>>From the cubes studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. >>The external storage array business, as we know it has changed forever. You know, you can see that in the survey data that we do and the financial information from the largest public storage companies. And it's not just because of COVID, although that's clearly a factor which has accelerated the shifts that we see in the market, specifically, those CIO is, are rationalizing their infrastructure portfolios by consolidating workloads to simplify, reduce costs and minimize vendor sprawl. So they can shift resources toward digital initiatives that include cloud containers, machine intelligence, and automation all while reducing their risks. Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this cube conversation where we're going to discuss strategies related to workload consolidation at petabyte scale. And with me is Dr. Rico. He's the vice president office of the CTO at INFINIDAT welcome back to the cube doc, always a pleasure to see you >>And great to be here. Always a pleasure to work with you, Dave. >>So doc, I just published a piece over the weekend and I pointed out that of the largest storage companies, only one showed revenue growth last quarter, and that was on a significantly reduced compare with last year. So my first question to you is, is INFINIDAT growing its business. >>Oh, absolutely. It's been a very interesting year all across as you can quite imagine. Um, but you know, our footprint is such that with our elastic pricing models and the, and the fact that we've got excess capacity, uh, in almost every single system that's out there, we were really given our customers a, an opportunity to take advantage of that, to increase their capacity levels while maintaining the same levels of performance and availability, but not have to have anybody on premises during this crazy, you know, COVID struck era. >>Yeah. So you're bringing that cloud model to the, to the data center, which has obviously been a challenge. I mean, you mentioned the subscription sort of like pricing, we're going to get into the cloud more, but I wonder if we could step back a little bit and look at some of the macro trends that you're seeing in the market and specifically as it relates to on-prem storage strategies that CEO's are taking. >>Yeah. You know, it's been interesting, we've seen over the course of the past five years or so, certainly a big uptick in people looking at next generation or what they believe in perceived to be next generation storage platforms, which are really just evolutions of media. They're not really taking advantage of any new innovations in storage and, you know, not withstanding our own products, which are all software driven. We've talked about that before, but what what's really happened in this past year, as you, as you said, CEOs and CTOs, they're always looking for that, that next point of leverage advantage. And they're looking for more agility in application deployment, they're looking in a way to rapidly respond to business requirements. So they're looking very much at those cloud-like requirements. They're looking at those capabilities to containerize applications. They're looking at how they can, um, you know, shift out virtual machines if they're not in a directly in a container, uh, and how the storage by the way, can, can have the same advantage and in order to do so, they really need to look at storage consolidation. You know, I think Dave, to, to sum it up from the storage perspective, you know, I love Ken Steinhardt was recently on a video and, you know, he was, he was challenged that, you know, people aren't looking at spinning rust, riff, you know, a derogatory wave of referring a disc and, and Ken, so rightly and accurately responded. Yeah. But people weren't really looking for QLC either. You know, what they're looking for is performance, scale availability and certainly cost effectiveness and price. >>Yeah. It was like, I set up front dock. I mean, if you're a C level executive today, you don't want to worry about your storage infrastructure. You've got bigger problems to worry about. You just want it to work. And so when you talk about consolidating workloads, people often talk about the so-called blast radiation. In other words, people who run data centers, they understand that things fail. And sometimes something as simple, it might be a power supply can have a catastrophic downstream effect on application availability. So my question is, how do you think about architecting systems? So as to minimize the effects of component failures on the business? >>Yeah. You know, it's a very interesting term, Dave blast radius, right? We've, we've heard this referred to storage over the last several decades. In fact, when it really should refer to the data center and the application infrastructure. Uh, but you know, if we're talking about just the storage footprint itself, one of the things that we really need to look, look at is the resilience and the reliability of the architecture. And when you look at something that is maybe dual controller single or double power supply, there are issues and concerns that take in, in, into, into play. And what we've done is we've designed something that's really triple redundant, which is typically only been applied to the very high end of the market before. And we do it in a very active, active, active manner. And naturally we have suggestions for best practices for deployment within a data center as well, you know, multiple sources of power coming into the array and things of that nature. But everything needs to be this active, active, active type of architecture in order to bring those reliability levels up to the point where as long as it's a component failure within the array, it's not going to cause an outage or data on availability event. >>Yeah. So imagine a heat map when people talk about the blast radius. So imagine the heat map is green. There's a big, you know, there's a yellow area and there's a, there's a red area. And what you're saying is, as far as the array goes, you're essentially eliminating the red area. Now, if you take it to the broader installation, you know, that red area, you have to deal with it in different ways, remote replication, then you can at the sink and in a sink. Uh, but, but essentially what I'm hearing you say, doc, is, is you're squeezing that red area out. So, so your customers could sleep at night. >>That absolutely sleep at night is so appropriate. And in fact, we've got a large portion of our customer base is, or they're running mission critical businesses. You know, we have some of the most mission critical companies in our, in our logo portfolio, in the world. We also have, by the way, some very significant service provider businesses who were we're providing, you know, mission critical capabilities to their customers in turn, and they need to sleep at night. And it it's, you know, availability is only one factor. Certainly manageability is another cause you know, not meeting a service level is just like data unavailability in some respects. So making manageability is automatic as it can be making sure that the, that the system is not only self-healing, but can re respond to variations in workload appropriately is very, very critically important as well. >>Yeah. So that, that you mentioned mission critical workloads, and those are the, those are the workloads that let's face it. They're not moving into the cloud, certainly not in any, any big way, you know, why would they generally are CIO CTO is they're putting a brick wall around that saying, Hey, it works. We don't want to migrate that piece, but I want to talk more about how your customers are thinking about workload consolidation and rationalizing their storage portfolios. What are those conversations like? Where do they start and what are some of the outcomes that you're seeing with your customers? >>Yeah, I think the funny thing about that point Dave, is that customers are really starting to think about a cloud in an entirely different way. You know, at one point cloud meant public cloud and men, this entity, uh, outside the walls of the data center and people were starting to use services without realizing that that was another type of cloud. And then they were starting to build their own versions of cloud. You know, we were referring to them as private clouds, but they were, you know, really spread beyond the walls of a single data center. So now it's a very hybrid world and there's lots of different ways to look at it, hybrid cloud multi-cloud, whatever moniker you want to put on it. It really comes down to a consistency in how you manage that infrastructure, how you interface with that infrastructure and then understanding what the practicality is of putting workloads in different places. >>And practicality means not only the, you know, the latency of access of the data, but the costs associated with it. And of course the other aspects that we talked about, like what the, the availability metrics, and as you increase the availability and performance metrics, those costs go up. And that's one of the reasons why some of these larger mission critical data centers are really, you know, repatriating their, their mission, critical workloads, at least the highest, highest levels of them and others are looking at other models, for example, AWS outposts, um, which, you know, talked about quite a bit recently in AWS reinvent. >>Yeah. I just wrote, again, this weekend that you guys were one of the, uh, partners that was qualified now, uh, to run on AWS outpost, it's interesting as Amazon moves, it's, you know, it's, it's it's model to the edge, which includes the data center to them. They need partners that can, that really understand how to operate in an on-premise world, how to service those customers. And so that's great to see you guys as part of that. >>Yeah. Thank you. And, you know, it was actually a very seamless integration because of the power and capability of all of the different interface models that we have is they all are fully and tightly integrated and work seamlessly. So if you want to use a, you know, a CSI type model, uh, you know, do you interface with your storage again, uh, with, with INFINIDAT and, you know, we work with all of the different flavors so that the qualification process, the certification process and the documentation process was actually quite easy. And now we're able to provide, you know, people who have particularly larger workloads that capability in the AWS on premises type environment. >>Yeah. Now I implied upfront that that cloud computing was the main factor, if not the primary factor, really driving some of the changes that we're seeing in the marketplace. Now, of course, it's all, not all pink roses with the cloud. We've seen numerous public cloud outages this year, certainly from Microsoft. We saw the AWS Kinesis outage in November. Google just had a major outage this month. Gmail was down G suite was down for an extended period of time. And that disrupted businesses, we rely on that schools, for example. So it's always caveat emptor as we know, but, but talk to INFINIDAT cloud strategy, you mentioned hybrid, uh, particularly interested in, in how you're dealing with things like orchestration and containers and Kubernetes. >>Yeah, well, of course we have a very feature rich set of interfaces for containers, Kubernetes interfaces, you know, downloadable through native, uh, native. So they're, they're very easy to integrate with, you know, but our cloud strategy is that, you know, we are a software centric model and we, you know, all of the, all of the value and feature function that we provide is through the software. The hardware of infiniboxes really a reference architecture that we, uh, we deliver to make it easier for customers to enjoy say 100% availability model. But if, if you want to run something in a traditional on premises data center, you know, straighten InfiniBox is fine, but we also give you the flexibility of cloud-like consumption through our pricing models, our, our elastic pricing models. So you don't need to consume an entire InfiniBox day one. You can grow and shrink that environment with, uh, with an OPEX model, or you can, um, buy it as you consume it in a, in a cap ex model. >>And you can switch, uh, from OPEX over to CapEx if it becomes more cost effective for you in time, which I think is, is what a lot of people are looking for. If you're looking for that public cloud, we, you know, we have our new tricks cloud offering, which is now being delivered more through partners, but you know, some businesses and especially the, the mid tier, um, you know, the SMB all the way through the mid enterprise are also now looking to cloud service providers, many of which use InfiniBox as, as their backend. And now with AWS outposts, of course, you know, we can give you that on premises, uh, uh, experience of the public cloud, >>You guys were early on. And obviously in that, that subscription-based model, and now everyone's doing it. I noticed in the latest Gartner magic quadrant on, on storage arrays, which you guys were named a leader, uh, they, I think they had a stat in there and said, I, I forget what the exact timeframe was that 50% of customers would be using that type of model. And again, I guarantee you by whatever time frame, that was a hundred percent of the vendor community is going to be delivering that type of model. So, so congratulations on being named a leader, I will say this there's there's there's consolidation happening in the market. So this, to me, this bodes well, to the extent that you can guarantee high availability and consistent performance, uh, at, at scale, that bodes well for, for you guys in a consolidating market. And I know IDC just released a paper, it was called, uh, I got, uh, I got a copy here. >>It's called a checklist for, uh, storage, workload consolidation at petabyte scale. It was written by Eric Bergner, who I've known for a number of years. He's the VP of infrastructure. Uh, he knows his stuff and the paper is very detailed. So I'm not going to go through the checklist items, but I, but I think if you don't mind, doc, I think it's worth reading an excerpt from this. If I can, as part of his conclusions, when workload consolidation, it organizations should carefully consider their performance availability, functionality, and affordability requirements. Of course, few storage systems in the market will be able to cost effectively consolidate different types of workloads with different IO profiles onto a single system. But that is in INFINIDAT forte. They're very good at it. So that's a, that's quite a testimonial, you know, why is that your thoughts on what Eric wrote? >>Well, you know, first of all, thank you for the kudos on the Gartner MQ, you know, being a leader on the second year in a row for primary storage, only because that documents only existed for two years, but, uh, you know, we were also a leader in hybrid storage arrays before that. And, you know, we, we love Gardner. We think they're, they're, you know, um, uh, real critical, you know, reliable source for, for a lot of large companies and, and IDC, you know, Eric of course is, uh, he's a name in the industry. So we, you know, we very much appreciate when he writes something, you know, that positive about us. But to answer your question, Dave, you know, there's, there's a lot that goes on inside InfiniBox and is the neural cash capabilities, the deep learning engine that is able to understand the different types of workloads, how they operate, uh, how to provide, you know, predictable performance. >>And that I think is ultimately key to an application. It's not just high performance. It's, it's predictable performance is making sure the application knows what to expect. And of course it has to be performant. It can't just be slow, but predictable. It has to be fast and predictable providing a multi-tenant infrastructure that is, that is native to the architecture, uh, so that these workloads can coexist whether they're truly just workloads from multiple applications or workloads from different business units, or potentially, as we mentioned with cloud service providers, workloads from different customers, you know, they, they need to be segmented in such a way so that they can be managed, operating and provide that performance and availability, you know, at scale because that's where data centers go. That's where data centers are. >>Great. Well, so we'll bring that graphic back up just to show you, obviously, this is available on your website. Uh, you can go download this paper from Erik, uh, from IDC, www infinidat.com/ian/resource. I would definitely recommend you check it out. Uh, as I say, Ericsson, you know, I've been in the business a long, long time, so, so that's great, doc, we'll give you the last word. Anything we didn't cover any big takeaways you want to, you want to share with the audience? >>Yeah. You know, I think I'll go back to that point. You know, consolidation is absolutely key for, uh, not just simplicity of management, but capability for you respond quickly to changing business requirements and or new business requirements, and also do it in a way that is cost-effective, you know, just buying the new shiny object is it's expensive and it's very limited in, in shelf life. You're just going to be looking for the next one the next year. You want to provide something that is going to provide you that predictable capability over time, because frankly, I have never met a C X O of anything that wasn't trying to increase their profit. >>You know, that's a great point. And I just, I would add, I mean, the shiny new object thing. Look, if you're in an experimental mode and playing around with, you know, artificial intelligence or automation thinking, you know, areas that you really don't know a lot about, you know, what, check out the shiny new objects, but I would argue you're on-prem storage. You don't want to be messing around with that. That's, it's not a shiny new objects business. It's really about, you know, making sure that that base is stable. And as you say, predictable and reliable. So doc Terico thanks so much for coming back into cube. Great to see you. >>Great to see you, David, and look forward to next time. >>And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante and we'll see you next time on the queue.