(jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. It's going to be a multi-cloud world. It's going to be a multi-cloud world because enterprises are so diverse, have so many data requirements and application needs that it's going to be serviced by a panoply of players, from public cloud to private cloud and SaaS companies. That begs the question, if data is the centerpiece of a digital strategy, how do we assure that we remain in control of our data even as we exploit this marvelous array of services from a lot of different public and private cloud providers and technology companies? So the question, then, is data sovereignty. How do we stay in control of our data? To have that conversation, we're joined by Erik Kaulberg, who's a vice president at Infinidat. Erik, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> So before we get into this, what's a quick update on Infinidat? >> Well, we just crossed the 5.4 exabyte milestone deployed around the world, and for perspective, a lot of people don't appreciate the scale at which Infinidat operates. That's about five and a half Dropboxes worth of content on our systems and on our cloud services deployed around the world today. So it's an exciting time. It's great being able to deliver these kinds of transformations at large enterprises all over the place. Business has been ramping wonderfully, and the other elements of our product portfolio that we announced earlier in the year are really coming to bear for us. >> Well, let's talk about some of those product, or some of those announcements in the product portfolio, because you have traditionally been more of an interestingly and importantly architected box company, but now you're looking at becoming more of a full player, a primary citizen in the cloud world. How has that been going? >> It's been great. So we announced our Elastic Data Fabric program, which is really our vision for how enterprises should deal with data in a multi-cloud world, in May, and that unified several different product silos within our company. You had InfiniBox on the primary storage appliance platform standpoint. You have Neutrix Cloud on the primary storage for public clouds. You have InfiniGuard for the secondary storage environments, and now we've been able to articulate this vision of enterprises should be able to access the data services that they want at scale and consume them in however way they prefer, whether that be on a private cloud environment with an appliance or whether that be in an environment where they're accessing the same data from multiple public clouds. >> So they should be able to get the cloud experience without compromising on the quality and the characteristics of the data service. >> Exactly. And fundamentally, since we deliver our value in the form of software, the customer shouldn't have to really care on what infrastructure it's running. So Elastic Data Fabric really broadens that message so that customers can understand, yes, they can get all the value of Infinidat wherever they'd prefer it. >> Okay, so let's dig into this. So the basic problem that companies face, to kind of lay this up front, the basic problems that companies face is they want to be able to tap into this incredible array of services that you can get out of the cloud, but they don't necessarily want to force their data into a particular cloud vendor or particular cloud silo. So they want the services, but they want to retain control over their data and their data destiny. How do you, in your conversations with customers, how do you see your customers articulating that tension? >> I think when I deal with the typical CIO, and I was in a couple of these conversations literally yesterday, it all comes back to the fundamental idea of do you want to pledge allegiance to a single public cloud provider forever? If the answer to that is no or if there's any hesitation in that answer, then you need to be considering services that go beyond the walled gardens of individual public clouds. And so that's where services like our Neutrix Cloud service can allow customers to keep control, keep sovereignty over their data in order to make the right decisions about where the compute should reside across whichever public cloud might offer the best combination of capabilities for a given workload. >> So it has been historically a quid pro quo where, give me your data, says the public cloud provider, and then I'll make available this range of services to you. And enterprises are saying, well, I want to get access to the services without giving you my data. How are companies generally going to solve this? Because it's not going to be by not working with public cloud or cloud companies, and it's not going to be by wanting to think too hard about which cloud companies to work with for which types of workloads. So what is the solution that folks have to start considering? Not just product level, but just generally speaking. >> Speaking broadly, I would say that there's no single answer for every company, but most large enterprises are going to want some sort of solution that allows their data to transcend the boundaries of public clouds. And there's a couple of different approaches to doing that. Some approaches just take software and then knit together multiple data silos across clouds, but you still have the data physically reside in different cloud environments, and then there are some approaches where they abstract away the data, where the data's physically stored, so that it can be accessed by multiple public clouds. And I think some mix of those approaches, depending on the scale of the company, is probably going to be one element of the solution. Now, data and how you treat the locations of data isn't the whole solution to the problem. There's many things to consider about your application state, about the security, about all that stuff, but-- >> Intellectual property, compliance, you name it. >> Absolutely. But if you don't get the data problem figured out, then everything else becomes a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot more expensive. >> So if we think about that notion of getting the data problem right, that should, we should start thinking in terms of what services does this data with these characteristics, by workload, location, intellectual property controls, whatever else they might be, what service does that data require? Today, the range of services that are available on more traditional approaches to thinking about storage are a little bit more mature. They're a little bit more, the options are a little bit greater, and the performance is often a lot better than you get out of the public cloud. Would you agree with that and can you give us some examples? >> Of course, yeah. And I think that in general, the public cloud providers have a different design point from traditional enterprise environments. You prioritize scale over resilience, for example. And specific features that we see come up a lot in our conversations with large enterprises are snapshots, replication with on-prem environments, and the ability to compress or reduce data as necessary depending on the workload requirements. There's a bunch of other things that get rolled into all of that. >> But those are three big ones. >> But those are big ones, absolutely. >> So how are enterprises thinking about being able to access all that's available in the cloud while also getting access to the data services they need for their data? >> Well, in the early days of public cloud deployments, we saw a lot of people either compromising on the data services and rearchitecting their applications accordingly or choosing to bring in more expensive layers to put on top of the standard hyperscale public cloud storage services and try and amalgamate them into a better solution. And of course we think that those are kind of suboptimal approaches, but if you have the engineering resources to invest or if you're really viewing that as something you can differentiate your business on, you want to make yourself a good storage provider, then by all means have at it. We think most enterprises don't want to go down that path. >> So what's your approach? How does Infinidat and your company provide that capability for customers? >> Well, step one is recognizing that we have a robust data services platform already out there. It's software, and we happen to package it in an appliance format for large enterprises today. That's that 5.4 exabytes, that's mostly the InfiniBox product, which is that software in an appliance. And so we've proven our core capabilities on the InfiniBox platform, and then about two and a half years ago now, we launched a service called Neutrix Cloud. And Neutrix Cloud takes that robust set of capabilities, that set of expectations that enterprises have around how they're going to handle multi-petabyte datasets, and delivers all those software-driven values as a public cloud service. So you can subscribe to the value of Infinidat without having any boxes involved or anything like that. And then you can use it for two things, basically. One is general purpose public cloud storage. So a better alternative or a more enterprise-grad alternative to things like AWS, EBS, or EFS. And another use case that is surprisingly popular for us is customers coming from on-prem environments and using the Neutrix Cloud service as just a replication target to get started. Kind of a bridge to the cloud approach. So we can support any combination of those types of scenarios, and then it gets most interesting when you combine them and add the multi-cloud piece, because then you're really seeing the benefits of eliminating the data silos in each individual public cloud when you can have, say, a file system that can be simultaneously mounted and used by applications in AWS, Azure, and GCP. >> Well, that's where, I would've thought that that would've been a third use case, right? >> Yeah. >> Is that multi-cloud and being able to mount the data wherever it's required is also obviously a very rich and important use case that's not generally available from most suppliers of data-oriented services. So where do you think this goes? Give us a kind of a visibility in where your customers are pointing as they think about incorporating and utilizing more fully this flexibility and new data services, the ability to extend and enhance the data services they get from traditional public cloud players. >> I think it's still early innings in general for the use of enterprise-grade public cloud services. I think NetApp actually just recently said that they're at $74 million annual run rate for their entire cloud data services business. So we have yet to see the full potential in general through the entire market of those capabilities in public clouds. But I think that in the long term, we get to this world where cloud compute providers can compete, truly have to compete for enterprise workloads, where you essentially have a marketplace where the customer gets to say, I have a workload. I need X cores. I need X capabilities. The data's right here in Neutrix or in something like Neutrix. And what will you offer me to run this workload for 35 minutes in Amazon? Same thing to Azure, same thing to GCP. I think that kind of competitive marketplace for public cloud compute is the natural endpoint for a disaggregated storage approach like ours, and that's what frankly gets some of our investors very excited about Infinidat, as well, because we're really the only ones who are making a strong investment in a multi-cloud piece first and foremost. >> So the ability to have greater control over your data means you can apply it in a market competitive way to whatever compute resource you want to utilize. >> Exactly. Spot instance pricing, for example, is only the beginning, because, I assume you're familiar with this, you can basically get Amazon to give you a discounted rate on a block of compute resources, similar to the other public clouds. But if your data happens to be in Amazon but Azure's giving you a lower spot instance rate, you're kind of SOL or you're going to pay egress fees and stuff like that. And I think that just disaggregating the data makes it a more competitive marketplace and better for customers. I think there's even more improvements to be had as the granularity of spot instance pricing becomes higher and higher so that customers can really pick with maximum economic efficiency where they want a workload to go for how long and ultimately drive that value back into the return that IT delivers to the business. >> So, Erik, you mentioned there's this enormous amount of data that's now running on Infinidat's platforms. Can you give us any insight into the patterns, particular industries, size of companies, workloads, that are being featured, or is it just general purpose? >> It's always a tough question for us because it is truly a horizontal platform. The one unifying characteristic of pretty much every Infinidat user is scale. If you're in the petabyte arena, then we're talking. If you're not in the petabyte arena, then you're probably talking to one of the upstart vendors in our space. It's business-critical workloads. It's enterprise-grade, whether you talk about enterprise-grade in the sense of replacing VMAX-type solutions or whether you talk about enterprise-grade in terms of modernizing cloud environments like what I've just described. It's all about scale, enterprise-grade capabilities. >> Erik Kaulberg, Infinidat, thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> And once again, I want to thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (jazzy music)