>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back inside the Sands. We are in Las Vegas. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2019 by welcoming in Erik Kaulberg, VP of cloud solutions at Infinidat. Erik, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, it's nice to see you too. >> So share a little bit at home for the folks who might not be too familiar with Infindat. I know you guys, big in the, in data storage, in terms of what's happening in the enterprise, but shed a little bit of light on that for us. >> Yeah, so Infinidat's all about re-inventing the next generation of data storage at multi-petabyte scale, whether that's for on-prem appliances where we have over 5.4 exabytes deployed now around the world, large enterprises, or whether that's through our cloud services like Neutrix Cloud, which we're talking a lot about today and through the conference, we're solving large data challenges for customers with blocker file storage requirements. We're doing that through technology that gets the price point of hard drives with the performance capabilities of solid state media, DRAM and flash, and we're doing it at very large scale, even though we kind of fly under the radar a bit from a marketing standpoint. >> So there's a lot of interesting things going on. Good storage demand. There's no question that the cloud is eating away at some of the traditional on-prem, and there's very few companies that are gaining share rapidly. You happen to be one of them. You know, Pure Storage grew 15% this quarter. Much, much lower. You know, generally HBE's shrinking. I think Delium C grew a little bit. You know, IBM has been down. I don't think they've announced yet. So you're seeing a couple of things. Cloud eating away, and then all this injection of flash. You're really the only guys who can make spinning disk run faster, as fast as flash. Everybody else is just throwing flash at the problem. And that's created headroom. So what are you guys seeing, 'cause you're clearly growing. You're a market share gainer. You have the advantage of being new and smaller. Talk about your business and how you're growing and why you're growing. >> It's nothing but growth, and it comes from this increase in the overall data that, requirements that customers have, and it comes from the economic aspects of that data. Fundamentally, data storage is all about economics, and we're able to deliver through our technical advantage of blending disk, flash, and DRAM an order of magnitude cost basis advantage, and that translates into direct financial benefits that allow ultimately enterprises to do more with their data. That's what we're all about. >> So as workloads shift to the cloud, there's an on-prem component. We're going to talk about cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. But you've got a product called Neutrix. Talk about that and where it fits into this big macro trend that we've just been talking about. >> Absolutely. So Neutrix fits into the broader landscape in a couple of ways. First of all, many of the clients that we deal with are large enterprises, and they're in their relatively early stages of cloud transformation. So Neutrix provides an easy on ramp for them to come from our best in class on-prem infrastructure and make that data accessible in one or multiple clouds. And that kind of, maybe it's for test dev. Maybe it's for a disaster recovery, a pilot light scenario, or a couple other use cases for general purpose primary data storage. That's their on ramp to then taking advantage of the more strategic value of Neutrix, which is allowing clouds to compete for the business on the compute side of things. >> You kind of hit a key word in there. I'm talking about transform. And we've talked about that a lot, transformation versus transition, in terms of storage capabilities, enterprise storage capabilities, whatever. Take us through that transformation, if you will, and not the transition, and what's the paradigm change? What's going on in that space that's requiring people tom ake this dive into the deep end, if you will, and not just tickling the water with their toes. >> Well, I think there's two elements to it. There's a business and kind of a philosophical reorientation around taking advantage of flexible resources and allowing infrastructure to change over time and pay opex-based business models, that sort of stuff, and getting comfortable with that honestly is a journey into and of itself, because many procurement organizations, especially large organizations, they don't know what to do with a monthly bill or an uncommitted reserve amount or things like that. So part of it is being able to walk with the customer as they transform on the business side of things, and then the other side is accepting and going down the path of variable workloads, being able to accommodate large varieties of mixed data environments, and be agile on the technology side so that you can put the data where it needs to be with the performance that it needs to be and with the capabilities that it needs to be. >> All right, so we're pressed for time, so I really want to get a few topics in. For now, I see three main opportunities, broadly. One is on-prem, stealing market share. We talked about that a little bit. Two is this multicloud thing, and we'll talk about that, as well. If you're an on-prem company, you got to have a multicloud strategy, and even if you're a pure cloud company, you got to have a multicloud strategy. And the third is the cloud. You've got to embrace the cloud. If you deny the cloud, you're denying the biggest trend. So let's start with the cloud. What's your cloud strategy? What's your relationship with AWS and how are you taking advantage of that? >> So we're all about delivering our data services in whatever means, whatever physical infrastructure, whatever underlying business model the customer requires. With that in mind, we deliver Neutrix Cloud as a service for use with major public cloud environments, including AWS, and our relationship with AWS, you know, they recognize, I think, they would say that we bring access to large-scale, tier one environments all around the world coming from our base on the on-prem, and they're very interested in obviously working with the customers on cloud transformation at the scale that we operate, as well, so it's a mutually beneficial partnership. We're proud to be an APN member and all of that sort of thing. >> Yeah, I mean, if you can put your stack in the AWS cloud, which is what you're doing, it's going to drive other services, right? It's going to drive ML and SageMakers and backup and all kinds of great things. >> Absolutely. >> So the storage guys at AWS may not love you, but everybody else at AWS is going to be happy because you're driving other services. All right, let's talk about multicloud. It's obviously a controversial topic. We've got, John Furrier every year does a exclusive interview with Andy Jassy, and he's on the record, and I think he's right. He says, look it, multicloud is going to be more complex, less secure, and more expensive. He's right. And he goes, but he also recognizes that there are multiple clouds out there, and so organizations have to participate in multicloud strategies. I've predicted, as have Stu Miniman and John Furrier, Amazon's going to participate in that someday. They're going to do what they're doing in hybrid. So Amazon looks at multicloud as multiple public clouds and on-prem as hybrid. Coming back to Infinidat, what's your multicloud strategy? >> So the great thing about our strategy is that we're able to deliver the same data in whatever public cloud environments the customer wants to deploy. So we actually run our own independent infrastructure that sits just outside the walled gardens of all the major public clouds, and then we can provide network connectivity using their direct connect interfaces or similar private network interconnects, all API-driven, customer doesn't have to think about the underlying infrastructure, and fundamentally it allows them to subscribe to our storage as a service directly in whatever public clouds they choose. >> And now let's talk about the on-prem piece of that, which is the hybrid component, using Jassy's sort of definitional framework. You've got Flex. That extends your on-prem story. Talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. So our customers are saying, "Hey, I want the public cloud business model "on the on-prem environment," and Flex is our answer to that kind of question. So we deliver essentially hardware independence, price per gig per month. We maintain title to the asset, all that sort of stuff. And we're in charge of refreshing the infrastructure every three years, and we back it with a more than public cloud level availability guarantee, 100% availability guarantee for the Flex business model. >> We've seen companies, flash-based products as backup targets. Infinidat uses a combination of flash and spinning disks to keep costs down, and you've got math magic to make it as performant. One of the things I like what you're doing is you're partnering with I think most of, if not all the backup software vendors and opening up new market opportunities and expanding your TAM by partnering with those guys. Talk a little bit about, can you give us some specifics there? >> Absolutely. So, for example, we were presenting at the Veeam booth earlier this week about the intersection between InfiniBox and the Veeam backup software suite, and we have similar capabilities with some of the other backup platforms, as well. So two sides to that, one using the on-prem or cloud environments as a source, and there we have integrations with our snapshot technology specifically, and then two, using our InfiniGuard product on the on-prem side as a target, and there we have deep integration at an API level with the various backup platforms. So it's a cohesive universe where customers can take primary data, they can put it on Infinidat, they can use whatever enterprise backup platform. They can also put it as a target on Infinidat technology. >> And we're talking a lot about today. What about tomorrow? I mean, you know, what's the bigger picture down the road? What's your crystal ball telling you in terms of future complexities and challenges and what you see where this is headed? >> I think from a storage standpoint, at least, obviously lots of other complexities beyond that universe, but from a storage standpoint, people want to stop thinking about infrastructure. They want to think about cloud data services. They want to think about essentially going from storage arrays to storage clouds. We're doing that on on-prem, we're doing that in public cloud environments, and we're knitting it all together with our initiative called the Elastic Data Fabric. Our ultimate goal there and what we think customers really want is to be able to get the data services that they want at any given instant through the business model they care about independent of the underlying infrastructure, and that's what we're set up to deliver over the next couple of years at Infinidat. >> Well, Erik, thank you for the time. We appreciate that. By the way, Erik has become a very important Cuber, a VIC. His sixth appearance here on theCUBE. I wish we had a plaque or something to give you, but how about just an attaboy? >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate that. >> Thanks, Erik. >> Back with more coverage here from AWS re:Invent 2019. You're watching us live. We're here on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)