>> ANNOUNCER: Live from
Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by Vmware
and its ecosystem partner. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman
here with John Troyer and excited to welcome back to the program Chris Wahl, who's the Chief
Technologist at Rubrik. Chris, thanks for joining us. >> Oh, my pleasure. It's my first VMworld CUBE
appearance so I'm super stoked. >> Yeah, we're pretty excited
that you hang out with, you know, just a couple of
geeks as opposed to, what's it Kevin Durant and Ice Cube. Is this a technology conference or Did you and Bipple work for some Hollywood big time company? >> It's funny you say that,
they'll be more tomorrow. So I'll allude to that. But ideally, why not hang
out with some cool folks. I mean I live in Oakland. Hip Hop needs to be represented and the Golden State Warriors. >> It's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to the party. I know there will be huge lines. When Katie comes to throw
down with a bunch of people. So looking forward to those videos. So we've been looking at
Rubrik since, you know, came out of stealth. I got to interview Bipple,
you know, really early on, so we've been watching. What you're on like the
4.0 release now right? How long has that taken
and you know why don't you bring us up to speed with
what's going on with Rubrik. >> Yeah, it's our ninth,
our ninth major release over basically eight quarters. And along with that, we've
announced we've hit like a 150 million dollar run
rate that we've included when we started it was all
about VMWare, doing back-ups providing those back-ups a place to land, meaning object store or AWS S3. And now it's, we protect
Hyper-V, Acropolis from Nutanix, obviously the VMWare Suite, we can do archive to Azure, we can do, there's like 30 some-odd integration points. With various storage vendors,
archive vendors, public cloud, etcetera. And the ulta release which is
4.0, just really extends that because now, not only
can we provide backups and recovery and archive,
which is kind of our bread and butter. But you can archive that
to public cloud and now you can start running those workloads. Right, so what we call a
cloud on, I can take either on demand or archive data
that's been sent to S3, and I can start building
virtual machines, like I said on demand. I can take the AMI,
put it in EC2 and start running it right now. And I start taking advantage
of the services and it's a backup product. Like, that's what always
kind of blows my mind. This isn't, that's not the use case, it's one thing that we unlock
from backup to archive data >> One of the challenges
I usually see out there, is that people are like,
oh Rubrik, you know they do backups for VMWare, how do you, you know, you're very much involved
in educating and getting out there and telling people about it, how do you get over the, oh
wait you heard what we were doing six months ago or
six weeks ago, and now we're doing so much more. So how do you stay up with that? >> It's tough to keep up
obviously, because every quarter we basically have either
some kind of major or a dot release that comes out. I mean realistically, I
set the table a little bit differently, I say, what are you looking to do? What are the outcomes that
you're trying to drive? Simplicity's a huge one
because everyone's dealing with I have a backup storage vendor
and I have a storage vendor, and I have tape vendor, and
all this other hodge podge things that they're dealing with. They're looking to save money,
but ultimately they're trying to automate, start leveraging the cloud. Start really like, taking
the headache out of providing something that's very necessary. And when I start talking about
the services they can add, beyond that, because it's not just
about taking a backup, leaving it in some rotting
archive for 10 years, or whatever, it's really what can I do
with the data once I have this duplicated and
compressed, kind of pool, that I can start drawing from. And that's where people start
to, their mind gets blown a little bit. Now that the individual
features and check boxes sets, it is what it is, you know,
like if you happen to need Hyper-V or Acropolis or whatever,
it's really just where you are on that journey to start
taking advantage of this data. And I think that's where people
start to get really excited and we start white boarding
and nerding out a little bit. >> Well Chris, so don't
keep us in suspense, what kinds of things
can you do once you have a copy of this data? It's still, it's all live, it's either on solid state or spinning disk
or in the cloud somewhere. That's very different than
just putting it on tape, so what do I do now, that
I have all this data pool? >> So probably the most
common use case is, I have VBC and a security group in Amazon. That exists today. I'm archiving to S3 in
some way, shape, or form. Either IA or whatever
flavor vessel you want. And then you're thinking, well
I have these applications, what else can I do with them? What if I put it to a query
service or a relational data base service, or what if I sped up 10
different copies because I need to for lode testing
or some type of testing. I mean it all falls under
the funnel of dev test, but I hate just capping it
that way, because I think it's unimaginative. Realistically, we're saying
here you have this giant pile of compute, that you're
already leveraging the storage part of it, you the
object store that is S3. What if you could unlock
all the other services with no heavy lift? And the workload is
actually built as an AMI. Right, so an ami, it's
actually running an EC2, so there's no, you don't
necessarily have to extend the Hyper Visor layer
or anything like that. And it's essentially S3 questions, from the product perspective. It's you know, what
security group, BCP, and shape of the format you want it to be. Like large, small, Xlarge, et cetera. That's it. So think about unlocking
cloud potentials for less technical people or
people that are dipping their toe in a public cloud. It really unlocks that
ability and we control the data plane across it. >> Just one thing on that,
because it's interesting, dev tests a lot of times, used
to get shoved to the back. And it was like, oh you can
run on that old gear, you know you don't have any money for it. We've actually found that
it can increase, kind of the companies agility and
development is a big part of creating big cool things
out of a company, so you don't under sell what
improving dev tests can do. So did you have some customer
stories or great things that customers have done with
what this capability has. >> Yeah, but to be fair,
at first when I saw that we were going to start,
basically taking VMWare backups and pushing that in archive
and then turning those into EC2 instances of any shape or quantity. I was like, that's kind of
crazy, who has really wanted that Then I started talking to customers and it was a huge request. And a lot of times, my architectural
background would think, lift and shift, oh no,
don't necessarily do that. I'm not a huge fan of that process. But while that is certainly
something you can do, what they're really looking
to do is, well, I have this binary package or application
suite that's running on Elk Stack or some Linux
distro, or whatever, and I can't do anything with that because it's in production and
it's making me money, but I'd really like to see
what could be done with that? Or potentially can I just
eliminate it completely and turn it into a service. And so I've got some customers
that completely what they're doing, they're archiving already and what they have the product doing is every time a new snapshot is taken and is sent to the cloud,
it builds automatically that EC2 instance, and it starts running it. So they have a collection
of various state points that they can start playing with. The actual backup is immutable,
but then they're saying, alright, what if exactly what
I kind of alluded to a little, what if I start using a
native service in the cloud. Or potentially just discard
that workload completely. And start turning it into a service, or refactor it, re platform it et cetera. And they're not having to
provision, usually you have to buy infrastructure to do that. Like you're talking about the
waterfall of Chinese stuff, that turns into dev
stuff three years later. They don't have to do
that, they can literally start taking advantage
of this cloud resource. Run it for an hour or so,
because devs are great at CDIC pipelines, let's just
automate the whole stack, let's answer our question
by running queries through jenkins or something like that. And then throw it away and
it cost a couple of bucks. I think that's pretty huge. >> Well Chris, can you also
use this capability for DR, for disaster recovery? Can you re hydrate your
AMI's up there if everything goes South in your data center? >> Absolutely. I mean it's a journey
and this is for dot zero. So I'm not going to wave my hands
and say that it's an amazing DR solution. But the third kind of use
case that we highlight with our product is that absolutely. You can take the work loads
either as a planned event, and say I'm actually
putting it here and this is a permanent thing. Or an unplanned event,
which is what we all are trying to avoid. Where you're running the
work loads in the cloud, for some deterministic period of time, and either the application
layer or the file system layer, or even, like a data base layer, you're then protecting it,
using our cloud cluster technology, which is Rubrik
running in the cloud. Right there, it has access
to S3 and EC2, you know, adjacently, there is not
net fee and then you start protecting that and sending
the data the other way. Because Rubriks software
can talk to any other Rubrik's software. We don't care what format
or package it's in. In the future we'd like
to add more to that. I don't want to over
sell it, but certainly that's the journey. >> Chris tell us about how
your customers are feeling about the cloud in general. You know you've lived with
the VM community for a lot of years, like many of us,
and that journey to cloud and you know, what is
Hybrid and multi-cloud mean to them, and you know, what you've been seeing at
Rubrik over the last year. >> Yeah it's ahh, everybody
has a different definition between hybrid, public, private-- >> Stu: Every customer I
ever talked to will have a different answer to that. >> I just say multi cloud,
because it feels the most safe And the technically correct
version of that definition. It's certainly something that,
everyone's looking to do. I think kind of the I want to build a private cloud phase of the journey is somewhat expired in some cases. >> Stu: Did you see Pat's
keynote this morning? >> Yeah, the I want to build a
private cloud using open stack and you know, build all my widgets. I feel that era of marketing
or whatnot, that was kind of like 2008 or 2010. So that kind of era of
marketing message has died a little bit. It's really just more
I have on prem stuff, I'm trying to modernize
it, using hyper-converge, or using software to find X,
you know, networking et cetera But ultimately I have to
start leveraging the places where my paths, my iya's and my
sas are going to start running. How do I then cobble all that together. I mean at the sea level,
I need visibility, I need control, I need to
make executable decisions. That are financially impactful. And so having something they
can look across to those different ecosystems, and
give you actionable data, like here's where it's running,
here's where it could run, you know, it's all still
just a business decision, based on SLA. It's powerful. But then as you go kind
of down message for maybe a director or
someone's who's managing IT, that's really, someone's
breathing down their neck, saying, we've got to have a strategy. But they're technically savvy, they don't want to just
put stuff in the cloud and get that huge bill. Then they have to like
explain that as well. So it kind of sits in a nice
place where we can protect the modern apps, or kind of,
I guess you can call them, modern slash legacy in the data center. But also start providing
protection at a landing pad for the cloud native to
use as an over watch term The stuff that's built
for cloud that runs there, that's distributed and very
sensitive to the fact that it charges per iota of
use at the same time. >> Well Chris, originally Rubrik
was deploying to customers as an appliance, right? So can you talk a little
bit about that, right, you have many different options
now, the customer, right? You can get open source, you
can get commercial software, or you can get appliances,
you can get SAS, and now it sounds like you're,
there's also a piece that can run in the cloud, right? That it's not just a box that
sits in a did center somewhere So can you talk about, again,
what do customers want? What's the advantage of some
of those different deployment mechanisms, what do you see? >> I'm not saying this
as a stalling tactic, but I love that question. Because yes, when we started
it made sense, build a turnkey appliance, make
sure that it's simple. Like in deployment, we used
to say it can deploy in an hour and that includes the
time to take it out of the box and that only goes so far
because that's one use case. So certainly, for the first
year or so, the product that was where we were driving it, as a
scale out node based solution then we added Rubrik edge
as a virtual appliance. And really it was meant to,
I have a data center and I'm covering those remote
offices, type use cases. And we required that folks
kind of tether the two, because it's a single node that's
really just a suggesting data and bringing it back using policy. Then we introduced cloud cluster in 3.2 which is a couple of releases ago. And that allows you to
literally build a four plus node cluster as your AWS, basically
you give us your account info and we share the EMI with you
or the VM in case of Azure and then you can just build it, right? And that's totally independent, like you can just be a customer. We have a couple of
customers that are public, that's all they do, they
deploy cloud cluster they backup things in that environment. And then they replicate or
archive to various clouds or various regions within clouds. And there's no requirement
to buy the appliance because that would be kind of no bueno to do that. >> Sure. >> So right, there's various
packages or we have the idea now where you can bring your
own hardware to the table. And we'll sell you the software, so like Lenovo and Cisco and things like that. It can be your choice
based on the relationships you have. >> Wow Chris your teams are gone a
lot, not just your personal team but the Rubrik team I walked by the booth and
wait, I saw five more people that I know from various companies. Talk about the growth of
like, you know Rubrik. You joined a year ago and it
felt like a small company then. Now you guys are there, I
get the report from this financial analyst firms and like, have you seen the latest unicorn, Rubrik and I'm like, Rubrik, I know those guys. And gals. So yeah absolutely, talk about
the growth of the company. What's the company hiring for? Tell us a little bit
about the culture inside. >> Sure, I mean, it's actually
been a little over two years now that I've been there,
it's kind of flying. I was in the first 50
hires for the company. So at the time I felt like
the FNG, but I guess now, I'm kind like the old, old man. I think we're approaching
or have crossed the 500 employee threshold and we're talking eight quarters essentially. A lot of investment,
across the world, right, so we decided very early on to
invest in Europe as a market. We had offices in Utruck
in the Netherlands. And in London, the UK, we've
got a bunch of engineering folks in India. So we've got two different
engineering teams. As well as, we have an
excellent, center of excellence, I think in Kansas City. So there's a whole bunch
of different roots that we're planting as a company. As well as a global kind
of effort to make sales, support, product, engineering,
marketing obviously, something that scales everywhere. It's not like all the
engineers are in Palo Alto and Silicone Valley and
everyone else is just in sales. But we're kind of driving
across everywhere. My team went from one to six. Over the last eight or nine months. So everything is growing. Which I guess is good. >> As part of that you also
moved to Silicone Valley and so how does it compare to the TV show. >> Chris: It's in Oakland. >> Well it's close enough
to Silicone Valley. >> It's Silicone Valley adjacent. I will say I used to visit
all the time, you know. For various events and things like that. Or for VM World or whatnot. I always got the impression
that I liked being there for about a week and then I
wanted to leave before I really started drinking
the kool aid a little heavily so it's nice being just
slightly on the east bay area. At the same time, I go
to events and things now. More as a local and it's kind of awesome to hear oh I invented whatever technology, I invented bootstrap or
MPM or something like that. And they're just available to chat with. I tried it at that the, the
sunscreen song, where he says, you know, move to
california, but leave before you turn soft. So at some point I might have to go back to Texas or something to just to keep the scaley rigidity to my persona intact. >> Yeah, so you missed the barbecue? >> Well I don't know if
you saw Franklin's barbecue actually burned down
during the hurricane, so. >> No >> Yeah, if you're a, a
huge barbecue fan in Austin, weep a tear, it might be a
bad mojo for a little bit. >> Wow. Alright, we were alluding
at the very beginning of the interview, you've got some VIP guests, we don't talk too much about,
like, oh we're doing this tomorrow and everything, but you got some cool activities, the all stars, you know some of the things. Give us a little viewpoint,
what's the goal coming into VM World this year
and what are some of the cool things that you're
team and the extended team are doing. >> Yeah, so kind of more
on the nerdy fun side, we've actually built up, one of my team, Rebecca Fitzhughes build out
this V all stars card deck so we picked a bunch of infuencers, and people that, you know
friends and family kind of thing built them some trading cards
and based on what you turn in you can win prizes and things like that. It was just a lot of other
vendors have done things that I really respect. Like Solid Fire has the
socks and the cards against humanity as an example. I wanted to do something
similar and Rebecca had a great idea. She executed on that. Beyond that though, we obviously
have Ice Cube coming in. He's going to be partying at
the Marquis on Tuesday evening so he'll be, he'll be hanging
around, you know the king of hip hop there. And on a more like fun, charitable note, we actually have Kevin
Durant coming in tomorrow. We are shooting hoops
for his charity fund. So everybody that sinks a
goal, or ahh, I'm obviously not a basket ball person, but whoever sinks the ball into the hoop gets two dollars donated
to his charity fund and you build it to win a
jersey and things like that. So kind of spreading it across
sports, music, and various digital transformation type things. To make sure that everyone who comes in, has a good time. VMWare's our roots, right? 1.0, the product was
focused on that environment. It's been my roots for a long time. And we want to pay that
back to the community. You can't forget where
you came from, right? >> Alright, Chris Wahl,
great to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us
sporting your Alta t-shirt your Rubrik... >> I'm very branded. >> John Troyer and I will
be back with lots more coverage here at VM World 2017, you're watching theCUBE.
