hard questions that sometime in a very big session some people either don't want to ask or unfortunately sometimes we don't necessarily want to answer. Right? So we we'llfind a way around this andwe'll keep it very open and very simple. It's also agood preposition for me given the fact that uh I'm talking about two products who are very dear to me because I worked with those product for a few years now. Uh but just as of like two or three months ago, they're not my direct responsibility anymore. So it makes it a little bit easier for me topoint a punch a few holes if you will. But um we'll definitely do a very open conversation. Um, hopefully you had some lunch because lunch would be closing at the expo, so don't rush now, unfortunately. But there are grab and go bags um throughout the convention, so hopefully you can find something. >> Andmore importantly, hope you can find somewhere to sit to eat it. >> Yes, cuz yesterday that was not a that was a big problem. >> Yeah, that's actually quite harder. Uh, in terms of introduction, my name is YonHeon. I'm director of cloud solution architects. I'm with Netup since 2013. So that's about 13 and a half years 2010 sorry at the insight since 2013. Um and I'm responsible for quite a few cloud product be that I used to be responsible for blue XP and CVO which we'll talk about a lot today but right now my team has been repurposed and we're focused on uh oneP first party solutions. So uh my first and primary prerogative is right now the FSXN solution if you're familiar with it. If not, grab me afterwards for a few minutes. That's kind of like an evolution for some of those services. Uh and we're also deal my team is also still dealing with few other cloud services as a cloud sync, cloud tearing and the like. Um I'm coming to you from Tel Aviv. Uh given the situation, I'm probably the only representative coming from Tel Aiv right now. Uh but uh it is what it is. And uh with without further ado, Iwould we have a back door. >> I guess >> that won't secure too much. >> That's right. I'm going to watch your back, pal. I got you. >> Andthis is Rod, but we'll I'll present Rod. Um I I'll get to it in the middle of the presentation. So uh wewon't waste time at the beginning. Um as part of what we need to do is we need to put up this confidentiality note. I guess this is not your first session. So I'm just you know I'm counting in my head to about 20 and then I can switch the slide but obviously everything that you hear about it is roughly protected by NDA. Obviously it's going to be very hard to enforce but the rules of insight is usually that we present stuff that is if we do roadmap stuff we tell stuff that is available in the next three to six month which is viable and good in this session. There's nothing confidential other than whatever Rob would say about Willie Star Watson, but that's what Rod would say. So, um, I'm good with that. I would like to set the stage a bit. And this is a customer session. It is slightly a different session than most of the customer sessions we do because we would like to have it as a conversation, as a chat. and we we'll I I'llstart and then I'll prime Rob to the main stage and then uhhe will take the lead. Um but what we would like to do is to give you a good example of a customer who's pushing I won't say pushing the envelope because those things were created to push the envelope with but at the end of the day Rod had a journey to the cloud and at some point he got to some of our solutions. He's an he's a longtime NetUp user and he got to our solutions and he found that it's actually a good thing to propagate his SAS delivery bless you and to prop his SAS delivery forward and get into a situation where you know you're getting um a good solution that wraps around whatever you need to get in order to fulfill your journey to the cloud. And this is what we'll talk about in this session. uh we'll focus mostly on well rod is using Azure mostly so we'll focus mostly on Azure but that's those solutions are available for all cloud platforms be well the primary one AWS Azure and Google forone and we will definitely talk uh a little bit deeper about uh what road is doing and a little bit about the infrastructure around it that made some of those things possible um quick agenda So we'll do a quick intro about cloud volume on which is the primary product that road is using and blue XP which is the orchestration manageability platform around cloud volume on we'll switch to talk about stars Watson and how they use this to deploy their SAS solutions okay and then we'll wrap up and let'sbegin so cloud volume on top I don't is anyone usingSo we got such a small crowd. Let's ask some questions. >> Yeah.I'm asking. Yeah. Isokay. Anyone is currently using cloud volume? Are you familiar withthe product or solution inOkay. >> Okay. Awesome. So >> is it in your PC in Azure? >> Okay. >> Okay. Good. So in a high level if there is one thing that I need you to remember from my part of the presentation is that cloud volume on is on okay primarily it's not a new product in the market anymore because some people are nodding because we had a few names for it.used to be on cloud and there was another name in the middle and then it landed on cloud volume on because someone in marketing probably needs to get paid. Um but at the end of the day it is first and foremost on and in this week andit's exactly this actually it was last week but no one really counts here it celebrated it 9th birthday right so this is a product that I stood here in on this floor not literally but around here and presented this product as a new offering and launched it in 2014 okay so we're talking about a technology which is viable and it actually undergone quite a few changes and modifications. I think italways go going through those motions and I'll explain why this is very flexible and very fluid because cloud is rapidly changing. So as opposed to having a box in your office that uh once in a blue moon you can update some stuff on it and make some changes. When you take a solution like this, when we take the onap itself, the core on top and put it in any cloud platform in order to make it run on top of the infrastructure which is available in the cloud whatever it is. So in AWS we're talking about EC2s and EBS's and here we're talking about VMs andall kinds of let's say LRS or ZRS discs. It depends on the regions of course. At the end of the day, you need to tailor made things and any change that the hyperscaler is doing, we need to match them. And it's good that we have such a good relationship with all of those hyperscalers.Around 2013, Netup has made a decision, a strategic decision to go toward the hyperscalers and say, "Guys, we want to bring our offering into the cloud." And we were pioneers in that because there's no one else that done something like that. none of the usual suspect in the storage market. And we took the same code and we can say that the same code base that you run in your office on a box, it's the same code that runs in the cloud whichindicates it's mature. >> Yes. And it's it one second I we we'll pause for questions. But it makes it very important to understand that distinction because that means that you can use mostly the same features on premise in the cloud. And then and again I'mahead of myself and Rob would probably mention this when we'll talk about something like as mundane as everyone knows what flex loan does. Flexone. Okay. Flexone essentially takes a volume and creates a copy of it which is starting as a readonly copy right and it does this instantaneously but it essentially not really a copy it's a projection right so think about it allows you to look atyour volume from a different place even though you have a different handler to access it what's the benefit let's say you have a DR setup right you moved your data to some place so you want to check what's inside your volume without breaking the replications and whatever ever you're doing. So you're essentially flex cloning the target and suddenly you can see everything and it doesn't take any other capacity and it doesn't take any time because it's instantaneous. you just look at the volume from a different way>> and you can get rid of it as quickly as you created it, >> right? And the benefit that it gives you is something which is essentially a killer app in order to test the R setup which is something that you don't really expect in the cloud because if you'd go to your setup your backup and you have backups let's say in Azure or youbacked up your EBS in AWS, you actually need to copy them to another place in order to test what's there. There's no really way or easy way to check as is out of the box. So just as an explanation or an example, but what Rod was saying earlier is super important and super relevant. We bring mature, battle tested, enterprisegrade features of storage systems into the cloud. And it makes it harder later to look at an a VM with some LRS this attached to it and say, okay, this is really a storage system. Sure, it stores data, but it's not a storage system. It doesn't give you the reliability or resiliency that you potentially expect, right? Because it's an LRS. Okay, so you have three local copies. That's a good example. But the VM itself is not a duplicate. And if you want to have two VMs look at the same LRSS, then you get into all kinds of problems. And this is why this product is was important then and it's very important now because it gives you something that is definitely not readily available in the cloud reel. you had a question sort >> yet introduced it in 2014 when you >> we started using in 2018 yeah andwe'll definitely talk about that so first and foremost as I said it's featurerich it comes with all the enterprise grade systems it is fully integrated with any other on so if you have other on systems moving data back and forth in and out is going to be super easy and you're going to be using the same tools and you're going to be using the same technologies that you use today just to manage the same solution. I think this is definitely something that makes things very easy does not recreate not require anyone to learn well it you probably need to learn some new skills to deal with the cloud but not it's not tremendous it's not monumental as switching from let's say I had on top now I'm switching to VMs with LRS it'stotally it's totally different solution and plus we'll talk about some of the features which are coming inside so that's going to be very easy toOn top of this, at the same year, we actually launched something that used to be called Cloud Manager, which evolved around the years into a big integration point and was rebranded two years back into Blue XP. Blue XP is the new platform on how to manage your I'll say stuff and stuff is a good explan is a good word for here because it'sfor pure cloud volume on top but you can also manage storage grids eeries fastest kubernetes >> kubernetes all kinds of object stoages everything so there's quite a few things that you can do through blue xp as an integration point and we'll say why it is important and the onrem you can actually manage your on-rem stuff in Bu XP as well. >> Yes.Exactly. >> We still have to kick it back to system manager to do a lot. >> So with Blue XP, they've actually added an advanced view. So it literally mirrors system manager in the same portal, same dashboard. You click a button and you're looking at system manager. And you don't have to log in again. have to do any of that because when you add theCVO system to Blue XP, you're giving it the credentials that it would need to manage the system. So, you can use that dashboard to manage it as well. I mean, you can see volumes, you can see lunge, you can see the discs, you can see everything, shares, all of it. >> No, the collector stateless. So, cloud blue XP is he'll get there. >> Yeah, I have a slide on blue XP. So, I think>> you're good. No, you're fine. Good question. Great question. >> You're good. You'reahead of stateless. He'll get there. Yes, two points that I would like to mention and explain. Theother tremendous difference here by taking code and making it run in yourand I'm pointing at every one of you your cloud infrastructure is also important because it does not our cloud volumeup is not necessarily a SAS right you don't consume it it's not a Dropbox it's not EFS or something else it is inside your environment so if you build your environment right and you have your firewalls and you have your bridges and you all your net up yoursetup for security and whatnot it is running within your VPCs or V-Nets or whatever you're using and at that point in time it does allow you to benefit from all the cloud ecosystem while actually being on top which is another benefit obviously if you need that benefit for sure but let's move on what we'll talk about the next the last point I'll talk about it a little bit later because it's part of Rod's part and I would like to pitch in and segment. It is available for multiplemethods of consumption. You can buy nodebased licenses which are like we used to sell for boxes but there's also a consumption model and we'll talk about this a little bit later. So bear with me.What's the benefit of actually bringing enterprisegrade features into the cloud? Very simple. You can actually do the same thing that you're doing on prem just in the cloud. everything.This makes it super easy to do something like a lift and shift. You have data which an application is running against it. Move your data just replicate it very easily. Now you have the data same data in the cloud. Just point the application at the new data set and just run with it. >> It would run the same way because >> use snap mirror if you got that app on prem you can use snap. >> So the same on top would run the same way on both sides. It allows you great business continuity. You can create all kinds of great uh schemes. Let's say for DR that that'sa great solution for DR for a secondary copy for file serving. It really depends on what you need. But asyou can see in the next slide that I'm going to show you in a second, we threw in most all of the licenses that NetUP has everything but the kitchen sink. You don't need to actually buy well out of thevery specific nuances of specific warm license potentially. All the licenses come built in and it's going to be very easy for you to get cracking immediately and also make have lots of benefits. It's going to also save you money. One of the reasons is it's going to save you money and going to reduce your cloud span is that some of the features that were coming in that you have on prem make so significance and a dramatic impact in the cloud. Rod will talk about it more. But if we talk about storage efficiencies, think about something like dduplication. Okay? dduplication.Okay? If you need to buy um 100 terabytes of storage on Azure, you're going to pay 10 cents per terabyte roughly a month. Okay, that's going to be a lot of money. But if you're going to be using dduplication and a very solid rate of dduplication in the industry can be 20% even 30%. Just cutting the 30% every month going to cut dramatically into your cloud spend. And that's even before we started to talk about something like taring. Okay. And what is tiering? Everyone familiar with the concept. So you can use multiple date multiple data tiers at the same time. >> Storage types. Different types of disk. >> Yes. So you what you can do and it can be done automatically and that license. Let's see if the pointer is working. Noton the screens. Okay. So >> W move that slide. Ah here that's what Okay. So you see this area here with those buckets. Okay. So that'svery simple. There is a mechanism. If you trigger it on bythe way by default it's usually on. You need to untrigger it if you don't want it. It's on. And the meaning of it is that it would look at blocks and it would decide if the blocks are getting cold because they haven't been touched for a while. We're actually going to delete them from the hot capacity tier from the hot performance tier and move them to the colder capacity tier which is simpler or cheaper. In Azure, we're talking about moving from LRS potentially to a blob. Okay. And that by itself is a cost saving of about 75%. Okay. theblocks can be either rehydrated and brought back if something is needed or even served from there depending if you're reading sequential versus random access. But since it is random and it is potentially um based on the specific blocks, you're actually getting enough performance in most cases that to warrant that coding of the blocks and then getting the storage efficiency and the cost saving tremendous cost saving versus you know using everything in the hot. >> You can also tar your snapshots. >> Well, that's for sure. That's the first thing that you need to tear. I think that in the newer versions there are ways to do ting of maybe not the compliance one. >> So not SLC SLE I think it sorry SLE is the problem. SLC is viable for now andI think that they're working on some solutions for that maybe 913 one which is now like buttrack this yes this so as I said all the licenses well thegreen thing is not working so don't write on the tea all the licenses are fully available so you get everything and it's a it's something and if you think about cloud solutions think about whatever you use today in the cloud if you need something that does both file block and object you need necessarily right now three separate solution. If you go to let's say AWS or even Azure, right? Let's do Azure. So you need blob for object and you want some files, you probably need some Azure files or Azure premium files. Hopefully use our Azure Neta files which is awesome as well. But obviously it's a different solution and if you want something to do block then you need to find a different solution. If you want to do something that do all of the same together then obviously cloud volume autoup is a good solution. All those licenses come built in. You don't need to buy separate replication licenses. You don't need to buy any taring licenses because this is built in for you. All this stuff is fully available and comes with the setup uh into uh CVO. When you start a cloud volume on it,just comes with it.Yes. and all white users that app >> yes and no so I'll repeat the question um so Kim right so Kim was asking about on top one and the applicability of onap one to those so it's essentially two different offerings because it's two different setups for all flash fast it makes sense on to use on one for example it comes with backup for example it comes with a few other things does on is on top one applicable as is to CVO cloud volume on I don't think that the answer is yes at this stage I know that they're examining and finding some ways to make something quite similar but most of the licenses that you have in on top one today you already have in CVO or you don't need think about it on top one on top of the storage licenses so replication licenses on there a snap lock using some of it is already here. Some of it you need to buy a separate license. Uh efficiencies are here. Most of the stuff is here. What you might be missing is tearing. But on top one is for onrem. So tearing from onrem to cloud is one kind of license. It's the same technology that's being used by data tiering inside CVO. So CVO does not require that taring license there and it is essentially built in because CVO can tier only to the cloud that is using it is using so if it's in Azure so blob if it's AWS then the other one say high speed Azure disc page glob or they've recently introduced a colder level of storage as well so it's not as easily accessible But it is accessible. It's just cheaperdisc. cheaper disc. >> I think the only thing that you might be missing from an on top one license is the cloud backup license which doesn't come inately with this one. And you need to get cloud backup for CVO. That's what I know. But um maybe it's better to double check. It's not my area. Also, I'm a director of solution architecture. So I don't sell stuff to people. So I can advise and it's the greatest position because you can advise and you don't care about whateverKevin is selling for example. But Iwish you the best of luck of course because mybonus is depending on you. Okay. So let's talk about blue XP. Just a few words. And this is a really good quote. I met this guy is one of the IT from the IT team of Porsche. So you know Porsche the sports car. It's really awesome.And he was saying very simply before we encountered well they started with cloud manage so cloud manager or blue XP doesn't really matter but before we saw that some kind of a unified solution to manage all those solutions at the same time we had to use boatloads of people and you need tohave many requirements across multiple tools in order to facilitate what we wanted to get and now we can do it in a way all in one without forfeiting almost anything or sacrificing anything that you would like to get. Blue XP is a vision. Okay, we started with cloud manager. We wanted to have some kind of a one-stop shop, a single pane of glass where you get your all of your cloud volume ons where all of your onrems or some of your blob storage and you want to get everything all at once on a single pane anddrag and drop stuff and we'll talk about the drag and drop a lot but we wanted to go to the next level and then blue XP came and blue XP is essentially a platform. So we took the cloud manager and we made a platform out of it. So it has tenency solution. It has the digital wallet which is actually a great solution of how to manage all of your licenses. Remember I talked about multiple consumption modes. I'll talk about it a little bit later together with Rod. Um so we're adding some things to make it a platform which is more applicable to enterprises and to organizations that have multiple BUS and multiple segments and many people touching many uh resources at the same time. So I think that if you look at something like that and that's like one screenshot that also I got from Rod. We'll see some more inthe next few slides. It allows you to have a unified experience across your management. So it's easy to manage the CVO the cloud volume on up and the AFF from the same place. If you want to go and open something like a system manager that's also viable. You can always do that as well. It's going to be very easy and it's within Blue XP already. So you go to one place to manage all of your data estate across whatever you have. >> Single pane of glass.>> Yeah. And then you can infer from multiple solutions. And there's some kind of a left pane here. So you can connect it to other solutions and you can employ more solutions that will give you more insight and more automation options and whatever you need in order to get your solution and everything is fully integrated into one platform which gives you the secure from tenency from uh from the way of how you log in and what kind of resources you are allowed or not allowed to see as a user of the platform. But you know what I'm a little bit ahead of myself and I'm wasting your time. So I would like everyone to hear from Rod Moore. So uh here comes Rod and I'll pass the baton. >> Sweet. Thank you. >> Wish it a sight of it. >> So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on me. I want to talk to you guys about the technology. I've been Willis with Willis Towers Watson 17 years. UmI've been a subject matter expert ontap since 2003 when I was actually an engineer and touched it like hands-on and learned it. It's when the discs used to show up at my desk, you know, when there's a disc in theum rack that went bad, it just show up. Uh today, I actually do oversee um a line of business within Willis Towers Watson. There's five major silos. I um work in a subsilo called insurance consulting and technology, i.e. ICT. And our primary function is we have a lot of actuaries. We employ um we're not probably the largest employer of actuaries, but probably one of the top. And we have over 2,000 actuaries on our payroll. You know, an actuary is an advanced mathematician that, you know, deals in um numbers and risk and uncertainty. That's their function. And Ilike to call them uh bean counters on steroids. They're just super smart math people. >> It'sthe people that make your insurance go up. >> Yes. You think initial? >> Well, they're the ones that take the data and help the insurance companies understand what their risks are, which would then relate to our costs. So, I went fishing. >> Yeah, I had to throw that in there. I am a human being. I like to fish. >> Um, so again, Willis Tires Watson, uh, we have many different lines of business. Our primary function is risk management, risk adversity. I mean that we wouldn't be using this solution if there was amajor risk to it. That's just that's we're so risk adverse, you know, that it'sjust an important function for usum we do insurance brokerage. Uh we actually do in North America, we have a very large consultancy that works with a lot of the major insurance companies um inthe world. 90 of the top 100 insurance companies are our customer. So we'vegot our fingers in a lot of people places.Um,British American company has stated it is 54,000 employees that at the last merger that happened in 2016. Willis Towers Watson started out as to Towers Parin and another company called Watson Wyatt to merge to become Towers Watson in 2009. 2016 Willis and Towers merged to become Willis Towers Watson. Uh, thankfully last year they decided to rebrand the company to WTW, so it's a lot shorter email address. >> [laughter] >> [laughter] >> [laughter] >> um $14 billion market cap and as stated we're the third largest insurance broker worldwide. Um again wehelp customers with risk uh improve business performance and you know thekey area that I work in is consultants. So our consultants use our applications that are actuarial based applications for modeling. Um we have uh massive compute farms and grids. So storage is paramount to our data output. Umwe're a leading provider of insurance solutions. I'm not going to sit here and read that to you. Um>> let's talk about the interesting. >> Yeah.So uh our workloads areas outlined. Um we have a lot of unstructured CIS data. You know, Ido reports and look at our data on a fairly regular basis, and I see files back to the 1990s for real. I mean, it's wedon't delete anything. The pile just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Um, so lots of unstructured data. Most of our stuff is SIFS SMB. We don't do a lot any NFS. We are doing ice scuzzi with NetApp uh CVO. Uh I did a session yesterday snap center and that's all SQL databases running on lens connected to uh on tap and as stated we do a lot of uh HPC type of grid work um you know we can spin up a thousand nodes and if we really wanted topush aCVO system over we could we and we have so we kind of figure out where that sweet spot's at so we don't do that. Um we have some core applications that are grid based. Igloo, rescue and emblem. Theyhave different functions. So um one of those is life. There's uh personal and casualty. There's um there's just different types of insurance and those applications are geared towards those different types of uh those types of insuranceances.Um why we went to the cloud. So in 2013 um the organization made a decision that we were going to go to the cloud. And so I was on the team, the architecture team at the time from Enterprise Corp IT to make that decision. And we looked at all the vendors at the time. And being a predominant Microsoft shop, it didn't make a lot of sense from a technology perspective to pick up everything and just move it from onrem to the cloud and not see some sort of real tangible financial benefit from theprovider. So in our case because we were such a large Microsoftshop that was the choice we just said we're going to go with Azure. So we made the commitment Azure allin and in 2016 um the rest of in I'm sorry in 2015 ICT thegroup that I'm in basically abandoned all of our on-rem stuff and everything we do is in the cloud. We don't do anything on prem anymore. 99% of everything we do in our business unit is in the cloud. the other four business units that are make up the rest of the organization, they are actually making that journey now. And so um we're kind of the use case example for them and we are considered bleeding edge when it comes to WTW. So um and uh it's again we're probably say thatapproach is not unique. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Right. Um we have another customer a big customer of ours. Iwon't name it but they're in the oil and gas market. Right. And they ended up well there's many customers in the oil and gas but this specific customer actually at some point came and said you know what we're selling all of our data centers to theydid some kind of a really roundabout trade that they sold all their data centers to Microsoft. >> Oh wow. And then they throughout that move they actually took a management like a third party integrator to handle the stuff and went with Microsoft into an all-in situation. So Microsoft and that integrator were responsible to move and do some kind of a lift and shift for all of their setup. And I'mjust telling you in CVO they have about I don't know roughly around 10 pabytes but in tiering and older they have tons of other stuff. Yeah,>> and they essentially in the process of clearing all their data centers and also move all in. But from my perspective and I'm saying these journeys usually take time and you need to understand and figure that you're going to hit some bumps on the road and bumps are there and moving only into Azure you can find some good stuff there and then you can find some stuff which hinder you in such a way thatyou cannot move forward even.>> Yep. >> Yep. >> Yep. The biggest reason Azure was chosen was it was cost. I mean, I'm going to be real, it was cost. And the reason that I mean from a cost perspective iswhen you take a VM on prem or a physical server and you make it a VM and you move it to AWS or Google, there's not necessarily baked into their service the license of the operating system. With Microsoft, it's included in the price tag. So, you get that. Same thing with, you know, um, Exchange, Teams, all those applications. you don't have to stand up IAS based infrastructure inside of a cloud provider. They can they offer those things as services. And so that was one of the biggest reasons like I said we were we're predominantly a Microsoft shop. We don't do a lot of Linux or a lot of NFS at all. Yeah. You know, one of the things that our clients, when I say clients, I'm talking about my clients, which are my in internal consultancy, the people that are generating revenue, they need us to be flexible and deliver solutions quickly, cost-effectively, and dynamically. And to do that, um, we had to be flexible with our storage. And so, on tap gave us that. CVO provided thatflexibility. Um, and as stated, end users and applications, they don't know if the storage is in the cloud or on premise. They're agnostic to that. They don't care. And you know, withCVO, it's just like running it onprem. Um, and the people that manage it for the most part won't even really know that they're actually managing a VM versus an actual system on prem. themanagement interface, the tooling, it'svery similar except with Blue XP and with Blue XP, it's expanded to actually include on on-prem support. So, you can actually join all your on-prem systems to the same dashboard. So, you've got one view. Kevin,>> you mentioned flexibility. uh when COVID hit um WTW went to ROD though were in the UK uh because um they sent about 2,000 employees in that area at all to work and so they needed to deploy media with Citrix in some form or fashion and they came to us the sales team and said well the only way we can how to do that you is purchasing the way set in the putting all tread you know and really that And they said, "We we don't have Titan that's got a Apple like in 48 hours." And we said, "But we know somebody in your company that help you." We said, "Call Rod." And he did. And they help them. And I think that actually was smart. >> Yeah, that's probably fair. Yeah. fair. Yeah. fair. Yeah. >> Yeah. Co, by the way, was interesting. I can recite all kinds of strange stories, but one of the funniest ones was an broadcasting company that called us and said, "We need to spin up like 20 CBOS today." So, we try to understand why and apparently they said so we can't go into the data center. We are forbidden to go into the data centers because of COVID and we cannot change any backup tapes. So, we need to dump the data somewhere fast and we don't care where. So the easiest way is to just move to the cloud and start doing it. And they ended up by the way using four because flexibility, right? So they were thinking all they're saying, okay, CVO per system, per LTO, per robot. And that's not the case. It allows you based on the fact that it's on top and it's using the same system for aggregates and volumes to be more flexible andjust use that technology the way it was not it was how you planned it like X years ago but it's a good chance to rearchitect and actually save based on that like use less heads lesssystems and so forth.>> Yeah. Well andthe familiarity that your staff has with it as well. I mean, if you've got storage prov or storage administrators and engineers today on dealing with all your on-rem stuff, when they get to the cloud, they're just going to it's actually going to be an enhancement to the tool set that they have on prem today is really what it's going to be. Um, they'll have the same tool set, but there's again Blue XP brings up just a completely different level of visibility to your enterprise. Single pane of glass. Um,yeah, so it fully integrated with Active Directory, which is obviously what we needed. Um, we use AVD, which is Azure virtual desktop. It's a pretty new offering. It's a couple years old in Azure andit's basically a like a competitor almost like Citrix VDI except it's Azure's flavor of it. They took Windows 10 and they made it multi session so you can actually have, you know, dozens of people signing into the same Windows 10 machine. Um, so that weactually host the profile discs for our Azure virtual desktops on our CVO system. Works great. Um, ease of use, again, we've talked about that. It'sjust it's if you're familiar with it today, the familiarity will carry to the cloud. It'sthe same view. Um, cost optimization, we talked about that. Tearing tiering is huge to us. Uh, we're sitting on just in ICT, we're sitting on about a two pabytes worth of data and 90% of it sitting in a blob storage because it'sbeen tiered due to not being used. And then you can set the policy by volume in your CVO system and you can tier it based on policy by volume. So it it's really flexible that way. It's not an all or nothing type of a setting. Um and as I indicated earlier, they've got different tiers of tiered storage. Now it used to be just what they would call hot tiers. Now they got a uh they actually have an archive tier. And so it really brings down the cost. So if you can afford for your users to have to wait a little while to get access to their data, you can archive it. And it'sstill accessible. It's just in an archive state. It's just slower to get. >> Yeah. And it's also viable because if you remember the early days of cloud, people used to say Glacier. Why does it call Glacier? Because you send it to an iceberg and you never know if you're going to get it back, right? So it's the same thing. And now both AWS and Azure have that very low tier which is way cheaper.>> It's way cheaper but potentially >> they assure you that within about two to three days and sometimes much less than that that's a maximum two to three days you can get the data back which is kind of>> yeah so if you're sitting on data like we do and I'm sure most organizations are you know we don't get told as storage people hey delete that we don't delete anything. It's again the pile just keeps getting larger and larger. So froma flexibility perspective, there's a couple types of um system deliverytypes. There's a single node which is just a single VM with storage hooked up to it and then there's an HA system that has load balancer sitting in front of two nodes with storage hooked onto them. And um weactually deployed our initial uh implementation using single nodes because the HA didn't even exist. That's how early we were into it. So when HA came, we flipped everything to HA. So all of our production systems are sitting on HA and we leveraged the baked in technology snapped uh snapshot and snap vault to snap mirror, excuse me, snap mirror, snap vault to replicate our HA prod systems to a single DR node in our DR region. So it helps keep cost down. Users aren't accessing the DR system at all unless we have obviously have a DR. >> Yeah. Butthere's a little more to it than just specific figuring out cost because you have single you have HA you have multiple regions and let's say Azure is picking up a new region suddenly there's a new technology there you can potentially employ it very easily until they roll it into other some of the other regions but another thing that you can do very easily with that is bursting right so you have a VM and suddenly uh you need to move many more users into that one so it's very easy to potentially shut it down and do a reboot And in that reboot process in the boot loop you can actually say give me a bigger VM right so I want more capacity I want more capabilities that is flexible it's not just go and buy a new head for a controller and see what you can do with that well that's flexibility from ondemand storage basically I mean you need it you can get it you don't have likejust he just said you don't have to buy anything you don't have to PO it it's just click a button and you got more storage. Um I stated this earlier, managetheenvironment from a single pane of glass. That's a big thing. I mean when people are looking at their storage, that'salways been in my history, you know, just trying to understand what you got where has always been the challenge. And withBlue XP, you join a system to the management plane and it you can see everything and it rolls it all up and it aggregates it. I'm going to show you some of that in screens going forward here in a minute. Um, as Yarn said earlier, you can replicate between nodes by dragging and drop and literally grab a cloud, drop it over and it fires up a wizard and you can actually select in the wizard, you know, how big you want thewhere you want it to go, what you want to call the aggregate, if you wanted to create a new aggregate or volume, you can the replication um relationship, you know, how often it syncs. Um, yeah, but >> but not last and not least, you can actually customize lots of things. So if you want to use it, Blue XP is essentially one can argue that it's a glorified example of API usage. Everything that you see in blue XP is fully API at the back end, right? So we use our own APIs for that. Which means that if you want to start using Terraform for example or APIs to set up, you know, take an unmanaged service and make it into a cookie cutter approach. That's going to be very easy using those APIs. We have telephone providers. We have unseable playbooks. We have quite a few other solutions for that. So if this is something which is interesting definitely we can talk about it. >> Yeah. So we use power apps to do a lot of that front end um using the APIs. So that if we want to spin up a new environment there's a just a dashboard that we've created. It's a power app in the portal and it literally uses the API togo out and do all the stuff on the storage that it needs to do. It's reallyrobust. really robust. Um and yeah we do we love the last one. We love tearing because of the amount of money that it saves us, but it allows us to have, you know, our consultants that need access to data and their request may be, you know, we need something from three years ago and I don't have to go to a tape. I don't have to go anywhere else. I can just say, you know, point them to where the archives at and they can go get it. It's on online and ready. And the concept of tearing means that the block is still available and attached. It's not a breadcrumb. It's not I backed it up and I'll bring it back. It's ifit's an ass and you let's say youdo an LS and you see the file it's notSMB. So you do a deal on the folder >> those days. Yeah. Yes. And you look at the list of files and you touch a file. It's there. But potentially it's cold. It might take a few more milliseconds. You know what? Even a second to bring it back, but at the end of the day it's there. It's available and it's attached to your system. >> So it's not a backup that you just dumped it into a tape and you need to figure it out where it is. And my consultants that I work for are veryclingy and very needy when it comes to their data and being able to access it. And I can assure you that if they if it was slow, I would hear about it and I don't hear about it. So it's >> then I don't hear about it. >> Yeah. It really it actually works. Yeah. >> Um so this is a um kind of an overview of my environment that I manage today. Um as I indicated earlier, we use HA which is indicated by this particular cloud. It says HA on it and it shows theline down here to a single node. This is the north our North American estate forICT and again like I said we use HA for prod and we use a single node for DR and we keep the snap um mirror relationships in region so that you know you're not snapping across the globe. So we use Azure pairs. So a Azure defines their data centers and their they pair them. So weuse that pairing topology. So, we're not outside the box um in all three regions. So, we've got North America, APAC, andAMIA. And um one of the other things that I wanted to point out when I put this slide in is with CVO, you can spin up asystem, and it's based on a Fremium, if that's what they actually call it, premium. And it's got it's a 500 gig max. Yeah. >> Yeah. 500 gig max. And what's really nice about it isit gives me theflexibility, you know, to test to play and there's no cost. I'm not paying NetApp touse it. Um all I'm paying for at the it would be the VM that's running it and the storage that I'd be using. >> So we a good place to mention licensing scheme in general. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Because you can enjoy nodebased licenses which gives you a you know you can put alicense on a node and say this is going to go all the way up to 368. But you can also buy capacity licenses which are you buy 500 terabytes of capacity for example but at the end of the day you can spin up as many instances as you want. So you can spin it I don't know 100 or five terabytes or 10 or 50. It'sthe same thing. It's what do you want to manage and what are your needs. So that's flexible enough. And fremium is essentially just another layer in this because you know if you're not going to grow in if it's a dev test environment and it's small enough to warrant a premium you can get under 500 gigabytes and it's not going to grow then it's just free and look at Rosa how many are those >> we got three >> so you have three out of 11 which he's not paying for but he's using them and he's using them all the time there's no time limit there's no feature limit there's nothing ifthis is good for you just use it and we do see all kinds of examples why people need that flexibility and then we just answered that in a way that calling because it was a plugin for a couple of customers and then we said you know what let's make a feature out of it. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So wehad this environment over here is a training lab. It's actually you know it'sjust for training that's all it's used for and we got AVD running on it and you know again there's no cost to it other than the VM and the storage that's being used. this particular system is being used by a government that I won't mention in Southeast Asia. Um the it's going to be used by them. Webuilt out the platform, built out the solution and as soon as they've tested it and they're happy with it, then it'll go from premium to an actual payBut it yeah, I mean it gives us the ability to set everything up and again there's no cost. Um so all the native backup functionality is built into the platform as Yarns pointed out. You got your snapshots, your snap mirror, and your snap vault and um they just work like they do on the on-rem systems. It's the same technology. Yeah. same technology. Yeah. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> There are regulations on there. >> Um I don't know that much about South. >> So what we'll do is depending on those requirements. So we a lot of the like at the European Union as an example that's a big right the Germans and the French they all want their data and the British all want their data to be in their certain places but as part of the EU they have agreed that there's specific Azure regions that we can put our data in andit remains compliant and so that's a big deal when we're setting up environments and trying to figure out where we're going to put stuff is we have to that have to take that into account. Um, we have some other systems that aren't shown here yet that are in Canada because we've got a client in Canada that has a hard fast we've your data our data has got to stay in Canada. Well, again with the Azure backbone and the whole Azure network, the way it's connected, it's easy for us to expand into one of their data centers. And literally, I can spin up as long as I have a connection, I can spin up a CVO system ina Canadian data center in 15 minutes. Soup to nuts. And by the way, one important notice is that you're seeing stuff here. This is the control plane. So while Blue XP knows where your stuff is, we don't know what's inside it. So there's no access. We don't have direct access to the data in any way. It's governed by you and well the customer right the users and everything. The only what we know is we can and if we'll mention I don't know if we'll have much time to talk about cloud sync because it's in the next slide but we'll probably dump it and just say a couple of words but we can control some of the control plane but not the we don't do the data plane. So a foreign government if you spin it in the right region the their data is there the connector doesn't hold anything. No >> the conneto aswhat says is stateless. You can destroy a connector and say, "Okay, I'm creating a new one." Just discover your data estate and you're good to go. >> And you can have multiple connectors managing the same CVO system because it's not really it's stateless. It's anytime you make a change or want to do something on a specific system, you click it and it literally goes and gets the data real live real time. It's and like you said, if you delete thecloud manager or theblue XP box, you can spin up another one. We're actually in the process of deploying three new blue XP environments. And the reason for it isbecause we've expanded ineach of these regions and the amount of time our connector currently sits in AMIA. And so when I'm managing the environment, it'sgoing to all these different devices across the entire globe. And so there's a noticeable delay as a administrator when you're administrating thoseenvironments. So >> So instead one of pane of glass, he's going to build multiple panes of glass relevant to the regions or the geo that he need. So, I'm going to have one in each region and then I'm going to keep the top one so I can still see everything top down and use the in regions to manage the devices more daily and in and out at the top level right there. So, I zoomed in on one of the systems that we have in our environment. This happens to be the HA system in our AMIA region. And I just wanted to point out some information. This is literally just one click on a on the cloud and it brings up this panel. this panel has evolved sinceI started using this platform and it's I mean that the amount of data you can get in onedashboard was that was pretty important to me and Italked to Yarn and his crew a lot about those kinds of things as a consumer of things that I wanted to see when I clicked on a node so that wecould easily understand what you were looking at and so you know you've got your storage usage your aggregates your volumes the number of replications Um all storage in Azure is encrypted at rest. Microsoft does it for you. So you don't even have to manage encryption in this environment. So if you've got a requirement on prem to encrypt your data, you don't have to do that up here. They do it for you. Or you can do you can get m you can do your own encryption. You can manage the keys and all that if you want to. We choose not to do that. It's just easier this way. But it gives you a breakdown of you know the HA status if it's healthy. Um tells you the version that you know you're running and what you can go up to. Um there's a timeline by node, there's a timeline at the top level and then you can drill into the timeline andthe timeline gives you basically it's like a activity log of the administrative side of things. So if you create an aggregate, you know, changing the size of a volume, all that stuff, you can go to the timeline and actually see who did it and when they did it. Um let's see what other stuff is good here. The storage efficiency, you know, that'shuge. I mean 174 to one. Now that takes snapshots into account, but it's still a hugeefficiency and that's you know that'sone of the reasons that we're >> you didn't give a time limit. >> Oh, I got to move. Okay, sorry guys. >> We need to rush a bit. >> All right, clouds sync. So, asYarn touched on, we use CloudSync to populate most of our systems from our on-prem systems. And the reason for it isbecause um we wanted the uh the ability to line up nodes so you can have worker nodes and you can scale those worker nodes out. And I mean it literally can crush your WAN circuit if you wanted to. We did. We actually got >> essentially an agnostic file copier mover, right? So you can use it and it's very agnostic. So I can move data from let's say EFS to uh to a system which is based on I don't know Azure files potentially. Okay. So I can do all kinds of shenanigans in a way andmove data wacky ways. If you've not seen cloudsync you should see get into a session and see one because it literally you can it's good for most of your use cases some or less but we can talk about that but >> so snap center I mentioned that earlier we you know we're using SQL um with ice skuzzi you can actually run ice sky out of the cloud volumes on tap system in Azureumsoas stated it was exactly what we were looking for it gave us what we needed the flexibility the cost the ability thatit didn't require to you know a full rekit and a retrain of our staff. Everybody could just, you know, pick it up and start using it. So, it was really and we were using, you know, tried andrude technologies that we all know from that app work. Um, and as stated, it comes with all the licenses that you need. Uh, need. Uh, need. Uh, yeah, just a simple tool. >> Thank you, Rob. >> So, I I'll try to wrap it up. Sorry. andwe talked about quite a few of the things and this is a big slide and if we had a little bit more time I may have talked about through some of some more of those bullets but I did choose to present this slide versus the previous one because it shows you the depth of things that we do. So essentially blue XP is a platform that can cater to quite a few kinds of users. So you have the rod and you have the architects and you have the storage admins and security admins and all kinds of other people. some people in finance that just want to see how many how much is it's costing them. There are some cost stream that you can actually see how much you're saving and how much it's going to cost you but because you might want to consider other solutions. Hopefully not but obviously that'sthe case. uh there's an API layer as I mentioned there's everything which we do on the back end side and we determine how you can deploy the connectors thenode itself that manages the blue XP and with that said you get all that stuff built in so it handles your storage it gives you health view of all of your environment it allows you to mobilize things and move things around as much as you need and obviously govern everything through some other uh solution so Ithink this is a good slide that gives you some kind of a overlay of what blue XP is and what why it is a platform and what it is going and where it is more importantly where it is going today and if I'm mentioning that obviously I'll summarizeuh but before I do the summary I'll put this one here so in case someone want to take a quick picture all of those sessions are still available I actually went ahead and checked myself so you can catch any one of those um most of them are focused on blue XP or CVO highly recommendedum if I can recommend or point at one or two if you have on-prem stuff managing your onremise storage with blue net blue XP is actually kind of nice by the way some of these are very short sessions like 20 minutes sorry Okay. >> So you can whether you can use blue XP on a KVM. So yes, you can run the connector on or ona on a onsuch a machine butyou cannot butthere is a need toaccess the cloud in a way right dark site. Awesome. So for dark site there is a session for this and I would recommend it. It's a 20 minute session to this one the top one 1545 because we have several modes for deployments for blue XP. You have an allout like Rod is doing cloud version. You have something which we call a restricted which has some of the cloud but it is restricted. It doesn't go to the SAS. It doesn't have the SAS layer and few of the other things are actually cut off and you have a dark site. Okay. So I would recommend this. It's a quick session. I think it's Rick Chris I don't know if it's Chris Fox or Omar one of them. Uh it's a good one. I recommend it in a short one very short. Check when it's available. It's 20 minutes and it's definitely worth your time. Um if you want to learn more you have some QR codes that I put here if you want to take a picture and then review them later on. That's fine. Uh on discover maybe test drive blue XP. So learn more. It's just easier than just URLs because you have to type them. So, and I'm thanking Kathy for doing this. It's not my job, but I was very happy that she did so I could steal this borrowthis from her presentation. Thank you, Kathy. And also this one, another picture um how to experience new XP and all the technical documentation. So, if you want to take this picture as well, that would be useful. But again, deployment modes 1545 that's a great session that's going to be. So without further ado, just to summarize, first of all, thank you for coming. Thank you. Weenjoyed this. Uh I like being with Rod, so that's a great opportunity for us and we don't meet very frequently. As I said, I'm from Tel Aviv. He's from Washington State.>> Um so hopefully you learn a little bit more about what is cloud volume on. You learn a little bit more about Blue XP and its applicability. And we wanted to give you a taste of a real customer that is using it extendedly, kicking its tires>> and kicking us sometimes in the process as well. We have to say that as well, butit'sin a good way.>> And I'll say without question, I said this in my session yesterday, if there's anything that we have problems with from a issues, the system doesn't do what it's supposed to or something's not working right, NetApp, they step up and they fix it. So, I mean, it's that's the same story you'll probably hear with stuff on prem. It's the same. It's the same in the cloud. It there's just they do they fix it. Thank you.>> So,and uh and that's it. Ifyou want to track and see some more information. So, um some options to see here. We now have a discordapparently. Funny, but uh that's okay. Yeah, I didn't know about this code until like twoyears ago when my son started using it. But yeah, anyway. So uh sorry just we're a little bit over time but wecan stay for a few minutes for questions if anyone has it but if not very much thank you very much for joining us and thank you for your time and hopefully you enjoy insight. There's a party tonight and tomorrow's another full day. Thank you very much guys.