>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by Vmware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and Dave and I are at VMworld and this is day three for us. Two sets, Dave, 94 interviews over Monday, Tuesday, today, excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Brian Carmody, CTO of INFINIDAT. Hey Brian, good to see you. >> Hey guys, how are ya? >> And we also have from US Signal, Marc Creviere, principal systems engineer, one of your customers. Marc, nice to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> So day three, everyone has their voices, that's impressive. Lots of news, lots of buzz. I've heard that this is the biggest VMworld so far. I think we've heard upwards of 25,000? >> I think it's a little over 21, 22 maybe, yeah. >> More than last year. Brian, would love to get your take on VMworld, but let's start with the business overview. What's new at INFINIDAT? >> Oh, things are going great. So this past summer, or this summer, we surpassed four exobytes of customer deployments. >> Congratulations. >> Yeah, our customers just have an enormous amount of capacity deployed globally. In March, we launched our portfolio, so we announced four new products including our flagship F6212. It's our highest capacity, our fastest InfiniBox ever. It's on track to be the fastest selling model and it's specifically designed to handle the explosive growth that we're seeing from multi petabyte per rack requirements and it's all being driven by demand in the analytic space and also in the cloud and service provider spaces. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing here at VMworld, your customers' responses to some of the huge momentum that you just described? >> Right, I mean, what customers ask for is number one, they want us to kind of double down on the fundamentals, which is make the unit cost, the unit economics of storage, go down every quarter. The product has to get cheaper every quarter. The second is maintaining reliability levels, so all of our systems come with a seven nines SLAs with less than three seconds of down time per system per year. In service provider environments, that's incredibly important because their customers are entrusting them with their operations, but the biggest change that we're seeing over time is this nonlinear, insatiable growth for increases in capacity. When we brought InfiniBox to market in 2013, our largest configuration was a petabyte of capacity per rack. We now have configurations with 10 petabytes of effective capacity per rack and we have customers that are screaming at us, asking us to double and triple that density. If there's one thing that doesn't change from year to year, is that there's always an awesome vibe at VMware, and that demand for storing huge massive amounts of information only increases every year. >> It's a place for practitioners to gather, right? The great thing about VMworld is this event has been hardcore practitioners, IT folks, and they haven't lost that. Marc, let's turn it to you, I mean US Signal, what are you guys all about, what's your role there, and I really want to get into how you're using INFINIDAT technology. >> Absolutely, I'm a principal systems engineer in our cloud engineering department. US Signal is an IT services provider based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We've got a whole stack, we're network, co-location, data protection, infrastructure as a service, and disaster recovery, all as managed services. One thing that we're able to do, we actually have a fiber optic network that's about 14,000 route miles throughout the Midwest, so we're able to deliver a door to data center design, that's everything. As soon as that data leaves the customer premises, it never leaves our assets, which is a great thing we're able to deliver and we layer on top of that our data protection suites. We've had explosive growth in all these areas. That's one of the ways that INFINIDAT's really helped. We used to work in the challenges of managing hundreds of terabytes an hour on multi petabyte scale. Our infrastructure footprint has actually been doubling year over year, so it's matching what you're seeing as far as demand, I think we're matching that demand in our environment. It's not just data on an array, this is our customer's business, so we're really intensely focused on protecting that and delivering solutions and INFINIDAT's really helped us along that journey. >> We're going to get into that but the data center business is on fire. What do you see is the big growth drivers in your business? >> A lot of the drivers for us specifically is reduction of scope of PCI compliance and HIPPA compliance. Our entire offering is actually HIPPA and PCI compliant, so that's a big driver. We got a lot of traction in the financial and healthcare verticals. In organizations, you know, they've got initiative to get to the cloud. We're a very concierge level service. We help people get there whether it's into our cloud ideally or we even help people get to a hybrid approach, leveraging other partnerships as well. That's a big driver, and data protection. We're experts in disaster recovery and helping people not only have it in place but executing on the plan, testing the plan, because until you've tested it, you don't have a DR plan. >> You know Lisa, over the years I've had an opportunity to visit facilities of cloud service providers and I'd notice years ago, maybe it's even still this way in a lot of places, they had one of everything. They had a lot of diversity, a really heterogeneous environment, very hard to manage, a lot of stove pipes and so I'm interested in what led you to INFINIDAT. You got big platform, we just heard earlier that it can both do primary storage and data protection with the same fundamental architecture, so what was it about INFINIDAT that attracted you? Give us the before and after, if you would. >> Yeah, we'd made a pretty significant investment in another vendor's technology, and part of our role is determining cost and lead time as customer projects come in. We had a couple initiatives, one, reduce cost of course, two, reduce the wait time between when that request comes in and figuring how much is it going to cost, how long is it going to take to get in. One of the strongest areas that INFINIDAT was able to solve for us in that is that it's a known cost, the capacity's there. It's gone from a lot of variables on that to have an order come in, and they'll ask when can this be provisioned and I'll shoot an email back saying it's there, send the bill. >> Very cloud-like sort of model in terms of your customer's consumption. What has that meant for your business? >> It's allowed us to be a lot more agile. It's allowed us to be more competitive as far as executing on time frames and cost, as I just said. The relationship with INFINIDAT, I mean, we work with a lot of vendors that tell us here's the product, here's how to use it, whereas INFINIDAT, we really have a good dialogue of here's how we'd like to use it, can we make that work, and being involved in their product pipeline and really, not only being able to provide input but getting feedback on that input and in many cases, seeing it turn into actual product features. >> Is it a common theme that you hear amongst customers? How have you taken the US Signal input? Maybe you can give us some perspective on that. >> I think one of the ways that a lot of the incumbents whose businesses are evaporating and are being disrupted, a lot of places where they got in trouble is they thought okay, we're the 800 pound gorillas so we're now going to kind of decide what's happening in the market and how things should be and dictated that kind of ivory tower model of product management down into their customers. It turns out that if you're paying attention, your customers are way smarter than anybody in your business, because they're closer to where the rubber meets the road. We have what I think is a very successful program, we call it Social Product Management, where guys like US Signal get involved very early in the product development process. We come to them with ideas, hey, this is something we're thinking about building or this is a way we're thinking about modifying our API, and we bring prototypes and we have the kind of relationship where we can iterate on things starting with ideas all the way through to general availability, and the end result is we end up being able to leapfrog the incumbents who have those kind of traditional waterfall ivory tower models of innovation, and they end up with these impedance mismatches, where you're not really building the things that customers need for their next big challenge. >> That's why we're all here, right? We hear that at every event, and you do too, it's all about customers, giving them choice. At the end of the day though, you have to be able to, sounds like, Brian, what you guys have at INFINIDAT, is the symbiotic relationship with your customers who are helping to significantly influence the product development because that's who, it's the US Signals of the world who need to be using this technology so you're not creating it in a vacuum. Sounds like a very highly collaborative environment that is allowing you, it sounds like, to leapfrog your competition. >> It is, it's highly collaborative and it's really hard, I'm not going to lie, because if you go and you ask 50 different customers how we should do something, you're going to get 50 different answers, and that's why you need a really strong product management team to kind of be able to tease out what customers want versus what customers need and oftentimes what they need, they don't know yet because it's a little bit ahead of the curve, and that's where the art of the product management comes into play. >> Marc, I've known Brian for a while. You've briefed me many times, we've done a lot of interviews together. I want to test something that Brian has convinced me of, but I want to hear it from the customer. >> Sounds like trouble. >> Think about INFINIDAT. I hear all the time, simplicity, cost effective, but yet faster than Flash and a variety of use cases with the same architecture. I can use the system for both primary and secondary storage, and then the innovations that come along through with software I can roll back to serial number 001. Every system is able to take advantage of that. All true, has that been your experience? >> Absolutely, yeah, delivers on every one of those. >> Any deviation from those things, I mean come on, tell us the truth. >> No, no, we beat em up. One thing that's interesting about the service provider space is we don't necessarily know or control what the workload is. We know just anecdotally that we've got SQL, we know anecdotally that we've got Oracle and SAP in our environment, and the system stands up to all of it. I mean, it outperforms the platform that we came from by multitudes of degree. As an example, we've got previous platform, multi day preparation for an upgrade. We do 40 minutes a piece and we're done. We're off the phone, it's amazingly simple as compared to other platforms we've worked with. >> These guys, you go on the floor here, there's a lot of buzz, there's a lot of hype. These guys aren't a hype company. I've talked to dozens of your customers and have very similar stories, so I kind of already knew what the answer was. Kind of boring, but consistent. But were you nervous about working with a supplier that probably a lot of folks in your organization hadn't heard of? How'd you get through that? >> That was definitely a challenge early on. We had some people in the department that were very set in the mindset, like they knew what they wanted before the project started, right? Just rigorous testing and vetting and looking at the pedigree of Moshe, the founder of the company. There was a lot of trust put in what he's been able to do and seeing those progressions and yeah, it was a little bit of a leap of faith and we're absolutely glad we did it because it's been nothing but huge payoff. >> Yeah, guy who invented the modern storage business, I guess that helps, alright, good. >> Well Brian, you can't have anything more validating than the voice of a successful customer, so Marc, thanks so much for sharing what you're doing with INFINIDAT. Brian, thanks for stopping by and giving us an update. Sounds like we're going to be hearing some more great things coming from both of you guys in the near future. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks guys, thank you. >> Bye. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, we are at VMworld 2018, day three, stick around. We'll be back after a break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by vmware and it's ecosystem partner. (techno beat) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests we've had on a few times. Randy Arseneau, who's the CMO of Inifindat, and Bryan Carmody who's the CTO at Inifinidat. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, Stu, what's going on? >> Thanks, Stu, good to be here. >> Alright, so, it's Vmworld time again, a lot going on. We set, kind of a vibe of the show already. It's about the same attendance as last year, but the vibe feels good. Pat is actually hitting the stride on the keynote, talking about Amazon, talking about momentum that they have. You guys have had some announcements recently. Randy, why don't you start us off. Tell us about, you know, the update of Inifinidat, how many customers you've got, what can you share? >> So, thanks, Stu, thanks for having us again, it's great to, great to be back on theCube. So, yeah, we've, over the last few years, three and a half years that we've been shipping our product, we've been able to sustain a really good, consistent cadence of growth, and that's continued into this year. So, a few weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, we announced our most recent performance, financial performance. We're continuing to more than double each quarter year over year. We are profitable from a gap revenue perspective, which is kind of unheard of in our industry, so we think we're breaking the trend of a lot of the storage startups, and even some established storage players that are having a really difficult time making their financial and business model and go to market work. Ours is clearly working, we're generating revenue, we're growing our customer base. We now have over two exabytes of storage in service world wide. We figured out about 80-ish, 80 percent, plus or minus a couple of percentage points of that is running vmware. So, we think this is kind of an obvious place for us to be in terms of the affinities of our customer base. And about 50 percent of our systems are actually dedicated to vmware, so they're running huge vmware farms. So, the financial performance has continued to be really solid, we're bucking the trend in the industry in terms of being profitable, and continuing to grow the business at a really aggressive rate. Because the solution works, I mean it's not rocket science, right, we have a product. >> I hear you have trouble raising money if you're profitable, so that's challenging. Yeah, and congratulations on the momentum. The joke a few years ago have been Vmworld became storage world, and you know, we spent years talking about, oh it's, you know flash is there, and then the software to find data center. The only mention of like, storage that I really heard in the keynote this morning was Pat talking about "Oh, they've got about 10,000 customers running vsand." So, Bryan, a lot of waves going on, we've had a number of conversations about where you fit, bring us up to speed as to, you know, what are the conversations you're having with customers, you know, what are the important trends to them, and where your technology, how do you position yourselves there? >> Oh, sure, so I mean, I think from customers perspectives it's all just storage, they're all data stores, and the different architectures, and the different delivery models are, they don't really matter at the end of the day. What your CIO, which he cares about, is what is the acquisition cost, what's the operational cost? What's the performance that it delivers, the latency in through put? And what's the availability of the data store? And, you know, what we're seeing, especially with the software defined storage systems, and vsands, is they work, but they work for small capacities, when you try to scale them, what every customer, without exception, sees is that they add three dollars in server cost for every dollar in storage array cost avoidance. So, you know, these projects tend to not be very, they tend to be career limiting, you know, and that's why what we're hearing, especially at Wall Street, is that it's vscam, not vsand. >> Stu: Wow. >> Yeah, but for small workloads where, and environments where you're looking to get a, you have a single person who needs to do storage, and manage the hyper visors, it absolutely works. I think it's a, it's a killer robome and small business solution. >> Yeah, it's interesting, cos there's this growth of solutions that use storage, but they aren't in a position to storage, and vsands, and a lot of hyper conversions like that. >> I like the virtualization admin, I've got some app, I just want a management, I don't have to want a, you know, God, that storage stuff's hard. You know, so they'll kind of do that pieces, versus, you know, real storage, you know, like care about reliability. >> Go ask Pat what the average size of those customers are. Like, my grandmother is one of those customers, you know, she uses it. But, yeah, so I >> You come from a heavy technology family, though, so. >> Yes, exactly. She was the first vm certified person I probably know. So, clearly the part of the market that we're going after is very different from that. Our systems start at, well they get interesting at a petabyte of usable capacity. By far our most popular model is a petabyte and a half of effective capacity. Our largest system scales up to ten petabytes in a single system manage, in a single rack. So, these are big monster cloud scale vmware environments. That's where, you know, our customers are having awesome success. And you know, it's not just limited to vmware, though. You know, you can take the same system, the same skew, and you can use it to replace data domain systems for backup to disc. The largest splunk insulation in the world is running at one of the US, big US telecoms and is running the same skew that our customers are using for their big petabyte scale vmware environments. Analytics, which is probably the biggest growing thing, one area that Randy is working pretty heavily in, it's absolutely exploding. >> Yeah, it's, which is cool in a sense, because we've been, you know, and I kind of use the tongue in cheek term "accidental tourists." I mean, we sell this system into an incredibly wide range of workload environments, and enterprise environments. Which is why we have a really strong presence in every vertical, I mean we're strong in health care and life sciences, we're strong in financial services, we're strong in retail and manufacturing, we're strong in utilities, we're strong in cloud providers. And it's exactly because of the fact that the system is designed and architected expressly to be very flexible and very adaptable. So, we never shy away from the concept of general purpose storage, I mean that became very unfashionable about five or six years ago, when everything had to be hyper-specialized and fit for purpose. But, when we can walk into an environment, and as Bryan said, most of our customers tend to be fairly, you know, midsize and large enterprises, they don't have one particular type or class of workload, they've got 100. And they're running 100 different storage systems. So we can go in as a consolidation play and say "Look, let's take all of that vmware environment, all of that, you know, take your data domain and your backup protection environment, your analytic workload environments, and move them off of these disparate platforms onto this one, you know, very capable, very flexible system. They all peacefully coexist, they all perform phenomenally well. It's immensely easy. We have a customer presentation that's going to be talking about exactly how easy it is. We have another Cube session where another one of our customers is going to share the beauty of integration and orchestration automation using our API. So, we kind of have a large enterprise class, extremely flexible, fully composable storage system that you can really plugin anywhere. I mean, we've talked before about how in some environments, there might be one or two little fringe applications somewhere that require some weird configuration of flash, or you know, in memory database or something that's five terabytes, that's running on some strange system, and that's fine, like, we're happy to leave that there. We will go after the other 95 percent of the workloads in your environments and we'll take them all, and do so very happily. >> Yeah, it's interesting, we tracked kind of that wave of big data, and especially like hadoop, and I went to all of these shows and they'd be like "Oh, you know, hgfs, you know, don't put it on a storage array because it's too expensive!" And when you dug into it, it was, you know, a couple of servers sitting under somebody's desk. >> Right. >> So, it wasn't real storage, like you said, but it was cost, and it was there, but what I'm excited about is when I'm hearing about the new kind of analytics things. When you start talking about, you know, AI and machine learning, and everything like that, you've got to have, you've got real storage issues, and how are you attacking the price, and how are you architecting to be ready for those types of applications? >> Yeah, and to Bryan's point the telecoms we've got the one running the largest splunk environment of the world, we've got another that's running a huge elk environment, the architect presented at elasticon this year, that's all running on Inifinibox. So, again, we haven't specifically architected the solution necessarily for those, but our customers, you know, God bless 'em, bring it in, plug it in, try it, because it's so simple, there's really no downside to experimenting with it, and they discover "Wow, this actually works exceptionally well." >> Yeah, and I think if, if you kind of step back from specific workloads, analytics or vmware, or whatever, what customers for the next decade are asking for is pretty consistent. And it's pretty easy to understand. They want to be able to do sub-millisecond response times. They want to do very high multi-gigabyte per second, throughput. They want to do it over petabyte scale datacents, and they want to do it at a vastly lower cost per gigabyte than the kind of traditional enterprise storage products. And if you build that, they will come. And I think that's what we did, and I think it's a huge part of, you know, the success that our customers are having. And the momentum that kind of our company has right now, is just doing all of those things simultaneously. >> Alright, so, from a price standpoint, I mean, price and simplicity, kind of been the things that we've been beaten on for the storage industry. You know, what, how do you position that, you know, what is kind of the killer, you know, thing that makes the customers come to you and say, you know, "Wow, you guys are different and that's going to solve." >> You know, so, we unabashedly, in every business school, you know, whatever, they tell you "Don't sell on price, sell on value," and we have kind of been doing the opposite of that. Since day one, since day one. The first communication to a potential customer is we put a number out there. That number will be a tenth, on a cost per gig basis, of, you know, of what they're paying today. And it's a, it's something that nobody can say no to, it's a demonstration that we're really serious about what we're capable of doing. So, then that only works if you back it up, then, when the customer does an evaluation, and the bake offs, and the competitive stuff. You have to absolutely destroy everything else out there, or else you get pigeonholed as a tier two, a tier three. And I think a lot of the, a lot of the newer companies are kind of falling into that, where they're, they have traction, but they're really not getting into enterprise accounts, they're not getting life safety and mission critical workloads put on them. So, we unabashedly lead with price, and, you know, at the end of the day, every time you instantiate a cost function reduction, in storage, it makes new types of computing possible. You put that storage in the hands of developers, and they tell their management teams "Here's what we can do with this." We are trying to make storage less expensive. >> Yeah, and although, you know, you're not supposed to sell on price, you sell on value, the problem is nobody buys on value, so you still have to be price sensitive. And you have to have a solution that is economically feasible, and viable, and attractive. So, we've got a very, very attractive TCO structure and model that we've used in just about every of our major sales campaigns. And we have to monstroubly, significantly lower cost, not just of acquisition, but of ongoing operation. So, when you layer all those things together, you can sell to the pure technologists who love the kind of robustness and the feature richness of the capability, and where they can apply it, and how they can apply it, but it also has a very attractive financial story, so when you're selling it to the business owners and the kind of, you know, other constituencies, it's a story that everybody likes, so. >> Yeah, lot of people in the storage industry, it's always, you know, that next thing, flash was a wavy road for a while, you know, when I go talk to the storage geeks, it's the "Oh, nvme over fabric." It's going to dramatically change everything. >> Bryan: It is. >> What's your take? >> Oh, yeah, yeah, it's huge, it's huge. You know, it's always a catch up game between the network and the transport technologies, and then the storage media. So, you know, nvme over fabric's is huge, but you know, you have to use it the right way, and I think that it's not being used correctly by the marketers, you know, who are running you know. A lot of the storage companies, they're using it as a way to justify their pricing. They're using it as a way to make storage expensive. And it's kind of the, again, it's the opposite of our strategy. What every customer is demanding from their vendors, is "I need my storage next quarter to be less expensive than it is, this quarter next year needs to be cheaper than this year, how are you going to do that for me?" So, advanced technologies, like, nvme and nvme over fabrics, and optane and three d crosspoint, these things all have, they're incredibly strategic technologies. But, you have to use them the right way, you have to always keep an eye on the bottom line, and be very suspicious of technologists that are trying to make infrastructure more expensive, rather than less. >> Yeah, and I mean, it's always, it's not just the technology, it's the application, and I think a lot of vendors in our space have a tendency to focus exclusively on the technology, and how to build an architecture around it, or repurpose an existing architecture, more commonly, without really thinking about the application of that technology. Where is it going to be used, how is it going to be used, what's the cost structure have to look like, what's the use-case environment look like, what verticals am I going to sell it to, what's the channel ecosystem look like? They kind of tend to save that for the last, so they develop this whiz bang, you know, solution, which is again, typically, an aging architecture that maybe has some new foundational layers of technology or media built into it, without really thinking about the end game. So, that's one of the many things that I think Moshe Yanai does better than anybody, is he looks at the problem from the outside in. He meets with customers on a daily basis, I mean, he's kind of a maniac in terms of traveling around and meeting with customers. He has a phenomenal reputation, for obvious reasons, and he listens. He listens to their problems, he listens to what they confront and what they fight with every day, to kind of make a solution that works for them, and then he adapts that to his design ethos. Not, it's not the other way around. So, we don't develop something and then go try to force fit it into a market or into an environment. >> Yeah, last thing I wanted to ask you is; users coming to a show like this, they love to be able to hear from their peers, you've got a whole bunch of customers telling their stories, what are some of the key takeaways that, you know, peers talking to peers, that they're going to be hearing this week at the show? >> Yeah, so, there's, it's a lot of the same things we've been talking about here, you know. It's cost takeout, frankly, I mean, first and foremost, these are customers that are under tremendous cost pressure. They have used us as a consolidation platform to take costs out, but deliver a higher quality of service. We have, so we have a breakfast we organize, we've got a bunch of our customers. The other thing I love about our customers is they have a tendency to be kind of groupies, and I use that term you know, very favorably, because they're immensely loyal to the system, because it simply makes their life better and easier and allows them to focus on other tasks. So, they're talking about cost reduction and consolidation, they're talking about delivering higher performance. Very, very simply, they're talking about the ease of integration and orchestration and automation using our API. So, plugging our system in and just, it becomes a magnet for workloads. They bring it in for a particular project, and as other growth occurs, in insularly areas, it just gets moved on to the infinibox because it's incredibly easy, and it's a painless, seamless, frictionless process, so. >> Bryan, I'm going to give you a final word, takeaways for the show that you want people to have from Infinidat. >> Oh, I just, I really want everybody to have a great time, come by, check out the booth, we have an espresso machine, we'll talk a little bit about some of the computer science behind the system, and, but more than anything, I want everybody to have a really good time at the event. >> Well, great point, everybody, Vmworld, always a great community, lots of great conversations, everybody geeking out on the technology, and getting some caffeine to help them through what is a very long week. So, we're at the beginning of three days of live coverage here, double set. Thank you, Randy Arseneau, Bryan Carmody. >> Thanks, Stu, if you chroma key my shirt, just be gentle, that's all I ask, thank you. >> Alright, we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCube. (techno music)

it's the cue now here's your host stool minimun hi this is Stu miniman with Wikibon with a special presentation of the cube here at the ribbon cutting at infinite at new briefing center in Waltham Massachusetts excited to have with me Brian Carmody who is the CTO of infinite at Brian thanks for joining me hey Stuart how you doing I'm doing great so we've talked to some of your team here got on the inside so here we're outside but we're going to be digging into some of the innards of what's going on in the industry so yeah Brian you know not much has been going on in the storage industry let me see in the last month we had the you know finalization of the largest kind of acquisition / merger in the industry of technology with Dell buying EMC and Newt annex just IP ode so you know when we've got the CTO we always want to kind of dig in you know what what's in your head what what are the big kind of mega trends that you're seeing and how's that impact what you're doing yeah so this was obviously it's been a crazy era of innovation for us I would even just looking back at the past two years you know 2016 or let's say 2015 was kind of the year that storage got fast it was the year that NAND flash at the knee of the adoption curve and every marketing person everywhere was hashtag AFA and then 2016 was kind of the year we think that storage got commoditized this was when software-defined in hyper converged technologies kind of hit the knee of the adoption curve it was capped just like 2015 was capped by the pure IPO 2016 was capped by the mechanics IPO telling is a really interesting question of what comes next like what's the next mountain that we're going to climb as an industry and we're hearing really interesting things from customers about what their priorities and what their challenges are so first off going into 2017 one of the really interesting phenomenon is that the requirements from traditional enterprise let's say a CTO of a bank that's building a next-generation data center versus a mega cloud provider those requirements are starting to converge so this idea that the cloud is one thing an enterprise is something else I think we're starting to kind of move past that obviously there's a huge trend still going on for compute heavy workloads to move off premise into into public clouds and kind of a net flow of storage heavy workloads tend to move on premise but I think we're at the point now where we're kind of reaching an equilibrium point between those two so that is certainly one trend another thing that we're hearing very much about is the the rise of new KPIs for measuring IT systems acquisition cost is still a big piece of the equation but new technologies are new new new metrics like power space and cooling are becoming very critically important because with the transition to the cloud even CIOs of very large fortune 500 companies their computations are often happening for the first time now in spaces where they are a tenant in someone else's get they are renting space or renting capacity so all this is putting a lot of pressure on systems designers to really focus on density of storage and density of computation and you know we see that this is contributing to the rise of a new class of storage technologies called hyper storage systems which are designed to to meet those goals all right so so Brian I'm I've tried to create different market categories before when I join Wikibon it was hyperscale invades the enterprise when people before were they were talking about hyper converged asthma much we talked about we called it server San actually because it was you know the benefits of ass and brought to the server but you know so you've got that term hyper in there is that hyper scales and hyper converge is it some other you know hyperness you know what what's what's the general idea you're trying to get food this new category it so let's take a look at kind of the existing commercially available technologies and it's kind of interesting to look at it and think about it on a two-dimensional axis of looking at the density and then the latency so you have the for example the traditional monoliths these are latency that's low enough for primary storage they do not tend to be very dense you know they're under a petabyte of storage per rack and that's where the industry began that's what a lot of us kind of cut our teeth on there being superseded by all-flash arrays these are higher density because they have data reduction technologies built-in natively into their data paths they have better latency so they're kind of moving up and to the right with respect to the monoliths but they come at a price they tend to be exceedingly expensive and relatively small systems then you have the SDS and the server storage and the scale out stuff they tend to be very close to the density of the monoliths again a half about half a petabyte to a petabyte per rack a regression on latency but they're being widely adopted because the costs are just so much better than the monoliths and the AFA is and that's the entire enterprise storage industry right in this area here now all the way down if you move to higher density you have systems like the Facebook open vault so this is you know an awesome open source storage system that I'm that Facebook developed it's the basis of haystack and f4 two of the largest storage systems in the world right now these are incredibly dense storage systems multiple petabytes per rack but they're very high latency they're used for cold data only and other things like Amazon glacier and whatnot are kind of all clustered down in that high latency but super dense so hyper storage is if you move around that two-dimensional chart is the upper right-hand quadrant it is storage technology that has the reliability of monoliths it has the cost structure the programmability and the the ability to run on any type of hardware that the SDS systems have but it has the density and the data center profile of the hyper scalar storage so this is completely uncharted territory this is where all of the R&D spend companies in like Google and Amazon everybody's racing to try to go figure this out and this is the kind of wild west where we operate we have a three year head start I'm a on-prem part of this but it's not going to last because this is you know it's the remaining uncharted territory in the industry really interesting so you've heard it first hyper storage definitely something I've been hearing for number of years is especially the big financial guys have been they've had hyperscale Envy is really what it was there like you know we spent huge amounts of budgets on IT you know we know our stuff how dare you know a bunch of retail guys basically you know come in here and think that they understand this space so it sounds like you're bringing some of that back to them um you know is infinite out the only ones you know you mentioned some of the you know kind of Google and Facebook are there anybody else that's kind of packaging this for the enterprise other than infinite at not yet so the sum of the of our competitors that are building their systems out of all flash technologies are moving in the right direction but their their media itself has to become a lot more dense and the cost has to drop significantly until they can be realistic plays and until then it's going to be differentiated by scale when you want to do petabyte scale stuff you do it with art with hyper storage architectures and one you want to be small and tight and fast you do it with a FAS but I think those lines will be blurred over time great so it sounds like you've got a clear differentiation compared to kind of just the the software-defined pieces don't deliver on you know some of the density that you're talking about or some of the high level performance when we start getting things like nvme i hear is going to be a game changer for the the hyperscale pieces do we start to see the blurring of lines between some of these architectures or is this something that you know two years from now you're going to say ok here's the last wave and here's the next wave yeah so I mean if you take a longer view instead of two years I mean if we if we look at a five and a ten year view this is all there is going forward there's hyperscale architectures or disaggregated architectures which are for compute heavy storage light workloads and then you have hyper storage which is for storage heavy compute neutral workloads and going forward if you take a 10-year window that's all there is out there well Brian I'm hoping we can do a whiteboard with you sometime in the future or maybe there'll be some kind of you know thesis on you know the kind of the hyperscale the hyper storage category but appreciate you here sharing it with our audience here I want to give you the final word as to kind of you know that the hard work that still needs to be done in the storage industry over the next few years go Patriots alright well we'll drop the mic there thank you brian says is so much for joining us and thank you for watching the cube

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this cube conversation Michael Gray is here is the chief technology officer of Boston based thrive Michael good to see you coming on glad to be here so tell us about thrive what do you guys all about you know thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider but really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider primarily now we're focusing on cybersecurity cloud hosting and public cloud hosting as well as disaster recovery so dig into that next generation yeah people use that term but what does it mean well the needs of our customers really changed over time before you could maybe simply roll out some antivirus and do some desktop management some server management but with the way some of the innovation is exploded in the cloud and the way application development has changed all of our businesses we've noticed that our customers have all kinds of new needs that includes much higher focus on cybersecurity these things can't be an after afterthought the other things with all the data that we see coming from our customers they may need a much higher level of performance than they ever did before from their their local hosting or or in the cloud so what Amazon Web Services came out you know 2006 timeframe every set up ms P's like drive they're in big trouble the exact opposite is happening for your business yeah yeah yeah you know why is that number one and number two how do you compete with the big cloud providers you know somebody like Amazon or even Azure those services are not easy to roll out you still need someone to understand what the businesses are and then translate those into technology solutions for us when someone starts asking how do I transform my business whether it be in the public cloud or the private cloud that's a tremendous opportunity to bring our knowledge and all of our engineering support to those customers to help them transform so I mean I I liken it to you know I could hire a plumber I could hire an electrician I could hire but I don't want to be the general contractor I'm happily happy to pay an expert at that who's got contacts deep expertise and and push the responsibility on them is that a fair analogy yeah I do think it is fair you know obviously it's a it's a much more technical environment than something like that so it's much more complicated you know the other thing is when we start to understand some of these business problems and pull the pieces apart we have a tremendous amount of expertise and experience where we can help those customers understand how to solve those business problems how to implement the technology and then how to be successful in whatever way they're trying to transform their business so you sort of touched on some of the trends in your business did talk more about your customers it's my understanding is it's mostly small and mid-sized customers is that correct you know there's far more mid-market than there ever were before I think people in the mid market are realizing that they do need to take some of these services outside their walls I notice a lot of mid-market customers that are focusing on their core business if you're a manufacturing company a biotech financial services company you can realize very quickly that you're not in the cloud hosting business and no matter how many people they hire grow your staff can be very difficult to actually be successful in these technologies despite all the different pieces that Amazon or Azure offers in the public cloud you still have to figure out how these systems work and how they apply to your business well to midsize companies and especially small companies they obviously aren't the resources that a large company has so you bring a lot of that infrastructure expertise along yeah and I think part of it is you know we have such a big exposure to a very large customer base so a problem that a customer may see that they think is maybe perhaps special to them we've solved that problem maybe hundreds of times and we can give them a lot of insight into how other companies of similar verticals have solved those problems you start out as sort of a local MSP and that have expanded over time yeah that's correct so we've expanded pretty rapidly over the past three to four years now we're we have five offices primarily in the East Coast and really started to help the mid-market who's now started to understand that they need to frankly outsource some of these solutions or get in business with a partner like us who can help them take those outside their walls and provide them a much higher level of service often at the end of the day the investments much lower for the customer so paint a picture of your your infrastructure what that look like yep so we have a data centers you know I have three primary data centers in New England the New Jersey New York area and then in the south all those data centers actually have infinite at storage which is you know something that I'm a huge fan of and one of the things that I like to offer in all of our data centers is I don't necessarily it doesn't matter to me geographically where the customer would like their workloads that's one of the things that the public cloud offers you can move resources around geographically depending maybe where your headquarters is or some of your branch offices we provide the same solutions at often a much higher performance level and we've extracted all the complications of where to put these so if a customer is in San Francisco and they'd like to dr2 New England not an issue but all of a sudden if they change their headquarters or maybe they do an acquisition and they need to change that footprint I can change that on the fly for them so and I've walked through many data centers of MSPs over the years yeah and ten years ago yeah you had one of everything yeah yeah compact server yeah yeah yes so I would imagine you had similar challenges you mentioned Infini debt yeah trying to essentially run your entire storage yeah yeah so we've um we've acquired several other MSPs over the past several years we had a lot of disparate storage platforms a lot of investments made some of them hung on to maybe for too long some of them you know were purchased for a specific business reason that might not be there anymore at this point we've standardized on Infini debt it's enabled our business to do a lot of new and innovative services so high performance storage replication similar to what you'd see in the public cloud but also we can support very complicated very data hungry clothes so you're sexually replacing so older storage systems with infinite at maybe you can describe the before and after you know frankly with with acquiring a lot of msps you name a storage platform we had it at some point through this standardization the the beauty of it is a consolidation so I can leverage the folks that manage our infinite at across the country all right so my TCO on something like this is is is really kind of amazing I can leverage a lot of experience with the defender that when I go in and need to do a data center consolidation I have some things that are knowns there's a lot of unknowns and acquisitions and all the due diligence in the world there's still going to be things that maybe not every detail has been figured out but when I roll out an infinite at I know I've solved one very foundational problem right out of the gate so and I want to come back on the TCO but before I do when I talk to people like you and I'm not a CTO but a lot of times I infer that people are comparing the the latest and greatest in this case infinite at yeah with what they had that's five six seven years old sure of course the TCO is the share that okay so I'm a push a little bit is is I presume you looked at infinite ad and other storage suppliers and I'm interested in what you found in those comparisons is it is it is it just great TCO relative to what you had that was five years old or is it real after the other yeah yeah so you know when it comes right down to it I've seen every marketing pitch for a storage platform you can possibly imagine I've seen every bullet list of features I've seen every we have proprietary technology that does X&Y you know eventually when you put it on the floor it's not everything that was in the sales process maybe there's something that was uncovered on a licensing side maybe the performance wasn't quite what someone said it would be the thing about infinite at is they've delivered on everything they've said in the sales process and you don't find that very often the other thing I need to mention too is that even post sale the discussion about the technology continues it's always a discussion about how the technology is built and how it enables you it's not we have a new feature coming on the roadmap that is gonna solve X&Y problem they've worked out the very foundational problems you know the other thing I do want to mention about Infini debt is being such a strong engineering company I know the best an engineer I can rely on them to make good engineering decisions so I want to ask you about performance because when I first saw infinite out you know we were on the on the flash bandwagon we got early on that yeah and these guys came in and said actually we can beat flash performance using our architecture and software and so forth yeah be like really so I'll ask you yeah have you found that from a performance standpoint so I have and you know I run into a lot of situations where there's technology leaders that are maybe buying into a specific brand name you know if we put X technology in I know for a fact that it's gonna beat the performance of an infinite at my approach with that is I have seen all the platforms and I agree there's a lot of great products out there high performance sit down and take a look at the way the technology has been built and have an open mind and you'll most likely be convinced that that technology is the right answer a lot of times I like to sit back and and say look I'm not gonna push any vendor any software partner any manufacturer on you take a step back and have an open mind of technology it'll make a big difference when you actually listen well I'm sure you've heard the sales pitches are you using those slow spinning business mic spinning discs or mechanical yeah yeah yeah yeah your experience has been and we've had Brian Carmody on yep yes of others yeah so then we have Moshe come in here yes Blaine that's sure and so but I always like to talk to the customer and get the affirmation yes yeah well again to me the the conversation with infinitive is always about engineering you know it's not a great deal of marketing first of course everybody does marketing that happens on a regular you have to do that to run a business but if you want to talk purely about how things have been designed that conversation often eclipses a lot of other marketing from other storage vendors so talk about your your how you spend your time yeah it's acting you know infrastructure roadmaps and so forth to get more sort of I got to get this stuff up and running today describe yeah you know we've set a path to build a very high performance nationwide cloud we are going up against the public cloud by the way I'm a public cloud partner right I do both we do hybrid hosting I want to give the customer the best of both worlds which may be a cliche but we really are aiming to get there that's one of my primary tasks is establishing a technology vision you know I can describe to a customer where our cloud is going and I can stand behind that with the public cloud we do have to Lou a little bit of reading the tea leaves so I I help people with trying to understand what you know maybe the public cloud vision might be but also how I fit together with that that public cloud with private cloud hosting and the other thing primary goal of mine is bringing in some of these different functions of IT so for instance high-performance cloud private cloud Plus cyber security I can bring those two together for you in a cohesive solution that that's what I spend a lot of my time so as you look out you know put on your your your binoculars maybe even your telescope big trend in one of the big trends is hyper-converged in bringing in storage compute and networking all together yep if I'm inferring correctly you're going for more of a Best of Breed approach yet and yet in you guys have the engineering expertise you have to do that can you can you talk about the philosophy there sure sure well one of the things that I like to do is just abstract some of these confusing and complicated conversations from our customers you know if we're gonna talk about SD win and make sure I have SD weigh in in my data center I can tell the customer I can give you that functionality and you don't have to worry about how these different pieces go together I'm happy to be transparent you know there's a lot of things in the public cloud that simply information you can't get I'm actually willing to share how those solutions that I built go together because I want people to see that transparent I want them to trust us so you know when when we go and start putting these together these are things where when the customer does have a question they want to drill in because they have concerns I can eliminate those very quickly you talking about private cloud earlier I want to come back to share and just so we always say on the cube bring the cloud experience to your data wherever it lives yeah it's all about that operating mom yep yeah so as you see tool chains like kubernetes yep yeah a cloud native stuff yeah come in you want to have that cloud experience you want to have yourselves a fantasy pass that on yep do you have customers yeah how do you look at that yeah what role does storage infrastructure playing to me and this is something that's primary to thrive focuses application enablement we're an application enablement company so if your application is best run in Azure and then we want to put it there a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies we have to build private clouds or even for security reasons we want to build private cloud or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees you know they didn't realize a lot of the maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number so you know we want to really look at people's applications and enable them to be highly high-performance but also highly secure I want to come back to the TCO I said oh yeah sure when you do the total cost of ownership analysis yeah what you find is it really boils down to the to the labor yeah piece of yep and see I'm curious as to when you brought in Infini debt yeah what the business impact was you know economically yeah no there's other non TCO thing yeah more so was it the labor cost that got reduced did you redeploy those resources well actually Hardware first and foremost and you know this is going back many years but and and I think I would say this is true for any datacenter cloud provider the minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow we're losing money okay because we've had to pick up the if someone needs to address that we have eliminated all storage performance helpdesk issues it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore we have we know that we can rely on our performance and we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis and that is not in question now the other thing is really as we started to expand our infinite at footprint geographically we suddenly started to realize not only do we have this great foundation built but we can the leverage and invest when we made to do things that we couldn't do before maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology maybe we could do them or they required some more licensing something like that but really when we started the standardization we did it for operational efficiency reasons and then suddenly realize that we had other opportunities here and I have to hand it to infinity they're actually the ones that helped us craft this story not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of so talk about the performance I want to ask you yeah I've had certainly Brian Carmody Craig Hobart and I have sat down and Craig actually made the statement you know the only bottleneck really is when the the system gets filled yeah you just dive in the architecture has that been your experience if this so reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks oh absolutely and you know I mentioned before that this is sort of formance is now becoming afterthought to me you know and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is weet from a performance standpoint not a capacity standpoint we can throw whatever we want at the infinite at and sort of the running joke internally is it will just smile and say is that all you got you mean like mixed workload so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload yeah yeah and you know I can imagine as someone that might be listening to what I'm saying well hey come on you know they can't really be that good and I'm I'm telling you from seeing a day-to-day again you can just throw the workloads at it and it will do what it says it does you don't see that every day now as far as capacity goes you know they there's capacity on demand model which you know we're a huge fan of they also have some other models the flex model which is very useful for budgeting purposes what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for an affinity it's very off-putting at first on day one and I remember my reaction but again as I saying earlier when you start peeling back two pieces of the technology and why these things are and the different flexibility on the financial side you realize that this actually isn't a downside it's an upside so the asset leverage of that floor tile as well exactly also make a big deal about a petabyte yes Gail is it important to you or what kind of scale are we talking about in terms of if you can share yeah absolutely so you know we obviously have multiple petabytes of storage for thrive for our customers again you know when someone has a large data set if we were to say we cannot handle that we're gonna be out of business pretty quickly this is one of the things the infinite flexibility of the public cloud again if you consider the public cloud both our competition and our partner you know we need to be able to offer that same kind of electricity in that same kind of endless capacity and at this point although I don't have completely unless capacity I have a tremendous amount of options I have workloads I can move different places and again a lot of times now it's more about performance than it is capacity oh you gotta give me something okay something that you wanna that should be doing to make your life better yeah I mean I gotta tell you it solves so many problems that is actually hard to come up with and again I'm smiling here because I've been down this road with those storage providers I've been let down by other storage writers I guess the son degree I maybe I'm waiting for them to let me down but I don't think they're going to that's a really interesting part I think that I'm you know the new trees cloud which is something that's been added over time you know a public cloud interaction is something that is desperately needed in the storage space so I'm interested to see how that product grows if I'm gonna give you something you know but again these are enablement platforms these aren't you know we need to do a feature comparison between a cloud and a public cloud and a private cloud last question some gifts are stuff you're working on yes II always like the SCT oh is that question yeah you know one of the the really interesting things to me is that we're finally getting there with anomaly detection not only you know just pure we found one event that that went out somewhere that doesn't make sense but we're profiling user behavior now AI and machine learning has been one of the big items that we've been promised for years but a lot of times it was just a tag line I think a lot of things that are happening in the public cloud computing space around profiling users and being able to reduce the amount of noise in the security space I think we're finally here and I think you know in the next 12 to 18 months AI isn't gonna become a cool feature said it's going to become a standard of a lot of security products so applying machine intelligence to a lot of the data that you have a lot of metadata yeah infrastructure metadata yeah yeah and you know even if you take for instance you know I'll pull it back to our storage conversation earlier if there's a storage activity is some sort of activity that's outside the norm that actually could be a security incident itself so you know pulling in data feeds is something that we've conquered its what are you gonna do with it now and we needed some humans to be able to pull that off before I think AI and machine learning is finally at the point where it's not out of reach for your average customer it doesn't take someone with a data analytics degree or something like that we can now buy these kind of products off the shelf and and leverage them for a lot of value oh Michael you've been a great guest thanks so much if you're welcome back anytime all right happy to be here all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante in the cube we'll see you next time

(orchestral music) >> Hi everybody my name is Dave Vallate and welcome to the special CUBE community event. You know, customers are on a digital journey. They're trying to transform themselves into a digital business, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Well we think it's the way in which they use data. So we're here with a company Infinidat who's all about using data at multi petabyte scale. We have news, we have announcements, we're gonna drill down with subject matter experts, and we're gonna start with Brian Carmody, who's the chief technology officer of Infinidat. Brian, it's good to see you again. >> Good to see you too, Dave. And I can't believe it's been a year. >> It has been a year since we last sat down. If you had to summarize, Brian, the last twelve months in one word, what would it be? >> How about two words, "insane growth". >> Insane growth, okay. >> Yes, yes. >> Talk about that. >> Yeah so, as of this morning at least, Infinidat has a hair over 4.6 exabytes of customer data under management, which is just insanely cool and I'm not sure if I counted all of the zeroes properly, but it looks like it's around 180 trillion IOs served to happy customers so far as of this morning. >> Some mind boggling numbers, so let me ask you a question. Is this growth coming from, sort of traditional workloads? Is it new workloads, is it a mix? >> Oh, that's a great question. So you know, early in the Infinidat ramp, our early traction was with core banking, transaction processing applications. It was all about consolidation and replacing rows of venoxes with a single floor tile, Infinibox. But in the past year, virtually all of our growth has been an expansion outside of that core, and it's a movement into greenfield applications. So basically, obviously our customers are going into hardcore digital transformation, and this kind of changes the types of workloads that we're looking at, that we're supporting, but it also changes the value proposition, consolidation and stuff like that is all about the bottom line, it's about making storage more efficient, but once we get into the digital transformation, these greenfield applications which is what most of our new growth is, it's actually all about using your digital infrastructure as a revenue generating machine for opening up new markets, new opportunities, new applications et cetera. >> So when people talk about cloud native, that would be an example, using cloud native tool chains, that's what's happening on your systems. Is that correct? >> Yeah absolutely. And I can give you some examples. So I recently spent a day with a group of engineers that are working with autonomous vehicle sensor data. So this is telemetry coming off of self driving cars. And they're working with these ridiculously large, like multi petabyte data sets, and the purpose of this system is to make the vehicles more smarter, and more resistance to collisions, and ultimately more safe. A little bit before that, me and a bunch of other people from the team spent a day with another partner, they're also working with sensor data, but they're doing biometrics off of wearables. So they've perfected an algorithm that can, in real time, detect a heart attack from your pulse. And will immediately dispatch an ambulance to your geolocation of where, hopefully your arm is still connected to your body. And immediately send your electronic medical health records to that nearest hospital, and only then you get a video call on your phone from a doctor who says hey, are you sitting down? Your gonna be fine, you're having a heart attack, and an ambulance is gonna be there in two minutes. And the whole purpose of this is just to shave precious minutes off of that critical period of getting a person who's having a heart attack, to get them the medical care they need. >> Yeah, I'd say that's a non traditional workload. And the impact is saving lives, that's awesome. Now let's talk a little bit about your journey. You know, our friends at Gartner, they do these magic quadrants, a lot of people don't like 'em, I happen to think they're quite useful, as a guidepost, you guys have always been strong on the vision, and you've been executing. Where are you today in that quadrant? >> Yeah, it's an extreme honor. Gartner elevated us into the Leader's Quadrant last year, so customers take that very, very seriously. And the ability to execute access, is, what Gartner says it's, are you influencing the market? Are you causing the incumbents to change their strategies? And with our disruptive pricing, with our liability guarantees, our SLAs and stuff like that, Gartner felt like we met the criteria. And it's a huge honor, and we absolutely have our customers to thank for that because the magic quadrant isn't about what you tell Gartner, it's about what your customers tell Gartner. >> Congratulations on that, and I know the peer insight, you guys have done very well on that also. I want you to talk about the team, you're growing. To grow, you've gotta bring on good people. You've added some folks, talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, yeah, well speaking of Gartner, we got Stan Zafos who recently joined. He's gonna be running product marketing for us. We're working with Doc, so he's a legend in the industry, so we're delighted to have him on board. Also, Steiny came over from Pure to join us as our field CTO, another legend who needs no introduction. So really, really happy about that. But also, it's not just, those are guys that customers see. But we're also experiencing this on the engineering side. So we, for example, we recently were very amused to realize that there are now more EMC fellows working at Infinidat, if you count Moshe, more EMC fellows working at Infinidat then working at Dell EMC, which is just, you know a humorous, kind of funny thing. So as the business has grown and has gotten momentum, you know, just like we're continuously amazed by the creativity and the things our customers are doing with data, every day, I am continuously amazed and humbled by the caliber of people that I get to work with every day. >> That's awesome. >> We're really, really happy about that. >> All right, well thank you for the recap of the past year, let's get into sort of some of the announcements today, and I wanna talk about the vision, so you have this Infinidat elastic data fabric, I'm interested in what that is, but I'm also, frankly even more interested in why. What's the "why" behind that? >> Sure. So elastic data fabric is Infinidat's roadmap, and our shared vision with customers for the future of enterprise storage. And the "why" is because customers demanded it. If we look at what's happening in the industry and the way that real customers are dealing with data right now, they have some of their data, and some of their workloads are running across public clouds. Some of them are in managed service providers. Some of them are SASs, and then they have on premises storage arrays, and elastic data fabric is Infinidat's solution that glues all of that together. It turns it into a single platform that spans on premises, colo, Infinidat powered managed service providers, Google, Amazon and Azure, and it glues it into a single platform for running workloads, so over the course of this of these presentations, we're gonna drill down into some of the enabling technologies that make this possible, but the net net, is that it is a brand new, next generation data plane for let's say for example, within a customer data center it allows customers to cluster multiple Infiniboxes together into what we call availability zones, and then manage that as a single entity. And that scales from a petabyte up to an exabyte of capacity per data center, and typically a customer would have one availability zone per data center and then one availability zone that can span multiple clouds, so that's the data plane. The control plane is the ability to manage all of this, no matter where the data lives, no matter where the workload is or needs to be and to manage it with a single pane of glass. And those are the kind of pieces of enabling technology that we're gonna unpack in the technical sessions. >> Two questions on that if I may. So you've got the data plane and the control plane, if I want to plug in to some other control plane, you know VMware control plane for instance, your API based architecture allows me to do that? Is that correct? >> Oh yeah, it's application aware, so for instance if you're running a VMware environment or a Kubernetes environment, it seamlessly integrates into that, and you manage it from a single API endpoint, and it's elastic, it scales up and down, and it's infinite and immortal. And probably the biggest problem that this solves for customers is it makes data migrations obsolete. It gives us the ability to decouple the data lifecycle from the hardware refresh lifecycle, which is a game changer for customers. >> I think you just answered my second question, which is what makes this unique? And that's at least one aspect of course. >> Yeah, I mean that's the, data migrations are the bane of customer's existence. And the larger the customer is, the more filer and erase sprawl they have, the more of a data migration headache they have. So when we kicked this project off five years ago, our call to action, the kernel of an idea that became elastic data fabric, was find a way to make it so that the next generation of infrastructure engineers that are graduated from college right now, will never know what a data migration is, and make it a story that old men in our industry talk about. >> Well that's huge because it is the bane of customers' existences. Very expensive, minimum $50,000 per migration, and many, many months, thanks Brian, for kicking this off, we've got a lot of ground to cover, and so we're gonna get into it now. We're gonna get into the news, we're gonna double click on some of the technologies and architectures, we're gonna hear from customers. And then it's your turn, we're gonna jump into the crowd chat and hear from you, so keep it right there. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming music) We're back with Doc D'Errico, the CMO of Infinidat. We're gonna talk about agility and manageability. Good to see you Doc. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> All right, let's start in reverse order, let's start with manageability. What's your story there? >> Sure, happy to do that, you know Dave, we get great feedback from our customers on how simple and easy our systems are to manage. We have products like Infinimetrics which give them a lot of insights into the system. We have APIs, very simple and easy to use. But our customers keep asking for more insights into their environment, leveraging the analytics that we already do, now you've also heard just now about our elastic data fabric, which is our vision, Infinidat's vision for the data center, not just for today, but into the future. And our first instantiation of that vision in answering those customer responses, is a new cloud based platform, initially to provide some better monitoring and analytics, but then you're going to go into data migrations, auto provisioning, storage availability zones, and really your whole customer experience with Infinidat. >> So for my understanding, this is a SAS solution, is that correct? >> It is, it's a secure, multi site solution, so in other words, all of your Infinidat systems, wherever they are around the world, all visible through a single pane of glass. But the cloud based system gives us a lot of great power too, it gives us the agility to provide faster development and rapid enhancement based on feedback and feature requests. It also then provides you customizable dashboards in your system, dashboards that we can create very rapidly, giving you advisors and insights into a variety of different things. And we have lots of customers who are already engaged in using this. >> So I'm interested in this advisors and insights, my understanding is you guys got a data lake in the backend. You're mining that data, performing analytics on it. What kinds of benefits do customers get out of that? >> Well they can search into things, like abandoned volumes within their system. Tracking the growth of their storage environment. Configuration errors, like asymmetric ports and paths, or even just performance behaviors, like abnormal latencies or bandwidth patterns. >> So when you're saying abandoned volumes, your talking about like, reclaiming wasted space? >> Absolutely. >> To be able to reuse it. I mean people in the old days have done that because of a log structured file and they had to do it for performance, but you're doing it to give back money to the customers, is that right? >> That's exactly right, you know customers very often get requests from business units to spin off additional volume sets for whether it be a test environment or some specific application that they're running for some period of time. And then when they spin down the environment they sometimes leave the data set there thinking that they might need it again in the not so distant future, and then it sort of dies on the vine, it sits there taking up space and it's never used again, so we give them insights into when the last time things were accessed, how often it's accessed, what the IO patterns are, how many copies there might be, with snapshots and things like that. >> You mentioned strong customer feedback. Everybody says they get great customer feedback. But you've been with a lot of companies. How is this different, and what specifically is that feedback? >> Yeah, the analytics and insights are very unique, this is exactly what customers have been asking for from other vendors. Nobody does it, you know we're hearing such great stories about the impact on their costs. Like the capacity utilization, reclaiming all that abandoned capacity, being able to put new workloads and grow their environment without having to pay any additional costs is exciting to them. Identifying and correcting configuration issues, getting ahead of performance problems before they occur. Our customers are already saving time and money by leveraging this in our environment. >> All right let's pivot to agility. You've got Flex, what's your story there? What is Flex? >> Well Dave, imagine a world if you will, if you didn't have to worry about hardware anymore, right, it sounds like a science fiction story but it's not. >> Sounds like cloud. >> It sounds like cloud, and people have been migrating to the cloud and in the public cloud environment, we have a solution that we talked about a year ago called Neutrix Cloud, providing a sovereign based storage solution so that you can get the resilience and the performance of Infinibox or Infiniguard in your system today, but people want that experience on premises, so for the on premise experience, we're announcing Infinibox Flex, and Inifiniguard Flex, an environment where, you don't have to worry about the hardware, you manage your data, we'll manage the hardware, and you get to pay for what you use as you need it. You can scale up an down, we'll guarantee the availability. 100% availability, and with this environment, you'll get free hardware for life. >> Okay a lot of questions, so this sounds like your on prem cloud, right, you're bringing that cloud experience to the data, wherever it lives, you say you can scale up and scale down, how does that work, you're over provisioning, or, and you're not charging me for what I don't use, can you give us some details there? >> Well just like with an Infinibox, we're going to try to provide the customer with the Infinibox that they need not just for today, but for tomorrow. We're gonna work with the customer to look into the future and try to determine what are their performance requirements and capacity requirements over time. The customer will have the ability to manage the data configuration and the allocation of the storage and add or remove storage as they need it. As they need it, as they scale up, and we'll build them based on the daily average, just like the cloud experience, and if, as they reduce, same thing, it will adjust the daily average and build accordingly. >> Am I right, the customer will make some minimum commitment, and then if they go over that, you'll charge 'em for it, if they don't, then you won't charge 'em for it, is that correct? >> If they go over it, we'll charge them for the period they go over, if they continue to use it forever, we'll charge them that. If they reduce it back, then we'll charge them the reduced amount. >> So that gives them the flexibility there and the agility. Okay 100% availability, what's behind that? >> You know, we have a seven nines reliability metric that we manage to on a day to day basis. We have customers who have been running systems for years without any noticeable downtime, and when you have seven ninths, that's 3.16 seconds of availability per year. Right, the life cycle of an IO timeout is much longer than that, so effectively from the customer's application perspective, it's 100% available. We're willing to put our money where our mouth is. So if you experience downtime that's caused by our system at any time during that monthly period, you get the next month for free for the entire capacity. >> Okay, so that's a guarantee that you're making. >> That's a guarantee. >> Okay, read the fine print. But it sounds like the fine print is just what you said it is. >> It's pretty straight forward. >> Free hardware for life. Free, like a puppy? (laughs) >> No, free like in free, free meaning you're paying for the service, we're providing the capacity for you to put your data, and every three years, we will refresh that entire system with new hardware. And the minimum is three years, if you prefer because of your business practices to change that cycle, we'll work with you to find the time that makes the most sense. >> So I could do four years or five years if I wanted. >> You could do four years or five years. You could do three years and three months. And you'll get the latest and greatest hardware. We'll also, by the way provide the data migration services which is part of this cloud vision. So your not going to have to do any of the work. You're not going to have to pay for additional capital expense so that you have two sets of hardware on the floor for six months to a year while you do migration and work it into your schedules. We'll do that entire thing transparently for you in your environment, completely non disruptive to you. >> So you guys are all about petabyte scale. Hard enterprise problems, this isn't a mom and pop sort of small business solution, where do you see this play? Obviously service providers are gonna eat this stuff up. Give us some -- >> Yeah you know, service providers is a great opportunity for this. It's also a wonderful opportunity for Infiniverse. But any large scale environment this should be a shoo-in. And you know what, even if you're in a small scale environment that has a need that you wanna maintain that environment on premises, you're small scale, you wanna take advantage of your data more. You know you're going to grow your environment, but you're not quite sure how you're gonna do it. Or you have these sporadic workloads. Perhaps in the finance industry, you know we're in tax season right now, taxes just ended half a month ago right, there are plenty of businesses who need additional capacity for maybe four months of the year, so they can scale up for those four months and then scale back down. >> Okay, give us the bottom line on the customer impact. >> So the customer impact is really all about greater agility, the ability to provide that capacity and flexible model without big impact to their overall budget over the course of the year. >> All right Doc, thank you very much. Appreciate your time and the insight. >> It's my pleasure, Dave. >> All right, let's year from the customer, and we'll be right back. Right after this short break. >> Michael Gray is here, he's the chief technology officer of Boston based Thrive, Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, glad to be here. >> So tell us about Thrive, what are you guys all about? >> You know, Thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider. But really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider, primarily now, we're focusing on cyber security, cloud hosting and public cloud hosting, as well as disaster recovery. To me, and this is something that's primary to Thrive's focus, is application enablement. We're an application enablement company. So if your application is best run in Azure, then we wanna put it there, a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies, we have to build private clouds. Or even for security reasons, we want to build private cloud, or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees. You know they didn't realize a lot of the, maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number. So you know, we wanna really look at people's applications and enable them to be high performance but also highly secure. >> So I'm curious as to when you brought in Infinidat, what the business impact was economically. There's all the sort of non TCO factors that I wanna explore, so was it the labor costs that got reduced, did you redeploy those resources? Was it actually the hardware, or? >> First and foremost, and you know this is going back many years, and I think I would say this is true for any data center cloud provider. The minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow, we're losing money. Okay, because we've had to pick up the phone and someone needs to address that. We have eliminated all storage performance help desk issues, it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore. We know that we can rely on our performance. And we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis, and that is not in question. Now the other thing is really, as we started to expand our Infinidat footprint geographically, we suddenly started to realize, not only do we have this great foundation built but we can leverage an investment we made to do things that we couldn't do before. Maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology, maybe we could do them but they required some more licensing. Something like that, but really when we started the standardization, we did it for operational efficiency reasons, and then suddenly realized that we had other opportunities here. And I have to hand it to Infinidat. They're actually the ones that helped us craft this story. Not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of. >> Has that been your experience, that it's sort of reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks? >> Oh absolutely, and you know I mentioned before that storage forms have now become an afterthought to me. You know, and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is from a performance standpoint, not a capacity standpoint, we can throw whatever we want at the Infinidat, and sort of the running joke internally is that we'll just smile and say is that all you got? >> You mean like mix workloads so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload? >> Yeah, and you know I can image that as someone who might be listening to what I'm saying, well hey come on, it can't really be that good. And I'm telling you from seeing it day to day, again you can just throw the workloads at it, and it will do what it says it does. You don't see that everyday, now as far as capacity goes, there's this capacity on demand model, which we're a huge fan of, they also have some other models, the flex model, which is very useful for budgeting purposes, what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for Infinidat, it's very off putting first on day one, and I remember my reaction. But again, as I was saying earlier, when you start peeling back the pieces of the technology and why theses things are, and the different flexibility on the financial side, you realize this actually isn't a downside, it's an upside. >> We're gonna talk performance with Craig Hebbert who's vice president with Infinidat, he focuses on strategic accounts, Craig, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so let's talk performance, everybody talks about performance they have their bench marketing, everybody's throwing Flash at the problem, you guys, you use Flash, but you didn't hop on that all Flash bandwagon, why and how are you different? >> Great question, we get it a lot with our customers. So we innovated, we spent over five years looking at the big picture, what the box would need today. What it would need in the future, and how would we arrive there by doing it economically? And so as you said, we use a small amount of Flash, that's a small percentage, two, three, four percent of the total box, but we do it by having a foundation that nobody else has, instead of throwing hardware at the solution, we have some specific mechanisms that nobody else has, we have a tri, which is a multi value structure that allows us to dynamically trace and track all of the IOs that come into the box, we ship intelligence. Everybody else ships dumb blocks of data. And so their only course of action to adopt new strategies is to bolt on the latest and greatest media. I've had a lot of experience at other companies where they've tried to shoehorn in new techniques whether it be a NAS Blade into an existing storage box or whether it be thin provisioning after the fact. And things that are done sort of like after the design is done never pan out very well. And the beauty with Infinibox is that all our protocols work the same way. I-ska-zin, NAS Block, it is all structured the same way. And that makes performance equal over all those protocols. And it makes it also easy to manage via the same API structure. >> So you're claiming that you can give equivalent or better performance with a combination of Flash and Spinning Disk than your competitors who are all Flash. Can you kind of add some color to that? >> Absolutely, so we use DRAM, all of our writes are ingested into the box through DRAM. We have 130 microsecond latency. Which is actually the lowest speed that fiber channel can attain, and so we're able to do things very, very quickly, it's 800 times faster NAND which is what our competitors are using. We have no raid structure on the SSD at all. So as things flow out of DRAM and go onto the SSD, our SSD is faster than everybody else's. Even though we use the same, so there's a mechanism there that we optimize. We write in large sequential blocks to the SSD. So the wear rate isn't the same as what our competitors are using, so everything we do is with an optimization, both for the present data and also the recall, and one of the things that culminates in a massive success for us, how we have those three tiers of data, but how we're able to out performance all Flash arrays, is that we do something, we hold data in cache for a massive amount of time, the average write latency in something like a VMAX is something like 13 seconds, the maximum is 28, we hold things for an astounding five minutes, and what that allows us to do is put profiles around things and remove randomness, randomness is something that's plagued data storage vendors for years. Whether it's random writes or random reads. If you can remove that randomness, then you can write out what are the slowest spinning disks out there, the Nearline SAS drives, but they're the fastest disks for sequential read, so if everything you write out is sequential, you can use the lowest cost disk, the Nearline SAS disk, and maximize their performance. And it's that technology, it's those patterns, 138 patterns that allow us to do all of these 38 steps in the process which augment our ability to serve customers data at a vastly reduced price. >> So your secret sauce is architecture intelligence as you call it, and then your able to provide lower cost media, and of course if Flash were lower cost, you'd be able to use that. There's no reason that you couldn't. Is that correct? >> We could but we wouldn't gain anything from it. A lot of customers say to us, why aren't you using more Flash, why don't you build an all Flash array? Why don't you use NVME? And we are actually the next version of the soft-wool-ship and the ME Capable as well as storage class memory. Why we don't do it is because we don't need it. Our customers have often said to us why don't you use 16 gig fiber channel or 32. And we haven't made that move because we don't move bottlenecks, we give customers a solution which is an end to end appliance, and so when we refresh the software stack, and we change the config with that, we make sure that the fiber channel is upgraded, we make sure that the three port, the Infiniban, everything comes with an uplift so there's not just one single area of a bottleneck. We could use more SSD but it would just be more money and we wouldn't be able to give you any more performance than we are today. >> So you have some hard news today. Tell us about that. >> Yeah I will. So we are a software company, and going back to the gen one I was here on day one when we started selling in the United States, when the first box was released it was 300,000 IOs, Moshe said he wanted a million IOs without changing the platform. We got up to about 900,000, that's a massive increase by just software tweaks, and so what we do is once the product has gone through its second year we go back and we optimize and we reevaluate. Which is what we did in the fall of 2018. And we were able to give a 30% uplift to our existing customers just with software tweaks in that area, so now we move to another config where we will introduce the 16, the 32 gig fiber channel cards and the MEO for fabric and storage class memory and all those things that are up and coming, but we don't need to utilize those until the price point drops. Right now if we did that, we'd just be like everybody else, and we would be driving up the price point, we're making the box ready to adapt those when the price point becomes accessible to our customers. >> Okay, last question, you spent a lot of time with strategic accounts, financial services, healthcare, insurance, what are some of the most pressing problems that you're hearing from them that you guys are helping them solve? >> It's a great question, so we see people with sprawl, managing many, many arrays, one of our competitors for instance for Splunk, they'll give you one array with one interface for the hot indexes, another mid tier array with another interface for the warm indexes. >> Brute force. >> Yeah, and then they'll give you a bunch of cold now storage on the back end with another disparate interface, all three of them are managed separately and you can't even control them from the same API. So what customers like about us, and just Splunk is one example. So we come in with just one 19 inch array and one rack, the hot indexes are handled by the DRAM, the warm indexes are handled by the SSD, and cold data's right there on the Nearline Sass drives. So they see from us this powerful, all encompassing solution that's better, faster, and cheaper. We sell on real, not effective, and so when encryption and things like this get turned on, the price point doesn't go up with Infinidat customers. They already know what they're buying. Everything else is just cream. And it's massive for economical reasons, as well as technological reasons. >> Excellent, Craig, thank you. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Okay keep it right there everybody. We'll be right back after this short break. (calming music) We're back with Ken Steinhart who's a field CTO with Infinidat, Ken, good to see you again. >> Great to see you Dave, it's been a long while. >> It sure has, thanks for coming back on the CUBE here. So you have the customer perspective. You've worked with a lot of customers. You've been a customer, availability, high availability, obviously important, especially in the context of storage. What's Infinidat's story there? >> Well high availability's been a cornerstone for Infinidat obviously from the beginning. And it's really driven some pretty amazing things. Not the least of which has been seven nines of availability proven by the product. What's new and different now, is we're extending that with the ability to do active active clustering and it's the real deal, we're talking about the ability to have the exact same volume now at synchronous distances, presenting itself to both sites as if it were just a single volume. Now this is technology that's based upon the existing synchronous replication and Infinisnap technology that Infinidat has already had, and this is gonna provide always on, continuous operation, even able to be resilient against site failures, component failures, storage failures, server failures, whatever, we will provide true zero RPO and true zero RTO at distance, and it's able to provide the ability to provide consistency also by using a very lightweight witness which presents itself as a third, completely separate fault domain to be able to see both sites to ensure the integrity of information, while being able to read and write simultaneously at two sites to what logically looks like one single volume. This is gonna be supported with all the major cluster software and server environments. And it's incredibly easy to deploy. So that's really the first point associated with this. >> So let me follow up on that, so a lot of people talk about active active, a lot of companies. How is this specifically different? >> It's different in that it is going to be able to now change the economics, first and foremost. Up until now, typically, people have had to trade off between RPO, RTO and cost, and usually you can get two of the three to be positive but not all three. It's sort of like if you buy a car. RPO equates to the quality of the solution, RTO equates to the speed or time, cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast it won't be cheap, if it's good and it's cheap, it won't be fast, and if it's fast and it's cheap it won't be good, so we're able to break that paradigm for the first time here, and we're gonna be able to now take the economics of multi site, disaster tolerant, cluster type solutions and do it at costs to what are comparable to what most people would do for just a single site implementation. >> And your secret sauce there is the architecture, it's the software behind it. >> Well it's actually a key point, the software is standard and included. And it's all about the software, this is an extension of the existing synchronous replication technology that Infinidat has had, standard and included, no additional costs, no separate quirky gateways or anything, being able to now have one single volume logically presented to two different sites in real time continuously for high availability. >> So what's the customer impact? >> The customer impact is continuous operation at economics that are comparable to what single site solutions have typically looked like. And that's just gonna be huge, we see this as possibly bringing multi site disaster tolerance and active active clustering to people that have never been able to afford it or didn't think they could afford it previously. That really brings us to the third part of this. The last piece is that, when you take an architecture such as Infinidat with Infinibox, that has been able to demonstrate seven nines of availability, and now you can couple that across at distance in synchronous distances to two data centers or two completely different sites, we are now able to offer a 100% uptime guarantee. Something that statistically hasn't really been particularly practical in the past, for a vendor to talk about, but we're now able to do it because of the technology that this architecture affords our customers. >> So guarantee as in, when I read the fine print, what does it say? >> Obviously we'll give the opportunity for our customers to read the fine print. But basically it's saying we're gonna stand behind this product relative to its ability to deliver for them, and obviously this is something customers we think are gonna be very, very excited about. >> Ken, thinks so much for coming on the CUBE, appreciate it. >> Pleasure's mine, Dave. As always. >> Great to see you. Okay, thank you for watching, keep it right there. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming music) Okay we're back for the wrap up with Brian Carmody. Brian, let's geek out a little bit. You guys are technologists, let's start with the software tech that we heard about today. What are the takeaways? >> Sure, so there's a huge amount of content in here, and software is most of it, so we have, first is R5. This is the latest software release for Infinibox. It improves performance, it improves availability with active active, it introduces non disruptive data mobility which is a game changer for customers for manageability and agility. Also as part of that, we have the availability of Infiniverse, which is our cloud based analytics and monitoring platform for Infinidat products, but it's also the next generation control plane that we're building. And when we talk about our roadmap, it's gonna grow into a lot more than it is today, so it's a very strategic product for us. But yeah, that's the net net on software. >> Okay, so but the software has to run on some underlying hardware, so what are the innovations there? >> Yeah, so I'm not sure if I'd call 'em innovations, I mean in our model, hardware is boring and commoditized and really all the important stuff happens in software. But we have listened, customers have asked us for it, we are delivering, 16 gigabit fiber channel is a standard option, and we're also giving a option for a 32 gig fiber channel, and a 25 gig ethernet, 25 gig ethernet, which is again, things that customers asking for 'em, and we've delivered, and also while we're on the topic of protocols and stuff like that, we're also demonstrating our NVMe over fabrics implementation, which is deployed with select customers right now, it is the world's fastest NVMe over fabrics implementation, it is a round trip latency of 52 microseconds which is half the time, roundtrip for us, is half the time that it takes a NAND Flash cell to recall its data, forgetting about the software stack on the round trip, that's gonna be available in the future for all of our customers, general availability via a software only update. >> That's incredible, all right, so to get out what that means for the road map. >> Oh sure, so basically with our road map, is we're laying out a very ambitious vision for the next 18 months of how to give customers ultimately what they are screaming for which is help us evolve our on premises storage from old school storage arrays and turn them into elastic data center scale clouds in my own data centers, and then come up and give us an easy, seamless way to integrate that into our public cloud and our off premises technologies, and that's where we're gonna be. Starting today, and taking us out the next 18 months. >> Well we covered a lot of ground today. Pretty remarkable, congratulations on the announcements. We covered all the abilities, even performance ability. We'll throw that one in there. So thank you for that, final word? >> The final word is probably just a message to our customers to say thank you, and for trusting us with your data. We take that covenant very seriously. And we hope that you with all of this work that we've done, that you feel we're delivering on our promise of value, to help them enable competitive advantage and do it at multi petabyte scale. >> Great, all right thank you Brian. And thank you, now it's your turn. Hop into the crowd chat, we've got some questions for you, you can ask questions of the experts that are on the call. Thanks everybody for watching. This is Dave Vallante signing out from the CUBE.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's The Cube! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody! My name is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special presentation on The Cube. Infinidat is a company that we've been following since it's early days. A hot storage company, growing like crazy, doing things differently than most storage companies. We've basically been doubling revenues every year for quite some time now. And Brian Carmody is here to help me kick off this announcement and the presentation today. Brian, thanks for coming back on. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. >> So, you may have noticed we have a crowd chat going on live. It's crowdchat.net/Infinichat. You can ask any question you want, it's an ask me anything chat about this announcement. This is a bi-coastal program that we're running today between here and our offices in Palo Alto. So, Brian let's get into it. Give us the update on Infinidat. >> Things are going very well at Infinidat. We're just coming out of our 17th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, so we have a healthy, sustainable, profitable business. We have happy, loyal customers. 71% of our revenue in 2017 came from existing customers that were increasing their investment in our technologies. We're delighted by that. And we have surpassed three exabytes of customer deployments. So, things are wonderful. >> And you've done this essentially as a one product company. Is that correct? Yes, so going back to our first sale in the summer of 2013, that growth has been on the back of a single product, InfiniBox, targeted at primary storage. >> Okay, so what's inside of InfiniBox? Tell me about some of the innovations. In speaking to some of your customers, and I've spoken to a number of them, they tell me that one of the things they like, is that from early on, I think serial number 0001, they can take advantage of any innovations that you've produced within that product, is that right? >> Yeah, exactly, so InfiniBox is a software product. It has dumb hardware, dumb commodity hardware, and it has it has very smart intelligent software. This allows us to kind of break from this forklift upgrade model, and move to a model where the product gets better over time. So if you look at the history of InfiniBox going back to the beginning, with each successive release of our software, latency goes down, new features are added, and capacity increases become available. And this is the difference between the software versus a hardware based innovation model. >> One of the interesting things I'll note about Infinidat is you're doing software defined, you don't really use that terminology, it's the buzzword in the industry. The other buzzword is artificial intelligence, machine learning. You're actually using machine intelligence, You and I have talked about this before, to optimize the placement of data that allows you to use much less expensive media than some of the other guys, and deliver more value to customers. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely, and by the way the reason why that is is because we're an engineering company, not a marketing company, so we prefer just doing things rather than talking about them. So InfiniBox is the first expression of a set of fundamental technologies of our technology platform, and the first piece of that is what you're talking about. It's called NeuroCache. And it's our ML and AI infrastructure for learning customer workloads and using that insight in real time to optimize data placement. And the end result of this is driving cost out of storage infrastructure and driving up performance. That's the first piece. That's NeuroCache. The second piece of our technology foundations is INFINISNAP. So this is our snapshot mechanism that allows infinite, lock-free, copy data management with absolutely no performance impact. So that's the second. And then the third is INFINIRAID and our Raz platform. So this is our distributed raid architecture that allows us to have multi pedibytes scale, extremely high durability, but also have extremely high availability of the services and that what enables our seven nines reliability guarantee. Those things together are the basis of our products. >> Okay, so sort of, we're here today and now what's exciting is that you're expanding beyond just the one product company into a portfolio of products, so sort of take us through what you're announcing today. >> Yeah so this is a really exciting day, and it's a milestone for Infinidat because InfiniBox now has some brothers and sisters in the family. The first thing that we are announcing is a new F Series InfiniBox model which we call F6212. So this is the same feature set, it's the same software, it's the same everything as its smaller InfiniBox models, but it is extremely high capacity. It's our largest InfiniBox. It's 8.3 pedibytes of capacity in that same F6000 form factor. So that's number one. Numnber two, we're announcing a product called InfiniGuard. InfiniGuard is pedibytes scale, data protection, with lightening-fast restores. The third thing that we're announcing, is a new product called InfiniSync. InfiniSync is a revolutionary business continuity appliance that allows synchronous RPO zero replication over infinite distances. It's the first ever in this category. And then the fourth and final thing that we're announcing is a product called Neutrix Cloud. Neutrix Cloud is sovereign storage that enable real-time competition between public cloud providers. The ultimate in agility, which is the ability to go polycloud. And that's the content of the portfolio announcement. >> Excellent, okay, great! Thanks, Brian, for helping us set that up. The program today, as you say, there's a cloud chat going on. Crowdchat.net/infinichat. Ask any question that you want. We're going to cover all these announcements today. InfiniSync is the next segment that's up. Dr. Ricco is here. We're going to do a quick switch and I'll be interviewing doc, and then we're going to kick it over to our studio in Palo Alto to talk about InfiniGuard, which is essentially, what was happening, Infinidat customers were using InfiniBox as a back-up target, and then asked Infinidat, "Hey, can you actually make this a product and start "partnering with software companies, "back-up software companies, and making it a robust, "back-up and recovery solution?" And then MultiCloud, is one of the hottest topics going, really interested to hear more about that. And then we're going to bring on Eric Burgener from IDC to get the analyst perspective, that's also going to be on the West coast and then Brian and I are come back, and wrap up, and then we're going to dive in to the crowd chat. So, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with Dr. Ricco, right after this short break. >> Narrator: InfiniBox was created to help solve one of the biggest data challenges in existence, the mapping of the human geno. Today InfiniBox is enabling the competitive business processes of some of the most dynamic companies in the world. It is the apex product of generations of technology, and lifetimes of engineering innovation. It's a system with seven nines of reliability making it the most available storage solution in the market InfiniBox is both powerful and simple to use. InfiniBox will transform how you experience your data. It is so intuitive, it will inform you about potential problems, and take corrective action before they happen. This is InfiniBox. This is confidence. >> We're back with Dr. Ricco, who's the CMO of Infinidat. Doc, welcome! >> Thank you, Dave. >> I've got to ask you, we've known each for a long time. >> We have. >> Chief Marketing Officer, you're an engineer. >> I am. >> Explain that please. >> Yeah, I have a PhD in engineering and I have 14 patents in the storage industry from my prior job, Infinidat is an unconventional company, and we're using technology to solve problems in an unconventional way. >> Well, congratulations. >> Dr. Ricco: Thank you. >> It's great to have you back on The Cube. Okay, InfiniSync, I'm very excited about this solution, want to understand it better. What is InfiniSync. >> Well, Dave, before we talk about InfiniSync directly, let's expand on what Brian talked about is the foundation technologies of Infinidat and the InfiniBox. In the InfiniBox we provide InfiniSnap, which is a near zero performance impact to the application with near zero overhead, just of course the incremental data that you write to it. We also provide async and we provide syncronous replication. Our async replication provides all that zero overhead that we talked about in InfiniSnap with a four-second interval. We can replicate data four seconds apart, nearly a four second RPO, recovery point objective. And our sync technology is built on all of that as well. We provide the lowest overhead, the lowest latency in the industry at only 400 microseconds, which provides an RPO of zero, with near zero performance impact application as well, which is exciting. But syncronis replication, for those applications while there's values to that, and by the way all of the technology I just talked about, is just as Brian said, it's zero additional cost to the customer with Infinidat. There are some exciting business cases why you'd use any of those technologies, but if you're in a disaster-recovery mode and you do need an RPO of zero, you need to recognize that disasters happen not just locally, not just within your facility, they happen in a larger scale regionally. So you need to locate your disaster recovery centers somewhere else, and when you do that, you're providing additional and additional performance overhead just replicating the data over distance. You're providing additional cost and you're providing additional complexity. So what we're providing is InfiniSync and InfiniSync extends the customer's ability to provide business continuity over long distances at an RPO of zero. >> Okay, so talk more about this. So, you're essentially putting in a hardened box on site and you're copying data synchronously to that, and then you're asynchronously going to distance. Is that correct? >> Yes, and in a traditional sense what a normal solution would do, is you would implement a multi-site or a multi-hop type of topology. You build out a bunker site, you'd put another box there, another storage unit there, you'd replicate synchronously to that, and you would either replicate asynchronously from there to a disaster recovery site, or you'd replicate from your initial primary source storage device to your disaster recovery site which would be a long distance away. The problem with that of course is complexity and management, the additional cost and overhead, the additional communications requirements. And, you're not necessarily guaranteeing an RPO of zero, depending upon the type of outage. So, what we're doing is we're providing in essence that bunker, by providing the InfiniSync black box which you can put right next to your InfiniBox. The synchronous replication happens behind the scenes, right there, and the asynchronous replication will happen automatically to your remote disaster recovery site. The performance that we provide is exceptional. In fact, the performance overhead of a right-to-earn InfiniSync black box is less than the right latency to your average all flasher right. And then, we have that protected, from any man-made or natural disaster, fire, explosion, earthquake, power outages, which of course you can protect with generators, but you can't protect from a communications outage, and we'll protect from a communications outage as well. So the asynchronous communication would use your wide area communications, it can use any other type of wifi communications, or if you lose all of that, it will communicate celluarly. >> So the problem you're solving is eliminating the trade-off, if I understand it. Previously, I would have to either put in a bunker site which is super expensive, I got to a huge telecommunications cost, and just a complicated infrastructure, or I would have to expose myself to a RPO nowhere close to zero, expose myself to data loss. Is that right? >> Correct. We're solving a performance problem because your performance overhead is extremely low. We're solving a complexity problem because you don't have to worry about managing that third location. You don't have to worry about the complexity of keeping three copies of your data in sync, we're solving the risk by protecting against any natural or man-made disaster, and we're significantly improving the cost. >> Let's talk about the business case for a moment, if we can. So, I got to buy this system from you, so there's a cost in, but I don't have to buy a bunker site, I don't have to rent, lease, buy staff, et cetera, I don't have to pay for the telecommunications lines, yet I get the same or actually even better RPO? >> You'll get an RPO of zero which is better than the worse case scenario in a bunker, and even if we lose your telecommunications you can still maintain an RPO of zero, again because of the cellular back-up or in the absolute worse case, you can take the InfiniSync black box to your remote location, plug it in, and it will synchronize automatically. >> And I can buy this today? >> You can buy it today and you can buy it today at a cost that will be less than a telecommunications equipment and subscriptions that you need at a bunker site. >> Excellent, well great. I'm really excited to see how this product goes in the market place. Congratulations on getting it out and good luck with it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> You're welcome, alright, now we're going to cut over to Peter Burris in Palo Alto with The Cube Studios there, and we're going to hear about InfiniGuard, which is an interesting solution. Infinidat customers were actually using InfiniBox as a back-up target, so they went to Infinidat and said, "Hey can you make this a back-up and recovery "solution and partner with back-up software companies." We're going to talk about MultiCloud, it's one of the hottest topics in the business, want to learn more about that, and then Eric Burgener from IDC is coming in to give us the analyst perspective, and then back here to back here to wrap up with Brian Carmody. Over to you, Peter. >> Thanks, Dave I'm Peter Burris and I'm here in our Palo Alto, The Cube studios, and I'm being joined here by Bob Cancilla, who's the Executive Vice President of Business Development and Relationships, and Neville Yates, who's a Business Continuity Consultant. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here on The Cube with us. >> Thanks, Peter, thanks for being here. >> So, there is a lot of conversation about digital business and the role that data plays in it. From our perspective, we have a relatively simple way of thinking about these things, and we think that the difference between a business and digital business is the role the data plays in the digital business. A business gets more digital as it uses it's data differently. Specifically it's data assets, which means that the thinking inside business has to change from data protection or asset or server protection, or network protection to truly digital business protection. What do you guys say? >> Sure we're seeing the same thing, as you're saying there Peter. In fact, our customers have asked us to spread our influence in their data protection. We have been evaluating ways to expand our business, to expand our influence in the industry, and they came back and told us, if we wanted to help them the best way that we could help them is to go on and take on the high-end back-up and recovery solutions where there really is one major player in the market today. Effectively, a monopoly. Our customers' words, not our own. At the same time, our product management team was looking into ways of expanding our influence as well, and they strongly believed and convinced me, convinced us, our leadership team within side of Infinidat to enter into the secondary storage market. And it was very clear that we could build upon the foundation, the pillars of what we've done on the primary storage side and the innovations that we brought to the market there. Things around or multiple pedibyte scale, with incredible density, faster than flash performance, the extreme ease of use and lowering the total cost of operation at the enterprise client. >> So, I want to turn that into some numbers. We've done some research here now at Wikibon that suggests that a typical Fortune 1000 company, because of brittle and complex restore processes specifically, too many cooks involved, a focus on not the data but on devices, means that there's a lot of failure that happens especially during restore processes, and that can cause, again a typical Fortune 1000 company, 1.25 plus billion dollars revenue over a four year period. What do you say as you think about business continuity for some of these emerging and evolving companies? >> That translates into time is money. And if you need to recover data in support of revenue-generating operations and applications, you've got to have that data come back to be productively usable. What we do with InfiniGuard is ensure that those recovery time objectives are met in support of that business application and it is the leveraging of the pillars that Bob talked about in terms of performance, the way we are unbelievable custodians of data, and then we're able to deliver that data back faster than what people expect. They're used today to mediocrity. It takes too long. I was with a customer two weeks ago. We were backing up a three terabyte data base. This is not a big amount of data. It takes about half and hour. We would say, "Let's do a restore" and the gentleman looked at me and said, "We don't have time." I said, "No, it's a 30 minute process." This person expected it to take five and six hours. Add that up in terms of dollars per hours, what it means to that revenue-generating application, and that's where those numbers come from. >> Yeah, especially for fails because of, as you said, Bob, the lack of ease of use and the lack of simplicity. So, we're here to talk about something. What is it that we're talking about and how does it work? >> Let me tell ya, I'll cover the what it is. I'll let Nevil get into a little bit how it works. So the what it is, we built it off the building block of our InfiniBox technology. We started with our model F4260, a one pedibyte usable configuration, we integrated in stainless, deduplication engines, what we call DBEs, and a high availability topology that effectively protects up to 20 pedibytes of data. We combined that with a vast certification and openness of independent software vendors in the data protections space. We want to encourage openness, and an open ecosystem. We don't want to lock any customer out of their preferred software solution in that space. And, you can see that with the recent announcements that we've made about expanding our partnerships in this space specifically, Commvault and B. >> Well, very importantly, the idea of partnership and simplicity in these of views, you want your box, the InfiniGuard to be as high quality and productive as possible, but you don't want to force a dramatic change on how an organization works, so let's dig into some of that Nevil. How does this work in practice? >> It's very simple. We have these deduplication engines that front end the InfiniBox storage. But what is unique, because there's others ways of packaging this sort of thing, but what is unique is when the InfiniGuard gets the data, it builds knowledge of relationships of that data. Deduplication is a challenge for second tier storage systems because it is a random IO profile that has to be gathered in the fashion to sequentially feed this data back. Our knowledge-building engine, which we call NeuroCache in the InfiniBox is the means by which we understand how to gather this data in a timely fashion. >> So, NeuroCache helps essentially sustain some degree of organization of the data within the box. >> Absolutely. And there's a by-product of that organization that the ability to go and get it ahead of the ask allows us to respond to meet recovery time objectives. >> And that's where you go from five to six hours for a relatively small restore to >> To 30 minutes. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, exactly. >> By feeding the data back out to the system in a pre-organized way, the system's taking care of a lot of the randomness and therefore the time necessary to perform a restore. >> Exactly and other systems don't have that capability, and so they are six hours. >> So we're talking about a difference between 30 minutes and six hours and I also wanted very quickly, Bob, to ask you a question the last couple minutes here, you mentioned partnerships. We also want to make sure that we have a time to value equation that works for your average business. Because the box can work with a lot of different software that really is where the operations activities are defined, presumably it comes in pretty quickly and it delivers value pretty quickly. Have I got that right? >> Absolutely, so we have done a vast amount of testing, certification, demos, POCs, you name it, with all the major players out there that are in this market on the back-up software side, the data protection side of the business. All of them have commented about the better business continuity solution that we put together, in conjunction with their product as well. And, the number one feedback that comes back is, "Wow, the restore times that you guys deliver to the market "are unlike anything we've seen before." >> So, to summarize, it goes in faster, it works faster, and it scales better, so the business truly can think of itself as being protected, not just sets of data. >> Absolutely. >> Agreed. >> Alright, hey Bob Cancilla, EDP of Business Development Partnerships, Neville Yates, Business Continuity Consultant, thanks very much for being on The Cube, and we'll be right back to talk Multicloud after this short break. >> With our previous storage provider, we faced many challenges. We were growing so fast, that our storage solution wasn't able to keep up. We were having large amounts of downtime, problems with the infrastructure, problems with getting support. We needed a system that was scalable, that was cost effective, and allow our business to grow as our customers' demands were growing. We needed a product that enabled us to manage the outward provision customer workloads quickly and efficiently, be able to report on the amount of data that the customer was using. The solution better enabled us to replicate our customers' data between different geos. >> We're back. Joining me now are Gregory Touretsky and Erik Kaulberg, both senior directors at Infinidat, overseeing much of the company's portfolio. Gregory, let's talk Multicloud. It's become a default part of almost all IT strategies, but done wrong, it can generate a lot of data-related costs and risks. What's Infinidat's perspective? >> So yeah, before we go there, I will mention this phenomemon of the data gravity. So we see, as many of our customers report that, as much as amount of data grows in the organization, it becomes much harder for them to move applications and services to a different data center, or to a different oblicloud. So, the more data they accumulate, the harder it becomes to move it, and they get locked into this, so we believe that any organization deserves a way to move freely between different obliclouds or data centers, and that's the reason we are thinking about the multicloud solution and how we can provide an easy way for the companies to move between data centers. >> So, clearly there's a need to be able to optimize your costs to the benefits associated with data, Erik, as we think about this, what are some of the key considerations most enterprises have to worry about? >> The biggest one overall is the strategic nature of cloud choices. At one point, cloud was a back room, the shadow IT kind of thing. You saw some IT staff member go sign up for gmail and spread or dropbox %or things like that, but now CIOs are thinking, well, I've got to get all these cloud services under control and I'm spending a whole lot of money with one of the big two cloud providers. And so that's really the strategic rationale of why were saying, "Organizations, especially large enterprises require this kind of sovereign storage that disagregates the data from the public clouds to truly enable the possibility cloud competition as well as to truly deliver on the promise of the agility of public clouds. >> So, great conversation, but we're here to actually talk about something specifically Neutrix. Gregory, what is it? >> Sure, so Neutrix, is a completely new offering that we come with. We are not selling here any box or appliance for the customers to deploy in their data center. We're talking about a cloud service that is provided by Infinidat. >> We are building our infrastructure in a major colo, partnering with Equinix and others, we are finding data centers that are adjacent public clouds, such as AWS or Azure to ensure very low latency and high bandwidth connectivity. And then we build our infrastructure there with InfiniBox storage and networking gear that allows our customers to really use this for two main reasons. So one use case, is disaster recovery. If a customer has our storage on prem in his data center, they may use our efficient application mechanism to copy data and get second copy outside of the data center without building the second data center. So, in case of disaster, they can recover. The other use case we see is very interesting for the customers, is an ability to consume while running the application in the public cloud directly from our storage. So they can do any first mount or iSCSi mount to storage available from our cloud, and then run the application. We are also providing the capability to consume the sane file system from multiple clouds at the same time. So you may run your application both in Amazon and Microsoft clouds and still access and share the data. >> Sounds like it's also an opportunity to simplify ramping into a cloud as well. Is that one of the use cases? >> Absolutely. So it's basically a combination of those two use cases that I described. The customers may replicate data from their own prem environment into the Neutrix Cloud, and then consume it from the public cloud. >> Erik, this concept has been around for a while, even if it hasn't actually been realized. What makes this in particular different? I think there's a couple of elements to it. So number one is we don't really see that there's a true enterprise grade public cloud storage offering today for active data. And so we're basically bringing in that rich heritage of InfiniBox capabilities and those technologies we've developed over a number of years to deliver an enterprise grade storage except without the box as a service. So that's a big differentiator for us versus the native public cloud storage offerings. And then when you look at the universe of other companies who are trying to develop let's say, cloud adjacent type offerings, we believe we have the right combination of that scalable technology with the correct business model that is aligned in a way that people are buying cloud today. So that's kind of the differentiation in a nutshell. >> But it's not just the box, there's also some managed servces associated with it, right? >> Well, actually, it's not a box, that's the whole idea. So, the entire thing is a consumable service, you're paying by the drink, it's a simple flat pricing of nine cents per gigabyte per month, and it's essentially as easy to consume as the native public cloud storage offerings. >> So as you look forward and imagine the role that this is going to play in conjunction with some of the other offerings, what should customers be looking to out of Neutrix, in conjunction with the rest of the portfolio. >> So basically they can get, as Erik mentioned, what they like with InfiniBox, without dealing with the box. They get fully-managed service, they get freedom of choice, they can move applications easily between different public clouds and to or from the own prem environment without thinking about the egress costs, and they can get great capabilities, great features like snapshots writeables, snapshots without overpaying to the public cloud providers. >> So, better economics, greater flexibility, better protection and de-risking of the data overall. >> Absolutely. >> At scale. >> Yes. >> Alright, great. So I want to thank very much, Gregory, Erik being here on The Cube. We'll be right back to get the analyst perspective from Eric Burgener from IDC. >> And one of our challenges of our industry as a whole, is that it operates to four nines as a level of excellence for example. And what that means is well it could be down for 30 seconds a month. I can't think of anything worse than me having me to turn around to my customers and say, "Oh, I am sorry. "We weren't available for 30 seconds." And yet most people that work in our IT industry seem to think that's acceptable, but it's not when it comes to data centers, clouds, and the sort of stuff that we're doing. So, the fundamental aspect is that can we run storage that is always available? >> Welcome back. Now we're sitting here with Eric Burgener, who is a research vice-president and the storage at IDC. Eric, you've listened to Infinidat's portfolio announcement. What do you think? >> Yeah, Peter, thanks for having me on the show. So, I've got a couple of reactions to that. I think that what they've announced is playing into a couple of major trends that we've seen in the enterprise. Number one is, as companies undergo digital transformation, efficiency of the IT operations is really a critical issue. And so, I'm seeing a couple of things in this announcement that will really play into that area. They've got a much larger, much denser platform at this point that will allow a lot more consolidation of workload, and that's sort of an area that Infinidat has focused on in the past to consolidate a lot of different workloads under one platform, so I think the efficiency of those kind of operations will increase going forward with this announcement. Another area that sort of plays into this is every organization needs multiple storage platforms to be able to meet their business requirements. And what we've seen with announcement is their basically providing multiple platforms, but that are all built around the same architecture, so that has management ease of use advantages associated with that, so that's a benefit that will potentially allow CIOs to move to a smaller number of vendors and fewer administrative skill sets, yet still meet their requirements. And I think the other area that's sort of a big issue here, is what their announcing in the hybrid cloud arena. So, clearly, enterprises are operating as hybrid clouds today, well over 70% of all organizations actually have hybrid cloud operations in place. What we've seen with this announcement, is an ability for people to leverage the full storage mnagement data set of an Infinidat platform while they leverage multiple clouds on the back end. And if they need to move between clouds they have an ability to do that with this new feature, the Neutrix cloud. And so that really breaks the lock-in that you see from a lot of cloud operations out there today that in certain cases can really limit the flexibility that a CIO has to meet their business requirements. >> Let me build on that a second. So, really what you're saying is that by not binding the data to the cloud, the business gets greater flexibility in how they're going to use the data, how they're going to apply the data, both from an applications standpoint as well as resource and cost standpoint. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean moving to the cloud is actually sort of a fluid decision that sometimes you need to move things back. We've actually seen a lot of repatriation going on, people that started in the cloud, and then as things changed they needed to move things back, or maybe they want to move to another cloud operation. They might want to move from Amazon to Google or Microsoft. What we're seeing with Neutrix Cloud is an ability basically to do that. It's breaks that lock-in. >> Great. >> They can still take advantage to those back end platforms. >> Fantastic. Eric Burgener, IDC Research Vice-President, Storage. Back to you, Dave. >> Thanks, Peter. We're back with Brian Cormody. We're going to summarize now. So we're seeing the evolution of Infinidat going from a single product company going to a portfolio company. Brian, I want to ask you to summarize. I want to start with InfiniBox, I'm also going to ask you "Is this the same software, and does it enable new use cases, or is this just bigger, better, faster?" >> Yeah, it's the same software that runs on all of our InfiniBox systems, it has the same feature set, it's completely compatible for replication and everything like that. It's just more capacity to use, 8.4 pedibytes of effective capacity. And the use cases that are pulling this into the field, are deep-learning, analytics, and IOT. >> Alright, let's go into the portfolio. I'm going to ask you, do you have a favorite child, do you have a favorite child in the portfolio. Let's start with InfiniSync. >> Sure, so I love them all equally. InfiniSync is a revolutionary appliance for banking and other highly regulated industries that have a requirement to have zero RPO, but also have protection against rolling disasters and regional disasters. Traditionally the way that that gets solved, you have a data center, say, in lower Manhatten where you do your primary computing, you do synchronous to a data bunker, say in northern New Jersey, and then you asynchronous out of region, say out to California. So, under our model with InfiniSync, it's a 450 pound, ballistically protected data bunker appliance, InfiniSync guarantees that with no data loss, and no reduction in performance, all transactions are guaranteed for delivery to the remote out-of-region site. So what this allows customers to do, is to erase data centers out of their terpology. Northern New Jersey, the bunker goes away, and customers, again in highly rated industries, like banking that have these requirements, they're going to save 10s of millions of dollars a year in cost avoidance by closing down unnecessary data centers. >> Dramatically sort of simplify their infrastructure and operations. Alright, InfiniGuardm I stumbled into it at another event, you guys hadn't announced it yet, and I was like, "Hmmm, what's this?" But tell us about InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, so InfiniGuard is a multi-pedibyte appliance that's 20 pedibytes of data protection in a single rack, in a single system, and it has 10 times the restore performance of data domain, at a fraction of the cost. >> Okay, and then the Neutrix Cloud, this is to me maybe the most interesting of all the announcements. What's your take on that? So, like I said, I love them all equally, but Neutrix Cloud for sure is the most disruptive of all the technologies that we're announcing this week. The idea of Neutrix Cloud is that it is neutral storage for consumption in the public cloud. So think about it like this. Do you think it's weird, that EBS and EFS are only compatible with Amazon coputing? And Google Cloud storage is only compatible with Google. Think about it for a second if IBM only worked with IBM servers. That's bringing us back to the 1950s and 60s. Or if EMC storage was only compatible with Dell servers, customers would never accept that, but in the Silicon Valley aligargic, wall-garden model, they can't help themselves. They just have to get your data. "And just give us your data, it'll be great. "We'll send a snowball or a truck to go pick it up." Because they know once they have your data, they have you locked in. They cannot help themselves from creating this wall-garden proprietary model. Well, like we call it a walled, prison yard. So the idea is with Neutrix Cloud, rather than your storage being weaponized as a customer to lock you in, what if they didn't get your data and what if instead you stored your data with a trusted, neutral, third party, that practices data neutrality. Because we guarantee contractually to every customer, that we will never take money and we will never shake down any of the cloud providers in order to access our Neutrix Cloud network, and we will never do side deals and partnerships with any of them to favor one cloud over the other. So the end result, you end up having for example, a couple of pedibytes of file systems, where you can have thousands of guests that have that file system mounted simultaneously from your V-Net and Azure, from your VPCs into AWS, and they all have simultaneous, screaming high performance access to one common set of your data. So by pulling and ripping your data from the arms of those public cloud providers, and instead only giving them shared common neutral access, we can now get them to start competing against each other for business. So rather than your storage being weaponized you, it's a tool that you can use to force the cloud providers to compete against each other for your business. >> So, I'm sure you guys may have a lot of questions there, hop into the crowd chat, it's crowdchat.net/infinichat. Ask me anything, ama crowdchat, Brian will be in there in a moment. I got to ask ya couple of more questions before I let you go. >> Sure. >> What was your motivation for this portfolio explansion. >> So the motivation was that at the end of the day, customers are very clear to us that they do not want to focus on their infrastructure. They want to focus on their businesses. And as their infrastructure scales, it becomes exponentially more complex to deal with issues of reliability, economics and performance. And, so we realized that if we're going to fulfill our company's mission, that we have to expand our mission, and help customers solves problems throughout more of the data lifecycle and focus on some of the pain points that extend beyond primary storage. That we have to start bringing solutions to market that help customers get to the cloud faster, and when they get there, to be more agile. And to focus on data protection, which again is a huge pain point. So the motivation at the end of the day is about helping customers do more with less. >> And the mission again, can you just summarize that, multi pedibyte? >> Yeah, the corporate mission of Infinidat is to store humanity's knowledge and to make new forms of computing possible. >> Big mission. >> Our humble mission. >> Humble, right. The reason I ask that question of your motivation, people might say, "Oh obviously, to make more money." But they're been a lot of single-product companies, feature companies that have done quite well, so in order to fulfill that mission, you really need a portfolio. What should we be watching as barometers of success? How are you guys measuring yourselves, How should we be measuring you? >> Oh I think the most fair way to do that is to measure us on successful execution of that mission, and at the end of the day, it's about helping customers compute harder and deeper on larger data sets, and to do so at lower costs than the competitor down the road, because at the end of the day, that's the only source of competitive advantage, that companies get out of their infrastructure. The better we help customers do that, the more that we consider ourselves succeeding in our mission. >> Alright, Brian, thank you, no kids but new products are kind of like giving birth. >> It's really cool. >> So hop into the crowd chat, it's an ask me anything questions. Brian will be in there, we got analysts in there, a bunch of experts as well. Brian, thanks very much. It was awesome having you on. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you in the crowd chat. (upbeat digital music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (electronic pop music) >> Thanks, Peter. We're back with Brian Carmody. We're going to summarize now. So we're seeing the evolution of Infinidat going from a single-product company to a portfolio company. Brian, I'm going to ask you to summarize. I want to start with InfiniBox. I'm also going to ask you, is this the same software, and does it enable new use cases, or is it just bigger, better, faster? >> It's the same software that runs on all of our InfiniBox systems. It has the same feature set, it's completely compatible for replication and everything like that. It's just more capacity. It's 8.4 petabytes of effective capacity. The use cases that are pulling this into the field are deep learning, analytics, and IOT. >> All right, let's go into the portfolio. I'm going to ask you, it's like, "Do you have a favorite child? Do you have a favorite child in the portfolio?" Let's start with InfiniSync. >> Sure. I love them all equally. InfiniSync is a revolutionary appliance for banking and other highly-regulated industries that have a requirement to have 0 RPO but also have protection against rolling disasters and regional disasters. Traditionally, the way that that gets solved is you have a data center, say, in lower Manhattan where you do your primary computing. You do synchronous to a data bunker, say, in northern New Jersey, and then you do asynchronous out of region, say, out to California. Under our model with InfiniSync, it's a 450-pound ballistically-protected data bunker appliance. InfiniSync guarantees that with no data loss and no reduction in performance, all transactions are guaranteed for delivery to the remote, out-of-region site. What this allows customers to do is to erase data centers out of their topology. Northern New Jersey, the bunker goes away. Again, highly-regulated industries like banking that have these requirements, they're going to save tens of millions of dollars a year in cost avoidance by closing down unnecessary data centers. >> And dramatically simplify their infrastructure and operations. >> Absolutely. >> InfiniGuard, I stumbled into it at another event. You guys hadn't announced it yet. I was like, "Hmm, what's this?" Tell us about InfiniGuard. >> InfiniGuard is a multi-petabyte appliance that fits 20 petabytes of data protection in a single rack, in a single system, and it has 10 times the restore performance of data domain at a fraction of the cost. >> Okay, and then the Nutrix cloud ... This is, to me, maybe the most interesting of all the announcements. What's your take on that? >> Like I said, I love them all equally, but Nutrix cloud for sure is the most disruptive of all the technologies that we're announcing this week. The idea of Nutrix cloud is that it is neutral storage for consumption in the public cloud. So think about it like this. Don't you think it's weird that EBS and EFS are only compatible with Amazon computing and Google cloud storage is only compatible with Google? Think about it for a second. If IBM storage only worked with IBM servers, that's bringing us back to the 1950s and '60s. Or if EMC storage was only compatible with Dell servers, customers would never accept that. But in the Silicon Valley oligarchic, walled-garden model, they can't help themselves. They just have to get your data. "Just give us your data. It'll be great. We'll send a snowball or a truck to go pick it up." Because they know once they have your data, they have you locked in. They cannot help themselves from creating this walled-garden proprietary model, or like we call it, a walled prison yard. So the idea is, with Nutrix cloud, rather than your storage being weaponized against you as a customer to lock you in, what if they didn't get your data? What if instead, you stored your data with a trusted, neutral third party that practices data neutrality? Because we guarantee contractually to every customer that we will never take money, and we will never shake down any of the cloud providers in order to get access to our Nutrix cloud network, and we will never do side deals and partnerships with any of them to favor one cloud over the other. So the end result is that you end up having, for example, a couple of petabyte-scale file systems where you can have thousands of guests that have that file system mounted simultaneously from your VNet in Azure, from your VPC's in AWS, and they all have simultaneous screaming high-performance access to one common set of your data. So by pulling and ripping your data out of the arms of those public cloud providers and instead, only giving them shared, common, neutral access, we can now get them to start competing against each other for business. Rather than your storage being weaponized against you, it's a tool which you can use to force the cloud providers to compete against each other for your business. >> I'm sure you guys may have a lot of questions there. Hop into the CrowdChat. It's crowdchat.net/infinichat. Ask Me Anything, AMA CrowdChat. Brian will be in there in a moment. I got to ask a couple of questions before I let you go. >> Brian: Sure. >> What was your motivation for this portfolio expansion? >> The motivation was that at the end of the day, customers are very clear to us that they do not want to focus on their infrastructure. They want to focus on their businesses. As their infrastructure scales, it becomes exponentially more complex. They deal with issues of reliability, and economics, and performance. We realized that if we're going to fulfill our company's mission, that we have to expand our mission and help customers solve problems throughout more of the data lifecycle, and focus on some of the pain points that extend beyond primary storage. We have to start bringing solutions to market that help customers get to the cloud faster, and when they get there, to be more agile, and to focus on data protection, which, again, is a huge pain point. The motivation at the end of the day is about helping customers do more with less. >> And the mission again, can you just summarize that? Multi-petabyte, and ... ? >> The corporate mission of Infinidat is to store humanity's knowledge and to make new forms of computing possible. >> Big mission. (laughs) Okay, fantastic. >> Our humble mission, yes. >> Humble, right. The reason I asked that question of your motivation, people always say, "Oh, obviously to make more money." But there have been a lot of single-product companies or feature companies that have done quite well. In order to fulfill that mission, you really need a portfolio. What should we be watching as barometers of success? How are you guys measuring yourselves? How should we be measuring you? >> I think the most fair way to do that is to measure us on successful execution of that mission. At the end of the day, it's about helping customers compute harder and deeper on larger data sets, and to do so at lower cost than the competitor down the road. Because at the end of the day, that's the only source of competitive advantage that companies get out of their infrastructure. The better we help customers do that, the more we consider ourselves succeeding in our mission. >> All right, Brian, thank you. No kids, but new products are kind of like giving birth. Best I can say. >> I have dogs. They're like dogs. >> So hop into the CrowdChat. It's an Ask Me Anything questions. Brian will be in there, we've got analysts in there, a bunch of experts as well. Brian, thanks very much. It was awesome having you on. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks for watching, everybody. See you in the CrowdChat. (electronic pop music)

>> Male Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hey everybody, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special presentation on theCUBE. Infinidat is a company that we've been following since it's early days. A hot storage company, growing like crazy, doing things differently than most storage companies. We've basically been doubling revenues every year for quite some time now. And Brian Carmody is here to help me kick off this announcement and the presentation tonight. Brian, thanks for coming back on. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. >> So you may notice, we have a crowd chat going on live, it's crowdchat.net/infinichat, you can ask any question you want, it's an ask-me-anything chat about this announcement. This is a bi-coastal program that we're running today between here and our offices in Palo Alto. So, Brian, let's get into it, give us the update on Infinidat. >> Things are going very well at Infinidat. We're just coming out of our 17th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, so we have a healthy, sustainable, profitable business. We have happy, loyal customers. 71% of our revenue in 2017 came from existing customers that were increasing their investment in our technologies, we're delighted by that. And we have surpassed three exabytes of customer deployments. So, things are wonderful. >> And you've done this, essentially, as a one product company, is that correct? >> Yeah, so going back to our first saddle in the summer of 2013, that growth has been on the back of a single product, InfiniBox, targeted at primary storage. >> Okay, so what's inside of InfiniBox? Tell me about some of the innovations. And speaking to some of your customers, and I've spoken to a number of them, they tell me one of the things they like is that from early on, I think serial number 0001, they can take advantage of any innovations that you produce within that product, is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, InfiniBox is a software product. It has dumb hardware, dumb commodity hardware and it has very smart, intelligent software. And this allows us to, kind of, break from this forklift upgrade model and move to a model where the product gets better over time. So, if you look at the history of InifiniBox, going back to the beginning, with each successive release of our software, latency goes down, new features are added, and capacity increases become available. And this is, ya know, the difference between a software versus a hardware based innovation model. >> One of the interesting things I'll note about Infinidat is, ya know, you guys, you're doing software defined, you don't really use that terminology, ya know, it's the buzzword of the industry. The other buzzword is artificial intelligence, machine learning. You're actually using machine intelligence, you have talked about this before, to optimize the placement of data that allows you to use much less expensive media than some of the other guys and deliver more value to customers. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. And, by the way, the reason why that is, is because we're an engineering company, not a marketing company, so we prefer just doing things rather than talking about them, but, so, InfiniBox is the first expression of a set of fundamental technologies, of our technology platform. And the first piece of that is what you're talking about, it's called neurocache, and it's our ML and AI infrastructure for learning customer workloads and using that insight in real time to optimize data placement. And the end result of this is driving cost out of storage infrastructure and driving up performance. That's the first piece, that's neurocache. The second piece of our technology foundations is InfiniSnap. So, this is our snapshot mechanism that allows infinite lock-free copy data management with absolutely no performance impact. So, that's the second. And then the third, is InfiniRaid and our RAS platform. So, this is our distributed raid architecture that allows us to have multi-petabyte scale, extremely high durability, but also have extremely high availability of the services. And that's what enables our seven nines reliability guarantee. Those things together are the basis of our products. >> Okay, so, sort of, we're here today and now what's exciting is you're expanding beyond just a one product company into a portfolio of products. So, sort of, take us through what you're announcing today. >> Yeah, so this is a really exciting day and it's a milestone for Infinidat because InfiniBox now has some brothers and sisters in the family. The first thing that we are announcing is a new F series InfiniBox model, which we call F-6212. So, this is the same feature set, it's the same software, it's the same everything as it's smaller InfiniBox models, but it is extremely high capacity, it's our largest InfiniBox, it's 8.3 petabytes of capacity in that same F-6000 form factor. So, that's number one. Number two, we're announcing a product called InfiniGuard. InfiniGuard is petabyte scale data protection with lightning fast restores. The third thing that we're announcing is a new product called InfiniSync. InfiniSync is a revolutionary business continuity appliance that allows synchronous RPO-0 replication over infinite distances. It's the first ever in this category. And then, the fourth and final thing that we're announcing is a product called NutrixCloud. NutrixCloud is sovereign storage, but enables real-time competition between public cloud providers. The ultimate in agility, which is the ability to go poly-cloud. And that's the content of the portfolio announcement. >> Excellent, okay, great. Thanks Brian, for helping us set that up. The program today, as I say, there's a crowd chat going on, crowdchat.net/infinichat, ask any question that you want. We're going to cover other's announcements today. InfiniSync is the next segment that's up. Dr. Rico is here, we're going to do a quick switch, and I'll be interviewing doc. And then we're going to kick it over to our studio in Palo Alto to talk about InfiniGuard, which is, essentially, what was happening is Infinidat customers were using InfiniBox as a backup target and then asked Infinidat, "Hey, can you actually make this a product "and start partnering with software companies, "backup software companies and, you know, "making it a robust, you know, backup "and recovery solution?" And then multi-cloud is, you know, one of the hottest topics going. Really interested to hear more about that. And then we're going to bring on Eric Burgener from IDC to get the analyst perspective, that's also going to be in the west coast. And then Brian and I are going to come back and wrap up. And then we're going to dive into the crowd chat, so keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with Dr. Rico, right after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> We're back with Doc D'errico, who's the CMO of Infinidat. Doc, welcome. >> Thank you Dave. >> I got to ask you, we've known each other for a long time. Chief Marketing Officer, you're an engineer. >> I am an engineer - Explain that please. Yeah, I have a PhD in engineering and I have 14 patents in the storage industry from my prior jobs. Infinidat is an unconventional company and we're using technology to solve problems in an unconventional way. >> Well, congratulations. - [Doc] Thank you. >> It's great to have you back on theCUBE. Infinisync, I'm very excited about this solution, want to understand it better, what is Infinisync? >> Well Dave, before we talk about Infinisync directly, let's expand on what Brian talked about as the foundation technologies of Infinidat and the InfiniBox. In the InfiniBox, we provide InfiniSnap, which is a near zero performance impact to the application with near zero overhead. Just of course the incremental data that you write to it. We also provide async and we provide synchronous replication. Our async replication provides all that zero overhead that we talked about InfiniSnap, with a four second interval. We can replicate data four seconds apart. Nearly a four second RPO, recovery point objective. And our sync technology is built on all of that as well. We provide the lowest overhead, the lowest latency in the industry at only 400 microseconds. Which provides an RPO of zero, with near zero performance impact to your application as well, which is exciting. But synchronous replication for those applications, while there's significant values to that, and by the way, all of that technology I just talked about, is just as Brian said, it's zero additional cost to the customer with Infinidat. There are some exciting business cases why you'd use any of those technologies. But if you're in a disaster recovery mode and you do need an RPO of zero, you need to recognize that disasters happen, not just locally, not just within your facility, they happen in larger scale, and regionally. So you need to locate your disaster recovery center somewhere else. And when you do that, you're providing additional impact and additional performance overhead just replicating the data over distance. You're providing additional cost and you're providing additional complexity. So what we're providing is InfiniSync and InfiniSync extends the customer's ability to provide business continuity over long distances at an RPO of zero. >> Okay, so talk more about this. So you're essentially putting in a hardened box on site, and you're copying data synchronously to that. And then you're asynchronously going to distance, is that correct? >> Yes, in a traditional sense what a normal solution would do is you would implement a multi-site or a multi-hop type of topology. You'd build out a bunker site and you'd put another box there, another storage unit there. You'd replicate synchronously to that, and you would either replicate asynchronously from there to a disaster recovery site, or you'd replicate from your initial primary source storage device to your disaster recover site, which would be a long distance away. The problem with that of course is complexity and management, the additional cost in overhead, and the additional communications requirements. And you're not necessarily guaranteeing an RPO of zero depending upon the type of outage. So what we're doing is we're providing, in essence, that bunker by providing an InfiniSync black box, which you can put right next to your InfiniBox. The synchronous replication happens behind the scenes right there, and the asynchronous replication will happen automatically to your remote disaster recovery site. The performance that we provide is exceptional. In fact, the performance overhead of a right to earn InfiniSync black box, is less than the right latency to your average all-flash array. And then, we have that protected from any type of man-made or natural disaster. Fire, explosion. >> Earthquake. - Earthquake. Power outages, which you can of course protect with generators, but you can't protect from a communications outage, and we'll protect from a communications outage as well. So the asynchronous communication would use your white area communications, it can use any other type of wi-fi communications, or if we lose all of that, it'll communicate cellularly. >> So the problem you're solving is eliminating the trade-off, if I understand it. Previously, I would have to either put in a bunker site, which is super expensive. I got to huge telecommunications cost, and just a complicated infrastructure. Or, I would have to expose myself to a RPO nowhere close to zero. >> Doc: Correct. >> Expose myself to data loss, is that right? >> Correct, we're solving a performance problem, because your performance overhead is extremely low. We're solving a complexity problem because you don't have to worry about managing that third location. You don't have to worry about the complexity of keeping three copies of your data in sync. We're solving the risk by protecting against any natural or man-made disaster, and we're significantly improving the cost. >> Let's talk about the business case for a moment if we can. So I got to buy the system from you, so there's a cost in. But I don't have to buy a bunker site, I don't have to rent, lease, buy, staff, et cetera. I don't have to pay for the telecommunications lines, yet I get the same or actually even better RPO? >> You'll get an RPO of zero, which is better than the worst-case scenario in a bunker. And even if we lose your telecommunications, you can still maintain an RPO of zero, again, because of the cellular backup. or in the absolute worst case, you can take the InfiniSync black box to your remote location, plug it in, and it will synchronize automatically. >> And I can buy this today? >> You can buy it today and you can buy it today at a cost that'll be less than the telecommunications equipment and subscriptions that you need at a bunker site. >> Excellent, well great, I'm really excited to see how this product goes into the marketplace. Congratulations on getting it out and good luck with it. >> Thank you Dave. >> You're welcome, alright now we're going to cut over to Peter Burris in Palo Alto in theCUBE studios there and we're going to hear about InfiniGuard, which is an interesting solution. Infinidat customers were actually using InfiniBox as a backup target. So they went to Infinidat and said hey, could you actually make this a backup and recover solution and partner with backup software companies. We're going to talk about Multicloud, it's one of the hottest topics in the business, want to learn more about that. And then, Eric Burgener from IDC is coming in to give us the analyst perspective. And then back here to wrap up with Brian Carmody. Over to you Peter. >> Man: Clear. (upbeat music)