When you live at the intersection of hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined storage, playing nice with the neighbors on both sides of the street is crucial. For Nutanix Inc., it’s a test of successfully shifting its product portfolio entirely to software services while balancing relations with hardware appliance suppliers.

Strengthening its partnership with backup and recovery software provider Veeam Software Inc., Nutanix has launched a fresh service for preserving data across multicloud environments. Dubbed Nutanix Mine, the new service adds better integrated backups for primary workloads.

Ken Ringdahl (pictured, left), vice president of global alliance architecture at Veeam, and Mark Nijmeijer (pictured, right), director of product management and data protection at Nutanix, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT event in Anaheim, California. They discussed the details of Nutanix Mine, how it navigates the choppy waters of ransomware, and what customers can expect from the ongoing partnership (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: One of the big announcements today is Nutanix Mine. What brings Nutanix and Veeam together to create Nutanix Mine?

Ringdahl: We brought a product to market together last year called Veeam Availability for Nutanix, which added support for primary workloads, but we hadn’t been working together on the secondary side where we land our backups, and … we really want to provide that seamless experience, a turnkey experience for our customers, so we started talking together. And we started brainstorming, and it became very clear … what we could deliver to our customers. And it became obvious that we should bring this together.

Knight: What were the problems you were trying to solve here? What were the issues you were hearing from customers?

Nijmeijer: When we talked to customers, we got a lot of complaints that they were voicing about the complexity in their backup infrastructures. Nutanix is known for providing simplicity for the primary infrastructures and for reducing complexity that you typically have in your feature architecture. Nutanix Mine will provide the same amount of simplicity for your backup infrastructure — a hyperconverged solution. That includes the Veeam software to provide data protection services for your data center.

Furrier: With multicloud and private cloud and hybrid, what changes? What’s changing in the customers’ minds right now? They got their own premises, but operationally, it feels like cloud, so how does this affect the DR piece?

Ringdahl: When we talk to our customers on how they’re protecting their data, we hear from a lot of them that want to leverage the cloud, and I think the cloud has gone through an evolution. It’s just like anything else out there. It can do all these things. And then people come back to reality, and what we see a lot of our customers doing is using the cloud for long-term data retention and using it as a secondary DR site.

We’re especially seeing this among large customers that have two physical data centers, so now what we’re seeing is a lot of customers that have one primary data center, but they’re leveraging the cloud as their DR site. They’re moving their data there with our recovery capabilities. You can get a cloud workload recovered in a disaster scenario quite rapidly, and that’s been a major change over the last couple years.

Knight: Why did you choose each other? What was the courtship like, and how did the relationship evolve?

Nijmeijer: If you look at Veeam and Nutanix, we really focus on quality and providing simplicity for our customers. That is something that was very apparent from the beginning. We have the same viewpoints and the same mantras around simplicity and providing quality. Both of our NPS scores are the highest in the industry. That is unheard of, so it was very natural, these companies coming together and providing value together.

Furrier: I need to ask you about ransomware. It really highlights the data protection scenario. What’s your guys’ view of the whole ransomware thing?

Ringdahl: We hear this a lot from customers … who come to us, unfortunately, after the fact. These ransomware folks are building these ransomware attacks. They’re very intelligent. They’ve gotten extremely intelligent in how they move from one system to another, and they even hide out, so you eliminate a ransomware attack and that thing can come right back. You restore a backup that was a month old, and it’s sitting and waiting.

Having a solution that can test your backups before you put them in production, having an air gap, having some mutability on some of your backup data — these things are all things that we talk to our customers about.

Knight: So, what are the next steps of this alliance? Where do you go from here?

Nijmeijer: We just finished a round of beta testing. We are going to be maniacally focused on the first hundred customers. Really understanding how they are going to put Nutanix Mine into their data centers. How they’re going to use it to protect their workloads and applications. From then on, we have a lot of plans — plans to build an even tighter integration from a management perspective, but also from a data fabric perspective.

There are lots of interesting areas that we’ve been brainstorming on, whiteboarding and so on that you will see coming out in the next few versions of the product.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE