(upbeat music) >> Lately Infinidat has been on a bit of a Super cycle of product announcements. Adding features, capabilities, and innovations to its core platform that are applied across its growing install base. CEO, Phil Bollinger has brought in new management and really emphasized a strong and consistent cadence of product releases, a hallmark of successful storage companies. And one of those new executives is a CMO with a proven product chops, who seems to bring an energy and an acceleration of product output, wherever he lands. Eric Herzog joins us on "theCUBE". Hey, man. Great to see you. Awesome to have you again. >> Dave. Thank you. And of course, for "theCUBE", of course, I had to put on a Hawaiian shirt as always. >> They're back. All right, I love it.(laughs) Watch out for those Hawaiian shirt police, Eric. (both laughing) All right. I want to have you start by. Maybe you can make some comments on the portfolio over the past year. You heard my intro, InfiniBox is the core, the InfiniBox SSA, which announced last year. InfiniGuard you made some substantial updates in February of this year. Real focus on cyber resilience, which we're going to talk about with Infinidat. Give us the overview. >> Sure. Well, what we've got is it started really 11 years ago with the InfiniBox. High end enterprise solution, hybrid oriented really incredible magic fairy dust around the software and all the software technology. So for example, the Neural Cache technology, which has multiple patents on it, allowed the original InfiniBox to outperform probably 85% of the All-Flash Arrays in the industry. And it still does that today. We also of course, had our real, incredible ease-of-use the whole point of the way it was configured and set up from the beginning, which we continued to make sure we do is if you will a set it and forget it model. For example, When you install, you don't create lungs and raid groups and volumes it automatically and autonomously configures. And when you add new solutions, AKA additional applications or additional servers and point it at the InfiniBox. It automatically, again in autonomously, adjust to those new applications learning what it needs to configure everything. So you're not setting cash size and Q depth, or Stripes size, anything you would performance to you don't have to do any of that. So that entire set of software is on the InfiniBox. The InfiniBox SSA II, which we're of course launching today and then inside of the InfiniGuard platform, there's a actually an InfiniBox. So the commonality of snapshots replication, ease of use. All of that is identical across the platform of all-flash array, hybrid array and purpose-built backup secondary storage and no other vendor has that breadth of product that has the same exact software. Some make a similar GUI, but we're talking literally the same exact software. So once you learn it, all three platforms, even if you don't have them, you could easily buy one of the other platforms that you don't have yet. And once you've got it, you already know how to use it. 'Cause you've had one platform to start as an example. So really easy to use from a customer perspective. >> So ever since I've been following the storage business, which has been a long time now, three things that customers want. They want something that is rock solid, dirt cheap and super fast. So performance is something that you guys have always emphasized. I've had some really interesting discussions over the years with Infinidat folks. How do you get performance? If you're using this kind of architecture, it's been quite amazing. But how does this launch extend or affect performance? Why the focus on performance from your standpoint? >> Well, we've done a number of different things to bolster the performance. We've already been industry-leading performance again. The regular InfiniBox outperforms 80, 85% of the All-Flash Arrays. Then, when the announcement of the InfiniBox SSA our first all-flash a year ago, we took that now to the highest demanding workloads and applications in the industry. So what did it add to the super high end Oracle app or SAP or some custom app that someone's created with Mongo or Cassandra. We can absolutely meet the performance between either the InfiniBox or the InfiniBox all-flash with the InfiniBox SSA. However, we've decided to extend the performance even farther. So we added a whole bunch of new CPU cores into our tri part configuration. So we don't have two array controllers like many companies do. We actually have three everything's in threes, which gives us the capability of having our 100% availability guarantee. So we've extended that now we've optimized. We put a additional InfiniBand interconnects between the controllers, we've added the CPU core, we've taken if you will the InfiniBox operating system, Neural Cache and everything else we've had. And what we have done is we have optimized that to take advantage of all those additional cores. This has led us to increase performance in all aspects, IOPS bandwidth and in fact in latency. In latency we now are at 35 mikes of latency. Real world, not a hero number, but real-world on an array. And when you look end to end, if I Mr. Oracle, or SAP sitting in the server and I'll look across that bridge, of course the sand and over to the other building the storage building that entire traversing can be as fast as a 100 microseconds of latency across the entire configuration, not just the storage. >> Yeah. I think that's best in class for an external array. Well, so what's the spectrum you can now hit with the performance ranges. Can you hit all the aspects of the market with the two InfiniBoxes, your original, and then the SSA? >> Yes, even with the original SSA. In fact, we've had one of our end users, who's been first InfiniBox customer, then InfiniBox SSA actually has been running for the last two months. A better version of the SSA II. So they've had a better version and this customer's running high end Oracle rack configurations. So they decided, you know what? We're not going to run storage benchmarks. We're going to run only Oracle benchmarks. And in every benchmark IOPS, latency and bandwidth oriented, we outperformed the next nearest competition. So for example, 57% faster in IOPS, 58% faster in bandwidth and on the latency side using real-world Oracle apps, we were three times better performance on the latency aspect, which of course for a high end high performance workload, that's heavily transactional. Latency is the most important, but when you look across all three of those aspects dramatically outperform. And by the way, that was a beta unit that didn't of course have final code on it yet. So incredible performance angle with the InfiniBox SSA II. >> So I mean you earlier, you were talking about the ease of use. You don't have to provision lungs and all that sort of nonsense, and you've always emphasized ease-of-use. Can you double click on that a little bit? How do you think about that capability? And I'm really interested in why you think it's different from other vendors? >> Well, we make sure that, for example, when you install you don't have to do anything, you have to rack and stack, yes and cable. And of course, point the servers at the storage, but the storage just basically comes up. In fact, we have a customer and it's a public reference that bought a couple units many years ago and they said they were up and going in about two hours. So how many high-end enterprise storage array can be up and going in two hours? Almost I mean, basically nobody about us. So we wanted to make sure that we maintain that when we have customers, one of our big plays, particularly helping with CapEx and OpEx is because we are so performant. We can consolidate, we have a large customer in Europe that took 57 arrays from one of our competitors and consolidate it to five of the original InfiniBox. 57 to 5. They saved about $25 million in capital expense and they're saving about a million and a half a year in operational expense. But the whole point was as they kept adding more and more servers that were connected to those competitive arrays and pointing them at the InfiniBox, there's no performance tuning. Again, that's all ease-of-use, not only saving on operational expense, but obviously as we know, the headcount for storage admins is way down from its peak, which was probably in 2007. Yet every admin is managing what 25 to 50 times the amount of storage between 2007 and 2022. So the reality is the easier it is to use. Not only does of course the CIO love it because both the two of us together probably been storage, doing storage now for close to 80 years would be my guess I've been doing it for 40. You're a little younger. So maybe we're at 75 to 78. Have you ever met a CIO used to be a storage admin ever? >> No. >> And I can't think of one either so guess what? The easier it is to use the CIOs know that they need storage. They don't like it. They're all these days are all software guys. There used to be some mainframe guys in the old days, but they're long gone too. It's all about software. So when you say, not only can we help reduce your CapEx at OpEx, but the operational manpower to run the storage, we can dramatically reduce that because of our ease-of-use that they get and ease-of-use has been a theme on the software side ever since the Mac came out. I mean, Windows used to be a dog. Now it's easy to use and you know, every time the Linux distribution come out, someone's got something that's easier and easier to use. So, the fact that the storage is easy to use, you can turn that directly into, we can help you save on operational manpower and OPEX and CIOs. Again, none of which ever met are storage guys. They love that message. Of course the admins do too 'cause they're managing 25 to 50 times more storage than they had to manage back in 2007. So the easier it is for them at the tactical level, the storage admin, the storage manager, it's a huge deal. And we've made sure we've maintained that as you've added the SSA, as we brought up the InfiniGuard, as we've continue to push new feature function. We always make it easy to use. >> Yeah. Kind of a follow up on that. Just focus on software. I mean, I would think every storage company today, every modern storage company is going to have more software engineers than hardware engineers. And I think Infinidat obviously is no different. You got a strong set of software, it's across the portfolio. It's all included kind of thing. I wonder if you could talk about your software approach and how that is different from your competitors? >> Sure, so we started out 11 years ago when in Infinidat first got started. That was all about commodity hardware. So while some people will use custom this and custom that, yeah and I having worked at two of the biggest storage companies in the world before I came here. Yes, I know it's heavily software, but our percentage of hardware engines, softwares is even less hardware engineering than our competitors have. So we've had that model, which is why this whole what we call the set it and forget it mantra of ease-of-use is critical. We make sure that we've expanded that. For example, we're announcing today, our InfiniOps focus and Infini Ops all software allows us to do AIOps both inside of our storage system with our InfiniVerse and InfiniMetrics packages. They're easy to use. They come pre-installed and they manage capacity performance. We also now have heavy integration with AI, what I'll call data center, AIOps vendors, Vetana ServiceNow, VMware and others. And in that case, we make sure that we expose all of our information out to those AIOps data center apps so that they can report on the storage level. So we've made sure we do that. We have incredible support for the Ansible framework again, which is not only a software statement, but an ease-of-use statement as well. So for the Ansible framework, which is trying to allow an even simpler methodology for infrastructure deployment in companies. We support that extensively and we added some new features. Some more, if you will, what I'll say are more scripts, but they're not really scripts that Ansible hides all that. And we added more of that, whether that be configuration installations, that a DevOps guy, which of course just had all the storage guys listening to this video, have a heart attack, but the DevOps guy could actually configure storage. And I guess for my storage buddies, they can do it without messing up your storage. And that's what Ansible delivers. So between our AIOps focus and what we're doing with InfiniOps, that extends of course this ease-of-use model that we've had and includes that. And all this again, including we already talked about a little bit cyber resilience Dave, within InfiniSafe. All this is included when you buy it. So we don't piecemeal, which is you get this and then we try to upcharge you for that. We have the incredible pricing that delivers this CapEx and an OpEx. Not just for the array, but for the associated software that goes with it, whether that be Neural Cache, the ease-of-use, the InfiniOps, InfiniSafes. You get all of that package together in the way we deploy from a business now perspective, ease of doing business. You don't cut POS for all kinds of pieces. You cut APO and you just get all the pieces on the one PO when we deliver it. >> I was talking yesterday to a VC and we were chatting about AI And of course, everybody's chasing AI. It's a lot of investments go in there, but the reality is, AI is like containers. It's just getting absorbed into virtually every thing. And of course, last year you guys made a pretty robust splash into AIOps. And then with this launch, you're extending that pretty substantially. Tell us a little bit more about the InfiniOps announcement news. >> So the InfiniOps includes our existing in the box framework InfiniVerse and what we do there, by the way, InfiniVerse has the capability with the telemetry feed. That's how we could able to demo at our demo today and also at our demo for our channel partner pre-briefing. Again a hundred mics of latency across the entire configuration, not just to a hundred mics of latency on storage, which by the way, several of our competitors talk about a hundred mics of latency as their quote hero number. We're talking about a hundred mics of latency from the application through the server, through the SAN and out to the storage. Now that is incredible. But the monitoring for that is part of the InfiniOps packaging, okay. We support again with DevOps with all the integration that we do, make it easy for the DevOps team, such as with Ansible. Making sure for the data center people with our integration, with things like VMware and ServiceNow. The data center people who are obviously often not the storage centric person can also be managing the entire data center. And whether that is conversing with the storage admin on, we need this or that, or whether they're doing it themselves again, all that is part of our InfiniOps framework and we include things like the Ansible support as part of that. So InfiniOps is sort of an overarching theme and then overarching thing extends to AIops inside of the storage system. AIops across the data center and even integration with I'll say something that's not even considered an infrastructure play, but something like Ansible, which is clearly a red hat, software oriented framework that incorporates storage systems and servers or networks in the capability of having DevOps people manage them. And quite honestly have the DevOps people manage them without screwing them up or losing data or losing configuration, which of course the server guys, the network guys and the storage guys hate when the DevOps guys play with it. But that integration with Ansible is part of our InfiniOps strategy. >> Now our shift gears a little bit talk about cyber crime and I mean, it's a topic that we've been on for a long time. I've personally been writing about it now for the last few years. Periodically with my colleagues from ETR, we hit that pretty hard. It's top of mind, and now the house just approved what's called the Better Cybercrime Metrics Act. It was a bipartisan push. I mean, the vote was like 377 to 48 and the Senate approved this bill last year. Once president Biden signs it, it's going to be the law's going to be put into effect and you and many others have been active in this space Infinidat. You announced cyber resilience on your purpose bill backup appliance and secondary storage solution, InfiniGuard with the launch of InfiniSafe. What are you doing for primary storage from InfiniBox around cyber resilience? >> So the goal between the InfiniGuard and secondary storage and the InfiniBox and the InfiniBox SSA II, we're launching it now, but the InfiniSafe for InfiniBox will work on the original InfiniBox. It's a software only thing. So there's no extra hardware needed. So it's a software only play. So if you have an InfiniBox today, when you upgrade to the latest software, you can have the InfiniSafe reference architecture available to you. And the idea is to support the four key legs of the cybersecurity table from a storage perspective. When you look at it from a storage perspective, there's really four key things that the CISO and the CIO look for first is a mutable snapshot technology. An article can't be deleted, right? You can schedule it. You can do all kinds of different things, but the point is you can't get rid of it. Second thing of course, is an air gap. And there's two types of air gap, logical air gap, which is what we provide and physical the main physical air gaping would be either to tape or to course what's left of the optical storage market. But we've got a nice logical air gap and we can even do that logical air gaping remotely. Since most customers often buy for disaster recovery purposes, multiple arrays. We can then put that air gap, not just locally, but we can put the air gap of course remotely, which is a critical differentiator for the InfiniBox a remote logical air gap. Many other players have logical, we're logical local, but we're going remote. And then of course the third aspect is a fenced forensic environment. That fence forensic environment needs to be easily set up. So you can determine a known good copy to a restoration after you've had a cyber incident. And then lastly is rapid recovery. And we really pride ourself on this. When you go to our most recent launch in February of the InfiniGuard within InfiniSafe, we were able to demo live a recovery taking 12 minutes and 12 seconds of 1.5 petabytes of backup data from Veeam. Now that could have been any backup data. Convolt IBM spectrum tech Veritas. We happen to show with Veeam, but in 12 minutes and 12 seconds. Now on the primary storage side, depending on whether you're going to try to recover locally or do it from a remote, but if it's local, we're looking at something that's going to be 1 to 2 minutes recovery, because the way we do our snapshot technology, how we just need to rebuild the metadata tree and boom, you can recover. So that's a real differentiator, but those are four things that a CISO and a CIO look for from a storage vendor is this imutable snapshot capability, the air gaping capability, the fenced environment capability. And of course this near instantaneous recovery, which we have proven out well with the InfiniGuard. And now with the InfiniBox SSA II and our InfiniBox platform, we can make that recovery on primary storage, even faster than what we have been able to show customers with the InfiniGuard on the secondary data sets and backup data sets. >> Yeah. I love the four layer cake. I just want to clarify something on the air gap if I could so you got. You got a local air gap. You can do a remote air gap with your physical storage. And then you're saying there's I think, I'm not sure I directly heard that, but then the next layer is going to be tape with the CTA, the Chevy truck access method, right? >> Well, so while we don't actively support tape and go to that there's basically two air gap solutions out there that people talk about either physical, which goes to tape or optical or logical. We do logical air gaping. We don't do air gaping to tape 'cause we don't sell tape. So we make sure that it's a remote logical air gap going to a secondary DR Site. Now, obviously in today's world, no one has a true DR data center anymore, right. All data centers are both active and DR for another site. And because we're so heavily concentrated in the global Fortune 2000, almost all the InfiniBoxes in the field already are set up as in a disaster recovery configuration. So using a remote logical air gap would be is easy for us to do with our InfiniBox SSA II and the whole InfiniBox family. >> And, I get, you guys don't do tape, but when you say remote, so you've got a local air gap, right? But then you also you call a remote logical, but you've got a physical air gap, right? >> Yeah, they would be physically separated, but when you're not going to tape because it's fully removable or optical, then the security analysts consider that type of air gap, a logical air gap, even though it's physically at a remote. >> I understand, you spent a lot of time with the channel as well. I know, and they must be all over this. They must really be climbing on to the whole cyber resiliency. What do you say, do they set up? Like a lot of the guys, doing managed services as well? I'm just curious. Are there separate processes for the air gap piece than there are for the mainstream production environment or is it sort of blended together? How are they approaching that? >> So on the InfiniGuard product line, it's blended together, okay. On the InfiniBox with our InfiniSafe reference architecture, you do need to have an extra server where you create an scuzzy private VLAN and with that private VLAN, you set up your fenced forensic environment. So it's a slightly more complicated. The InfiniGuard is a 100% automated. On the InfiniBox we will be pushing that in the future and we will continue to have releases on InfiniSafe and making more and more automated. But the air gaping and the fence reference now are as a reference architecture configuration. Not with click on a gooey in the InfiniGuard case are original InfiniSafe. All you do is click on some windows and it just goes does. And we're not there yet, but we will be there in the future. But it's such a top of mind topic, as you probably see. Last year, Fortune did a survey of the Fortune 500 CEOs and the number one cited threat at 66% by the way was cybersecurity. So one of the key things store storage vendors do not just us, but all storage vendors is need to convince the CISO that storage is a critical component of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. And by having these four things, the rapid recovery, the fenced forensic environment, the air gaping technology and the immutable snapshots. You've got all of the checkbox items that a CISO needs to see to make sure. That said many CISOs still even today stood on real to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy and that's something that the storage industry in general needs to work on with the security community from a partner perspective. The value is they can sell a full package, so they can go to their end user and say, look, here's what we have for edge protection. Here's what we've got to track the bad guide down once something's happened or to alert you that something's happened by having tools like IBM's, Q Radar and competitive tools to that product line. That can traverse the servers and the software infrastructure, and try to locate malware, ransomware akin to the way all of us have Norton or something like Norton on our laptop that is trolling constantly for viruses. So that's sort of software and then of course storage. And those are the elements that you really need to have an overall cybersecurity strategy. Right now many companies have not realized that storage is critical. When you think about it. When you talk to people in security industry, and I know you do from original insertion intrusion to solution is 287 days. Well guess what if the data sets thereafter, whether it be secondary InfiniGuard or primary within InfiniBox, if they're going to trap those things and they're going to take it. They might have trapped those few data sets at day 50, even though you don't even launch the attack until day 200. So it's a big deal of why storage is so critical and why CISOs and CIOs need to make sure they include it day one. >> It's where the data lives, okay. Eric. Wow.. A lot of topics we discovered. I love the agile sort of cadence. I presume you're not done for the year. Look forward to having you back and thanks so much for coming on today. >> Great. Thanks you, Dave. We of course love being on "theCUBE". Thanks again. And thanks for all the nice things about Infinidat. You've been saying thank you. >> Okay. Yeah, thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> (upbeat music) >> Okay, we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Hertzog is back and joining us is Stan Wysocki, who's president of Mark III Systems. Stan, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> Tell us about Mark III Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website. I'd love to hear more about your business. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There've been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of largest enterprise customers in the Southeast, with server storage networking virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create the full stack message and a full-stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers in DevOps, MLOps and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI, ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them on their adoption of open-source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. >> I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment in an Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? >> Yeah, that's great. So kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage. And that's both an internal customer and your end user customers, on how they want to engage, how they want to consume and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world, right? So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop, right? So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hacker is getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward and we're proud to partner with Infinidat in leveraging InfiniGuard and Infinni safe to really protect our customer's data. >> Great. Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How's how it's going to help the end customers? >> Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the fortune survey of CEOs in 2021. The number one concern of CEOs of the fortune 500, was cybersecurity and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes of the importance of the digital data, that all companies generate, of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do, is make sure that your storage estate, fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with InfiniGuard, or Ifini safe technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world, can make sure that the data is safe, protected and can help them form a malware or ransomware attack, against that valuable data set. >> Well then you know, one of you guys could come with, I mean, we talked to CSOs and they've told us that there be could in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategies changed, no longer than just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to two different areas, obviously endpoint, you know, cloud security is a big deal, identity access management, but ransomware, is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home, or Stan you mentioned greater sophistication of hacker. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? >> Well, you know I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that that's gone up, in any year, right? So, with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like something like 27 different security products and imagine a CSO and his team, who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage InfiniGuard and Infini safe and to be able to provide, you know the immutable snapshots. The logical air gas, the physical air backs and offense network for recovery. That's all extremely easy to manage. I mean I talked to my customers on why they have chosen Infinidat, you know through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is. How easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right, you think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers. But my most technical customers really appreciate this, because of the way Infinidat manages itself and provides the tools saying, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it, so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks, rather than the tier and feeding other storage environment. >> Yeah, thank you and then when you talk to CSOs, you ask them what's the number one problem, they'll tell you lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day, you're getting billion dollar, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about, specifically InfiniGuard, how it fits into your stack like where and how you're applying it? Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. >> Oh yeah definitely, you know we have customers in pretty much every vertical, that we're supporting their stores environments and Infinidat plays and all of those verticals with all of our customers. One in particular a healthcare account, one of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years, is become the de facto standard, stores platform that they have. And they also now have InfiniGuard as the backup target for commovault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer, that really demands excellence, right? So they love, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller set up, they love the availability and the resiliency, but then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. >> Excellent. So Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap, what is that? You know, the logical air gap if you will and then the physical labor, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? >> Well, first of all, obviously, we with the InfiniGuard, has a purpose built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup, is one of the first things these sophisticated ransomware, or malware it entity is going to attack. right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AK their backup estate, is exactly the first thing they're going to target. And they do it certain viciously of course. So what are the key things we do, is we allow them to take those backup datasets, commvault for example and in Stan's example, or Vain or veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle Armin and allow them to create a mutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can alter them. And then we air gap them locally, from the management framework. So in an InfiniGuard, we have a technology known as our day-to-day dupe engines ODDES. Those are really the management scanner for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap, with ODDES, cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they can not lengthen them, in short we take that management scheme away and create this separation. But we also allow them to replicate those backup datasets to a remote InfiniGuard box. You would set up the exact same parameters, I want to make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours and then you've got the duplicate. Remember the average length, from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom, it could be going on for 50 days, a hundred days, 150 days. And it's all done, if you will on the download, hidden. So if by the way, you happen to have a data center fire, or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake, or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience, as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one InfiniGarden. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CapEx there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the dataset. Some of the cyber reasons, technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the dataset. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So to second that Vain or Veritas, IBM spectrum protect commvault, backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins, could immediately restored, it's ready to go. And we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. >> So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice Eric was just sharing, the local air gap and then the secondary, is that really in the case of a disaster, or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing as the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? >> Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is splits it between two sides and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we are down in Texas, hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles on in land. And then there's, you know, hurricane Harvey, right with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third side. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CSO and his team can focus on preventing attacks, while they're very confident that their infrastructure team, can handle anything that slips by them. >> Okay, great. Thank you. We're about out of time but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of, how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers, you know where's that value that business case for them. I wonder if you could just tie that note for us. >> Sure. We want to make sure that we tie everything back, normally technical value, as Stan very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our infiniGuard customers, is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose-built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they're able to increase the number of daily backups, from 30,000 to 90,000. So they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA, in the European area, they had 14 purpose-built backup appliances, seven in one data center and set seven and a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one of the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there. And then they replicate, from one data center to the other data center. As both data centers are both active data centers, but differ for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CapEx, 14 physical boxes down to two. And of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the watch slots, power and floor. All of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically, 'cause there's only two systems now, to power cool, et cetera et cetera. Floor space, Rackspace from 14. So wow, did they save money. So I think, it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way. And as Stan pointed out, in a highly automated way, that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems, because they're overworked and they need to focus on as Stan pointed out, their AI infrastructure, where they're doing for AI applications, don't have time to deal with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end-user perspective, as well as up in through their entire IT chain of command. >> Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinidatguard.com or it's markiisis.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution. A little bit about AI. Gentlemen, thanks so much for the conversation today, great to have you. >> Mark and Steve: Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Hertzog is back and joining us is Stan Wysocki, who's president of Mark Three Systems. Stan, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> Tell us about Mark Three Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website. I'd love to hear more about your business. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There've been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of largest enterprise customers in the Southeast, with server storage networking virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create the full stack message and a full-stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers in DevOps, MLOps and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI, ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them on their adoption of open-source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. >> I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment in an Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? >> Yeah, that's great. So kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage. And that's both an internal customer and your end user customers, on how they want to engage, how they want to consume and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world, right? So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop, right? So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hacker is getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward and we're proud to partner with Infinidat in leveraging InfiniGuard and Infinni safe to really protect our customer's data. >> Great. Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How's how it's going to help the end customers? >> Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the fortune survey of CEOs in 2021. The number one concern of CEOs of the fortune 500, was cybersecurity and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes of the importance of the digital data, that all companies generate, of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do, is make sure that your storage estate, fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with InfiniGuard, or Ifini safe technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world, can make sure that the data is safe, protected and can help them form a malware or ransomware attack, against that valuable data set. >> Well then you know, one of you guys could come with, I mean, we talked to CSOs and they've told us that there be could in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategies changed, no longer than just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to two different areas, obviously endpoint, you know, cloud security is a big deal, identity access management, but ransomware, is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home, or Stan you mentioned greater sophistication of hacker. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? >> Well, you know I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that that's gone up, in any year, right? So, with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like something like 27 different security products and imagine a CSO and his team, who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage InfiniGuard and Infini safe and to be able to provide, you know the immutable snapshots. The logical air gas, the physical air backs and offense network for recovery. That's all extremely easy to manage. I mean I talked to my customers on why they have chosen Infinidat, you know through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is. How easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right, you think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers. But my most technical customers really appreciate this, because of the way Infinidat manages itself and provides the tools saying, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it, so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks, rather than the tier and feeding other storage environment. >> Yeah, thank you and then when you talk to CSOs, you ask them what's the number one problem, they'll tell you lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day, you're getting billion dollar, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about, specifically InfiniGuard, how it fits into your stack like where and how you're applying it? Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. >> Oh yeah definitely, you know we have customers in pretty much every vertical, that we're supporting their stores environments and Infinidat plays and all of those verticals with all of our customers. One in particular a healthcare account, one of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years, is become the de facto standard, stores platform that they have. And they also now have InfiniGuard as the backup target for commovault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer, that really demands excellence, right? So they love, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller set up, they love the availability and the resiliency, but then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. >> Excellent. So Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap, what is that? You know, the logical air gap if you will and then the physical labor, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? >> Well, first of all, obviously, we with the InfiniGuard, has a purpose built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup, is one of the first things these sophisticated ransomware, or malware it entity is going to attack. right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AK their backup estate, is exactly the first thing they're going to target. And they do it certain viciously of course. So what are the key things we do, is we allow them to take those backup datasets, commvault for example and in Stan's example, or Vain or veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle Armin and allow them to create a mutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can alter them. And then we air gap them locally, from the management framework. So in an InfiniGuard, we have a technology known as our day-to-day dupe engines ODDES. Those are really the management scanner for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap, with ODDES, cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they can not lengthen them, in short we take that management scheme away and create this separation. But we also allow them to replicate those backup datasets to a remote InfiniGuard box. You would set up the exact same parameters, I want to make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours and then you've got the duplicate. Remember the average length, from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom, it could be going on for 50 days, a hundred days, 150 days. And it's all done, if you will on the download, hidden. So if by the way, you happen to have a data center fire, or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake, or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience, as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one InfiniGarden. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CapEx there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the dataset. Some of the cyber reasons, technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the dataset. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So to second that Vain or Veritas, IBM spectrum protect commvault, backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins, could immediately restored, it's ready to go. And we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. >> So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice Eric was just sharing, the local air gap and then the secondary, is that really in the case of a disaster, or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing as the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? >> Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is splits it between two sides and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we are down in Texas, hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles on in land. And then there's, you know, hurricane Harvey, right with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third side. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CSO and his team can focus on preventing attacks, while they're very confident that their infrastructure team, can handle anything that slips by them. >> Okay, great. Thank you. We're about out of time but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of, how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers, you know where's that value that business case for them. I wonder if you could just tie that note for us. >> Sure. We want to make sure that we tie everything back, normally technical value, as Stan very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our infiniGuard customers, is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose-built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they're able to increase the number of daily backups, from 30,000 to 90,000. So they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA, in the European area, they had 14 purpose-built backup appliances, seven in one data center and set seven and a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one of the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there. And then they replicate, from one data center to the other data center. As both data centers are both active data centers, but differ for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CapEx, 14 physical boxes down to two. And of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the watch slots, power and floor. All of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically, 'cause there's only two systems now, to power cool, et cetera et cetera. Floor space, Rackspace from 14. So wow, did they save money. So I think, it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way. And as Stan pointed out, in a highly automated way, that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems, because they're overworked and they need to focus on as Stan pointed out, their AI infrastructure, where they're doing for AI applications, don't have time to deal with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end-user perspective, as well as up in through their entire IT chain of command. >> Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinidatguard.com or it's markiisis.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution. A little bit about AI. Gentlemen, thanks so much for the conversation today, great to have you. >> Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hi and welcome to the cube Studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry I'm your host Peter Burris if there's one thing we know about cloud it's that it's going to drive new data and a lot of it and that places a lot of load on storage technologies who have to be able to capture persist and ultimately deliver that data to new classes of applications in support of whatever the digital business is trying to do so how is the whole storage industry and the relationship between data and storage going to evolve I can't think of a better person to have that conversation with in stanley's a phos senior vice president product marketing infinite dad Stan welcome to the cube thank you for it's my pleasure to be here and I'm flattered with that introduction well hold on look you and I have known each other for a long time we have been walking into user presentations and you've been walking out until recently though you were generally regarded as the thought leader when it came to user side concerns about storage what is that problem that users are fundamentally focused on as they think about their data data management and storage requirements fundamental problems and this afflicts all classes of users whether in a financial institution at university government small business medium-sized businesses is that they're coping with the number of primal forces that don't change and the first is that the environment is becoming ever more competitive and with the environment being ever more competitive that means that they're always under budget constraints they're usually suffering from skill shortages especially now when we see so many new technologies and the realization that we can coax value out of the information that we capture and store creating new demands elsewhere within the IT organization so what we see historically is that uses understand that there you have an insatiable demand for capacity they have finite budgets they have limited skills and they realize that recovering from a loss of data integrity is a far more painful process than recovering from an application blowing up or a networking issue and they got to do it faster and they have to do it faster so what we see in some ways is in effect the perfect storm and this is part of the reason that we've seen a number of the technical evolutions that we've witnessed over the past decade or two decades or however long we'd like to admit we've been tracking this industry occurring and growing in importance what we've also seen is that many of the technologies that are useful in helping to deliver usable availability to the application are in some ways becoming more commoditized so when we look across these industries some of the things that we're looking for is cost efficiency we're looking at increasing levels of automation we're looking of increases in data mobility with the ultimate objective being of course to allow data to reside where it naturally belongs and we're trying to deliver these new capabilities at scale in infrastructures that were built with storage arrays that would design for a terabyte world instead of a petabyte world and it won't be too long before we start talking about exabytes as we're already seeing so to be able to satisfy new scale problems with traditional and well understood issues is there are three basic types of storage companies that are targeting this problem the first of the established storage companies the incumbents the incumbents and the incumbents I really don't envy them because they have to maintain backwards compatibility which limits their ability to innovate at the same time they're competing against privately held newer companies that aren't constrained by the need for backwards compatibility and therefore able to take better advantage of the technology improvements that we're seeing to live it and when I say technology improvements not just in hardware but also in terms of software also in terms of management and government and governing philosophies so beginning with the point that all companies large small have some basic problems that are similar what we then see is there are three types of storage companies addressing them one of the in established and common vendors the other and they've gotten a lot of press or the companies that realize that flash media very media that delivers one to two orders of magnitude improvements in terms of performance in terms of bandwidth in terms of environmental x' that they could create storage solutions that address real pain points within a data center within an organization but at a very high price point and then it was the third approach and this is the approach that infinite I chose to take and that is to define the customer problem to find the customer market and then create an architecture which is underpinned by brilliant software to solve these problems in a way that is both cost-effective and extensible and of course meeting all of the critical capabilities that users are looking for so we've got the situation where we've got the incumbents who have install bases and are trying to bring their customers forward but right I have to do so within the constraints of past technology choices we've got the new folks who are basically technology first and saying jump to a new innovation curve and we've got other companies that are trying to bring the best of the technology to the best of the customer reality and marry it and you're asserting that's what infinite at ease and then it's precisely what we've done so let's talk about why did you then come to infinite at what is it about infinite act that gets you excited well one of the things that got well your number of things that got me excited about it so the first is that when I look at this and I approach these things as an engineer who's steeped in aerospace and weapon systems design so you look at the problem you superimpose capabilities there and then you blow it up and then if well we do blow it up but we blow it up using economics we blow it up using superior post-sale support effectiveness we blow it up with a fundamentally different approach to how we give our install base access to new capabilities so we're established storage companies and to some extent media based storage companies of forcing upgrades to avoid architectural obsolescence that is to gain access to new features and functions that can improve their staff productivity or deliver new capabilities to support new applications and workloads we're not forcing a cadence of infrastructure refreshes to gain access to that so if you take a look at our history our past behavior we allow today we're allowing current software to run on n minus 2 generation hardware so that now when you're doing a refresh on your hardware you're doing a refresh on the hardware because you've outgrown it because it's so old that it's moved past its useful service life which hasn't happened to us yet because that's usually on the order of about eight years and sometimes longer if it's kept in a clean data center and we have a steady cadence of product announcements and we understood some underlying economics so whether I talk to banking institutions colleges manufacturing companies telcos service providers everybody's in general agreement that roughly two-thirds of the data that they have online and accessible is stale data meaning that it hasn't been accessed in 60 to 90 days and then when I take a look at industry forecasts in terms of dollar per terabyte pricing for HD DS for disk drives and I look at dollar per terabyte forecast for flash technologies there's an order of magnitude difference in meaning 10x and even if you want to be a pessimist call it only 5x what you see is that we have a built-in advantage for storing 60% of the data that's already up and spinning and there are those questions of whether or not the availability of flash is going to come under pressure over the next few years as because we're not expanding another fabs out there they're generating flash so let me come back right it's kind of core points out there so we have quality yeah the right now you guys are trying to bring the economics of HDD to the challenges are faster more reliable more scalable data delivery right so that you can think about not only persisting your data from transactional applications but also delivering that data to the new uses new requirements new applications new business needs so you've made you know infinite out has made some choices about how to bring technology together that are some somewhat that are unique first thing is the team that did this tell us a little bit about the team and then let's talk about some of those torches so one of the draws for me personally is that we have a development team that has had the unique possibly the unique experience of having done three not one not two but three clean sheet designs of storage arrays now if you believe that practice makes perfect and you're starting off with very bright people that experience before they designed a storage array when we look at the InfiniBand when we look at in Finnegan what we see is the benefit of three clean sheet designs and what does that design look like what is it how did you guys bring these different senses of technology together to improve the notion of it all right so what we looked at we looked at trends instead of being married to a technology or married to an architecture we were we define the users problem we understood that they have an insatiable need for data we can argue whether they're growing at fifteen percent 30 percent or 100 percent per year but data growth is insatiable stale data being a constant megive n' and of course now with digital business initiatives and moving the infrastructure to the edge where we could capture ever more data if anything the amount of stale data that was storing is likely to increase so we've all seen survey after survey that 80% of all the data created is unstructured data meaning we're collecting it we know that may be a value at some point but we're not quite sure when so this is not data that you want to store in the most expensive media that we know how to manufacture or sell right not happening so we have a built-in economic advantage for this at least 60% of the data that users want to keep online we understand that if you implement an archiving solution that archive data still has to be stored somewhere and for practical purposes that's either disk or tape and we're not here to talk about the fact that I can take tape and store in a bunker for years but if I want to recover something if I have to answer a problem I want it on disk so the economic gap the price Delta between an archive storage solution per se and our approach is much narrower because we're using a common technology and when Seagate or West and digital a Toshiba cell and HDD they're not asking you where you're putting it they're saying you want this capacity this rpm this mean time between face its this is how much it's going to cost so when we take a look at a lot of the innovation and go to market models what they really are or revenue protection schemes for the existing established vendors and for the emerging companies the difference is there are in the problems that they're solving am i creating a backup restore solution the backup and restore is always a high impact pain point am i creating a backup restore solution am i building a system for primary storage a my targeting virtualized environments my targeting VDI now our install base the bulk of our install base I'm not sure we actually we should share percentages but it's well north of 50 and if you take a look at some virtualized estimates probably 80% of workloads today are virtualized we understood that to satisfy this environment and to have a built-in advantage that's memorable after the marketing presentations are done in other words treating these things as black boxes so if we take a look at my high-level description of an infinite box array installed at a customer site consistent sub-millisecond response times and we're able to do that because we service over 80% of all iOS out of DRAM which is probably about four orders of magnitude faster than NAND flash and then we have a large read cache to increase our cache hit ratio even further and when I say large we're not talking about single digits of terabytes we're talking about 20 plus terabytes and that can grow as necessary so that when we're done we're achieving cache hit ratios that are typically in excess of 90% now if I'm servicing iOS out of cache do I really care what's on the back end the answer is no but what I do care about for certain analytics applications is I want lots of bandwidth and I want and if I have workloads with high right content I don't want to be spending a lot of time paying my raid right penalty so what we've done is to take the obvious solution and coalesce rights so that instead of doing partial stripe rights we're always doing full stripe rights so we have double bit protection on data stored on HD DS which means that the world is likely to come to an end before we lose this slight exaggeration I think we're expecting the world to come to an end in 14 billion years yeah yeah let's do so so if I'm wrong get back to me in a Bay and it's a little bit less than that but it doesn't matter yeah okay high on that all so we've got a so we've got a built in economic advantage we've got a built in performance advantage because when I'm servicing most iOS out of DRAM which is for does magnitude faster than NAND flash I've got a lot of room to do a lot of very clever things in terms of metadata and still be faster so and you got a team that's done it before and we've got a team that's done it before and experimented because remember this is a team that has experience with scale-up architectures as in symmetric s-- they have experience with scale-out architectures which is XIV which was very disruptive to the market well so was it symmetric spec and now of course we've got this third bite at the Apple with infinite at where they also understood that the rate of microprocessor performance improvement was going up a lot faster than than our ability to transfer data on and off of HD DS or SSDs so what they realized is that they could change the ratio they can have a much lower microprocessor or controller to back-end storage ratio and still be able to deliver this tremendous performance and now if you have fewer parts and you're not affecting the ID MTBF by driving more iOS through I've lowered my overall cost of goods so now I've got an advantage in back-end media I have a bag I have an advantage in terms of the number of controllers I need to deliver sub sillas eken response time I have an advantage in terms of delivering usable availability so I'm now in a position to be able to unashamedly compete on price unashamedly compete on performance unashamedly compete on a better post sale support experience because remember if there's less stuff they had a break we're taking less calls and because of the way we're organized our support generally goes to what other vendors might think of it's third level support because of a guided answer answers the phone from us doesn't solve the problem he's calling development so if you take a look at gotten apear insights we're off the scale in terms of having great reviews and when you have I think it's 99% I may be off by a percent ninety eight to a hundred percent of our customers saying they'd recommend our kit to their to their peers that's a pretty positive endorsement yeah so let me let me break in and and kind of wrap up a little bit let me make this quick observation because the other thing that you guys have done is you've demonstrated that you're not bound to a single technology so smart people with a great architecture that's capable of utilizing any technology to serve a customer problem at a price point that reflects the value of the problem that's being solved right and in fact we it's very insightful observation because when you recognize that we've built a multimedia integrated architecture that makes our that makes very easy for us to include storage class memory and because of the way we've done our drivers we're also going to be nvme over if ready when that starts to gain traction as well excellent Stanley Zappos senior vice president product management Infini debt thanks very much for being in the cube we'll have you back oh it's my pleasure there's been a blast and once again I want to thank you for joining us for another cube conversation on Peterborough's see you next time [Music]

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