(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle 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.

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

(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) >> Despite its 70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town, everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are a hundred people, and 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, Moshe Yanai. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service, and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently, in early this year, appointed industry vet, Phil Bullinger, as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury, to run EMEA, and APJ Go-To-Market. And just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Hertzog to be CMO. Hertzog has worked at numerous companies, ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, and is SVP of product marketing and management at Storage Powerhouse, EMC, among others. Hertzog has been named CMO of the year as an OnCon Icon, and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud, along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today, is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr.Eric Hertzog. Good to see you, Eric, thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE, and I am of course sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. >> Dude, no Hawaiian shirt, okay. That's a pretty buttoned up company. >> Well, next time, I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. >> Okay, so give us the backstory, how did this all come about? you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but, how did it come about? Tell us that story. >> So, I have known Phil since the late 90s, when he was a VP at LSA of Engineering, and he had... I was working at a company called Milax, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP, and he was providing the subsystem, and we were providing the fiber to fiber, and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Isilon team. And then he became the general manager. So, while I didn't work for him, I worked with him, A, at LSA, and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won, and he said "Hey Herzog, "we should talk, I have a CMO opening". So literally happened over LinkedIn discussion, where I reached out to him, and congratulate him, he said "Hey, I need a CMO, let's talk". So, the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exec staff. >> That's awesome, that's right, he was running the Isilon division for awhile at the EMC. >> Right. >> You guys were there, and of course, you talk about Milax, LSA, there was a period of time where, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So, you sort of saw the whole landscape. So, you got some serious storage history and chops. So, I want to ask you what attracted you to Infinidat. I mean, obviously they're a leader in the magic quadrant. We know about InfiniBox, and the petabyte scale, and the low latency, what are the... When you look at the market, you obviously you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? >> Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage, other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinidat message of optimizing applications, workloads, and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that, and overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is, when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do, because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor, and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have, you actually... I found out when I got here, they took out a hundred arrays from EMC Hitachi. And that company now has 20 InfiniBoxes, and InfiniBox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So, that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OPEX angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So, lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if you will, amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the InfiniBox SSA, the InfiniGuard product, which is really optimized, not only as the PBA for backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also, has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping, and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault, so that you can then recover their review for malware ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So, between the relationship with Phil, and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket. In fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. >> Wow, okay, so yeah, I think it was Duplessy called them the best kept secret, he's not the only one. And so that brings us to you, and your mission because it's true, it is the best kept secret. You're a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner magic quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops and block storage. You talked about the consolidation story, and I've talked to many folks in Infinidat about that. Ken Steinhardt rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend, about, you know... So, that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion, and Infinidat has proven that it can operate at very very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? >> Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel as you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN, and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers, and there's been a lot of conflict. So, we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business within general globally. So, we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting, personally, next week with five different CEOs of channel partners. Of which, only one of them is doing business with Infinidat now. So, we want to expand our channel, and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area. The work we do with all the industry analysts, not just in North America, but in Europe as well, and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort, both of us, of course, having been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple of years. So, we're going to open that up. And then, obviously, increase our demand generation activities as well. So, we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do, and deliver that message to the world. Deliver it to the partner base, so the partners can take advantage, and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OPEX. So, the partner wins, and the end user wins. And that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. >> So you're not only just the marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So, you could... You're like a walking spec sheet, John Farrier says you could just rattle it off. Already impressed that how much you know about Infinidat, but when you joined EMC, it was almost like, there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products. And you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidat? >> Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technologies that happens run on a hybrid array, an all flash array, has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So, with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the InfiniBox, you can easily use an InfiniGuard. You got an InfiniGuard, you can easily use an InfiniBox SSA. So the capability of doing that, helps reduce operational manpower and hence, of course, OPEX. So the story is strong technically, the story has a strong business tie in. So part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days. Yeah, we both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS, and latency, and bandwidth. And if the people didn't... If the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud, virtual environments and containers, which Infinidat can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer, and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions. Yet, with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CapEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me. And we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that... My job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value, that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CSO, by the VP of software development, who then says to VP of industry, that Infinidat stuff, we actually need that for our SAP workload, or wow, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CSO says, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidat guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job, and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. >> So the other thing, the interesting thing about Infinidat. This was always a source of spirited discussions over the years with business friends from Infinidat was the company figured out a way, it was formed in 2011, and at the time the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to flash, of course, floyers work a big flash, all flash data center, etc, etc. But Infinidat with its memory cache and its architecture, and its algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance in an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is I think unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting, but at the time it made sense, to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach, I might try to build, a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe go into that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud, what's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that? >> Sure, so the cloud strategy, is first of all, seamless integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support Outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend, either for their primary storage, or for their secondary storage. So, we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the Telcos has 150 Infiniboxes, InfiniBox SSAS and InfiniGuards. 150 running one of the largest Telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure, why don't you use us the giant Telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup is our servers, or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infiniboxes or InfiniBox SSA. So, the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium, and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right outside SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about InfiniGuard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery, but at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City, or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability, which InfiniGuard can do. Which of course, is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. So, we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play. And again we have a number of public references in the cloud, US signal and others, where they talk about why they use the InfiniBox, and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. >> Okay, so I got to ask you, so you've mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters is in Waltham, we're going to pry you out of the Golden State? >> Let's see, I was born at Stanford hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere, but here. And of course, remember when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week, and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving, I'm a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, the Silicon Valley Guy from the old days, that's me. >> Yeah, the hotels in Waltham are a little better, but... So, what's your priority? Last question. What's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? >> Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinidat, which is a little unusual, is there sometimes are silos and having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or a small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness, So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful, even with the silos, imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so, we're going to do that, and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple awards recently, we're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC Awards, and one of the channel publications is going to give us an award next week. So yeah, we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend. Both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So, those are the things we're going to do first, and yeah, we're going to be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing, as I mentioned, I'm meeting, five partners, CEOs, and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we want to get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff, going "We are going with Infinidat "as one of our strong storage providers". So, we're doing all that upfront work in the first 100 days, so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. >> Love the channel story, and you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos, correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinidat does a lot of business in overseas. A lot of business in Europe, obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel, but that's by its very nature, stovepipe. Most startups start in the US, big market NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. It's almost like Infinidat sort of simultaneously grew it's overseas business, and it's US business. >> Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India, and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. In fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today, and one of the comments that was made for someone who's going to give us a PO. So, the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter, and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up a storage company these days, but the CIO called him and said "I can't believe the work you did. We're going to buy some more stuff this quarter". So that white glove service, our technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service is pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service, when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company, and will continue to be so. >> Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do, and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinidat since, sort of day zero and I really wish you the best. >> Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE. And trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. >> Ah, I can't wait. All right, thanks to Eric, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

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

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

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

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2018! Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re:Invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney. Host of the Cube: Amazon web services. There are maybe 2,000 people here at their event, re:Invent annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, computer networking, part of the main infrastructures involving changing very rapidly and spawning new use cases, new value propositions, it's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Erik Kaulburg, who is the vice president of Infinidat, Cube alumni, great to see you again. >> Nice to see you as well. >> Been on the Cube multiple times. I think last time it was at VMWorld, or a studio? >> At, actually, our product launch for the cloud storage solution, as well. >> So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just, for the folks who might now know Infinidad, explain what you guys do, and your disruptive innovation. >> So, for Infinidad, we're all about tier-one environments, and it's the data piece of that environment, today, although that may not be forever. And, it's consumed through a couple of different modalities, so one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the InfiniBox solution, which we shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today, and broadening that to address the secondary storage market with InfiniGuard and Neutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an iAd service in conjunction with other public clouds. >> Let's get that in a second, I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions, cloud storage, you're seeing pure storage had a big announcement of now they're doing a device, now doing software on premise, Amazon's going to have a device on premise, it's up for the cloud. Like, what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? Obviously, API, microservices, these are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity, but still a challenge. You guys are the center of it, what's the market look like to you? >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data is at the middle of everything, and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes, or primarily sell boxes today, are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments, and they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds, and the other is to build alongside it and enable those major public clouds, and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry, with regards to the public cloud. >> What's the role of storage here at re:Invent, because, like I said, Holy Trinity is of infrastructures, computer storage, and networking, and as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with Cloudify, is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? >> Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like, we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday, and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data, so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows, and get things done quicker. We use less PHP type resources to get a problem solved, so I think that category of solutions, where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value, or more value in the end application, is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. >> What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? >> Well, I think, in general if you look at the adoption patterns of their block, file, and objects storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases, and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there, outside of the traditional, traditional cloud native object architectures, in the block and file arena, which has largely been untapped by the data and storage services, and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. >> What is the competition? What's, like, NetApp doing? Let me ask, everyone's got to be on mobile clouds. Amazon, clearly the leader. They're making the market, so unless, say Kubernetes doesn't intermediate their services, for the most part, that's the market leader, but you got to play on a lot of clouds, because customers aren't going to have one cloud, they're going to certainly be hybrid on premises and cloud, but certainly be on multiple clouds. What's, like, NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? >> So, what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest, what I see is they've got tied immigration, which is very impressive, with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is, when you want cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. >> Like what? >> So, you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure. Let's say, if you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. >> Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. Neutrix Cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. >> So on a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility of Infinidad, and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio, but specifically, with regards to cloud storage, Neutrix delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS, of course, and it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA, which we've talked about, which we believe is best in class, as well as enterprise-grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve. Large-scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things, which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. >> And what's the core problem that you solved with this product? >> It's, you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue, anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities, and even business guarantees provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last, let's say, 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So, that's what we're addressing, making it easier for storage to accomplish that. >> You guys always have impressive customers, always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. >> So, our customers have fallen into two categories, with regards to Neutrix Cloud adoption. The easy case, and the most natural for many of them, since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure at a large scale today, is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the Neutrix cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster-recovery target, things like that, and we think that there's value there. There's lots of companies which do DR as a service, to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case, which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications, and bringing them the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. >> We talked about the cloud guys, so we don't want to put you on the spot here, because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage, and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block, file, that good stuff. Now, with the cloud, and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie-in with you guys, because storage is not necessarily just a magic, quadrant-like thing. Oh, back-up and recovery, this and that, you're starting to see much more of a platform approach. And successful platforms enable things to be successful. It's not like I built it for this, purpose-built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform, and if so, what does that mean, and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? >> I think you said it, actually, better than I did, that ultimately, we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So, if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a back-up optimizing environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all those today, and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single, kind of, data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. >> So, were you looking at, you know, kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat, and one of the things that I'm thinking of is, how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, you know, utilize it, across multiple environments? >> So, many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach, and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily, and how, ultimately, they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the Neutrix Cloud service. >> Right. >> So we can have clients up and running in less than a day, from initial contact to large scale adoption, and it could be even faster than that as well. >> Now onto your relations with Amazon. What's it like, what's the details of it, what's the value, what's the connection point? >> I think we all agree that tier one applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure, and so, to the extent Neutrix Cloud enables those tier one applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship, so we're absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them, there are certainly areas where we overlap, but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strategies. >> So, who are you competitors that you're most, kind of, focused on? Well, you shouldn't be focused on your competitors, you should be focused on what you're doing, but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? >> I would say others that people would lump in this space, include NetApp Solutions in the public cloud environments, we see a couple of small start-ups, like Zadara, for example, from time to time, but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services. And customers have to think about, well, I'm planning on replatforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective and often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environments. So, that's when we come into the conversation, and from that point forward, generally, if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. >> You know, when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Gabe and I would always talk about Infinidat. You got good pedigree of a team. Classic storage. You have a good storage market. You guys take a different approach with this start-up. Founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce, what's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidad. What are they buying? What are they really getting, besides the product performance? What's the culture like, what's the company's view on the future world, serious insight. >> I think there's several elements to that, of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So, Moshe Yanai, who basically defined the enterprise storage category overall back in EMC, had a succession of teams that he's built over the years, and he's really brought all of those key elements together. Three generations of storage expertise. >> Successful, by the way, three generations of exits, >> Absolutely, yeah. Building an organic business, selling a business, and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some point. >> How's it going so far, how's business in general? >> Well, you know, we're private, so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal, the adoption of our portfolio solutions, in addition to just the core product, has really put us in a position of a very strong, long-term independence. >> Portfolios in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving, or both? >> It's, actually, on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general, as a, you know, into a lot of different use cases, because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So, we go where the data is. >> What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What're you lookin' to do next? >> Well, we did just have a major product release, so I'm glad that we've that, you know, out there, we're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements, and then ultimately, you know, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. >> All right, Erik, thanks for coming on the Cube show, thanks for the update. Infinidad, check them out, successful exit, multiple ties in the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great, storage has been going away, neither is networking, and neither is computing, it's only going to get better, stronger, as the cloud brings in more capabilities with machine learning and more use cases, new work loads, new capabilities. The Cube bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier and Lauren Cooney, on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VM World 2018. Brought to you by VMware and Adziko System partners. >> Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay everybody in Las Vegas. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with David Floyer. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. We've got two sets here in the VM Village. 94 guests this week. It's a record for the CUBE. Thanks so much for watching. I've been in this business as long as Pat Gelsinger and ever since I've been in this business people have said, "oh infrastructure's dying", and you know what, storage is the gift that keeps on giving. And I just, we love the conversations. Guys from Infinidat are here. Jacob Broido is the Chief Product Officer and Neville Yates is the Senior Director of Data Protection Solutions at Infinidat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Happy VMworld 2018. >> Thank you >> Thank you >> All right Jacob, I'm going to start with you. >> Okay. >> So we have seen Infinidat come in. You're basically competing with all flash arrays, you're faster than Flash, and that's your sort of tag line. So you have this system designed for primary storage and then all of a sudden, you know last summer, around last summer, maybe it was the fall. We see you guys entering the data protection market with essentially the same architecture. How is it that you can take a system that's designed for primary storage faster than Flash, and then point it at data protection. Help us understand. >> That's a great question. So, it all starts with the fact that we designed our system to work with mixed workloads. And primary storage being our first keypoint, but the design and architecture supposed to work with any type of workload. And what we started seeing in the field is that our customers first displaced a lot of incumbent primary storage on us. And then we started seeing them putting backup workloads as well, and data protection workloads on our systems as well, and coming back and saying that this works amazingly led to more of that. This basically led us to a point of expanding on that strategy and introducing additional products and services. The key point for us in this was that it was remarkably easy for us to introduce additional capabilities because of the solid technical and architectural foundation. We're very fast. Our financial model enables us to do and go after the data protection market efficiently, and we're seeing this in the field. >> So Neville help us, paint a picture for us. You've got a long history in the data protection market. You were involved in disrupting tape, you've been a consultant in this space working with customers. What's the market sort of look like, the sort of available market for you guys? >> So when Jacob refers to the expansion into data protection, we took this technology as Jacob describes the InfiniBox, and we didn't just expand in one direction. We expanded in two directions, multi-direct, with the introduction of of InfiniSync, which is a means by which critical applications can enable a recovery point of zero, Jacob will go into more details on that. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we deliver a deploying InfiniGuard. Based on the same technology that Jacob described as the core, we're now able to be the target of factual re-enter, the typical grandfather/father/son, every 24-hours you do a backup, you do an incremental. And with deduplication as a front end to the core storage, now we've got a coverage across a data protection spectrum that nobody else can match. Recovery point of zero, leveraging replication technologies that Jacob will expand upon in a minute, Snap technology internal to InfiniBox, integrated with backup applications such as the dash-board management is all consistent, and then further down the spectrum, the InfiniGuard itself, dealing with the traditional kind of data protection schemes. A complete spectrum coverage. Nobody else can deliver it. Built on that technology core to the InfinityBox storage itself. >> So you got the full pyramid covered with the same fundamental architecture. But Jacob, you can't just throw the Box at data protection, you have to bring in other features, you got to be best of breed. So maybe you can talk a little bit about, double-click on some of those. >> Sure. So it all starts with kind of base foundation for our data protection that is InfiniSnaps. It's our snapshot core engine which from day one, we designed to work at multi-petabyte scale, and for us what that means is that you need to support hundred-thousands of snapshots and up to multiple millions. That's by design how we designed the system. But not only that, you have to have zero impact on performance. If you look at our systems in the field, our customers are doing thousands of snapshots per day. Some are doing tens of thousands or more per day with no performance impact, that's not even measurable on any of their performance graphs. This is the foundational technology on which we have built our forward looking additional data protection technologies. So, if we look upper in the pyramid of overall solutions for data protection, after that we introduce our asynchronous replication which is based on that snapshot technology for us. The reason we had such an efficient and groundbreaking snapshot technology, enables us to do the lowest RPO protection for async replication when comparing to any storage product on the market. We're talking about four seconds RPO, and this is something that no other vendor was able to do, because snapshots break at that pace. It's very hard to create and delete snapshots at scale at a such a short interval. >> Without performance degradation. >> Exactly, exactly. We were able to do this. And this is kind of one example of how our early days architectural planning and investment in our product architecture pays off year after year with every new feature. That's why it seems easy for now when we release features quickly, because we have such a solid technical foundation. >> One of the things that I was really fascinated by, was your purchase of Axxana. And how have you been able to use that to get this RTO zero, that you're claiming on that? I mean if you look at the marketplace at the moment, it seems to be that the storage vendors in general are owning this whole space of RTO, lower-RTO's, et cetera. >> That's a great question, but before we get into details about that I want to cover a kind of foundational technology for that, that enabled us to do this. And that is our synchronous replication within InfiniBox already. Which is also built on top of our async, which in turn, built on top of our snapshots. With our synchronous replication within InfiniBox, we're delivering the lowest possible latency for sync replication today. Just to give you an example of how low and how efficient that is, systems that are running synchronous replication on top of InfiniBox are having lower latency than a single all-flash array writing locally. Just imagine what it means. We're able to do the round trip right to another array, and complete the whole work faster than you'll have an all-flash array, a typical all-flash array doing. Now that foundational technology also is a key part of our InfiniSync implementation. Because what we did, we took a great product which comes from Axxana, which is the hardened black box, capable of withstanding any type of disaster, fire, floods, earthquake, whatever. And we essentially integrated it very closely with InfiniBox sync replication, where we're writing this very efficient low-latency sync operations to our InfiniSync appliance, and essentially enabling RPO zero over in the distance. So if you look at it from the heart things perspective which is the data path, we had existing capability, which is our sync replication within the array. We just had to integrate it with another great product, Axxana, and that essentially was more than anything an integration work rather than from scratch development. Because again, this is part of our philosophy, we plan ahead as far a our product, road map, and strategy, and when you lay out the foundation early on, you get to the point where some things look easy, because they were pre-made and prepared early on. >> So that's the tip of the pyramid. For those mission critical applications where you need RPO zero, you've now enabled customers to do that for much lower cost than let's say for instance, the three site data center. >> Yep. >> What about the sort of fat middle, Neville, of data protection, I think you guys call it InfiniGuard. Right? That's kind of your solution there. >> So InfiniGuard simply is InfiniBox storage, with all of it's resiliency and performance, and algorithms that outperform typical arrays, and in front of that we've integrated deduplication engines. These deduplication engines present themselves as targets to the traditional backup ecosystem, receive data, de-duplicate it, and use the resources of InfiniBox storage integrated into the InfiniGuard. And, it's been received well, because its ability to deliver aggressive recovery time objectives, because of its performance in terms of resource speeds. The traditional systems that have been designed ten or fifteen years ago were okay at doing backups, they were purposely built for backup processes. They suffer greatly as a byproduct of the process of deduplication, and the IO profile that that generates. InfiniGuard breaks through that, because of its performance in the underlying storage, in order to drive RTO's, for the recovery of those files that are under the 24-hour sort of data protection cycle. And the customers are receiving it well. They are amazed at the performance, the reliability, and the simplicity within which that fits into the existing ecosystem. So it completes. InfiniSync, InfiniGuard, with InfiniBox at the core in the middle. >> And so you partner with the backup software vendors. >> Of course. >> You're not writing your own backup software, right? >> No no no. So integration, Veeam, the ConVals, the Veritas OST's, et cetera. A little further integration when it comes to InfiniBox Snap technology. That is integrated into backup applications such as ConVal or Veeam. Specifically, you can use their dashboard and their scheduling scheme to trigger the snap that then is taken care of in InfiniBox. So, it's quite a comprehensive deliverable against the whole data protection paradigm. >> And have you made a cloud of that now? With your new service? >> Not yet, but as Jacob said, there's the vision, we are always building strategically, slightly ahead of the curve. So you can imagine that that's not lost on the radar screen. >> Right. >> I see this as a return on asset play. In other words, I've got the architecture, I've got my processes and procedures in place, I don't have to go out and buy a purpose built appliance for data protection now, I can use the asset that's on my floor, that people are trained on, what are your thoughts? >> Absolutely, it seems to me that you have, uh simplified tremendously, all of those previous steps, that took one to another to another, and put them all in the same box, and used the same technologies, to achieve much better end to end results. I think it's excellent. >> You're absolutely correct, and it's deliverable in a timely fashion, because the foundation is so strong. The investment that we made from day one, to make sure that that storage architecture was able to deliver the storage services at the right cost point, at the right resiliency, at the right performance levels, is the means by which we're able to accomplish that. No one else can do it. >> And there's another arc to this story. That we're constantly, we're continually investing into that foundation. Every, our customers, the one unique thing that they experience with us, is that their systems get better every time, every release that we have, every month they get better. Not only on performance, which is obvious, in that our systems are improving all the time. >> As opposed to the normal expectation is that >> Yes. >> as you fill it up it gets worse. >> Yeah. We are actually delivering the opposite. Our customers that are buying the system today, know that, the ones that experienced InfiniBox, know that it will become better over time. And that expands the whole spectrum. It's performance, it's reliability, but it also futures it. All of the things that we discussed here, were delivered free of charge through our software upgrade to our existing InfiniBox customers. And, without disclosing something specific looking forward, there are many more things in that area coming up pretty soon from us. >> Very innovative. You guys always solve problems differently, cutting against the conventional wisdom. You see, VMworld, a lot of glam. A lot of big market. And you guys, I was at your customer dinner the other night. A lot of happy customers. A very intimate event. And a lot of good belly to belly conversations. So congratulations. Final thoughts from each of you on VMworld 2018, the future of Infinidat, anything you want to share with us? Go ahead, Neville. >> Good show, the clients, the prospects that I've spoken to here, they get to open their minds in terms of our solution-offering, and it's generated a lot of interest, and it's going to be a good remainder of the year and a good 2019. >> Great, Jacob, final words from you. >> I agree as well. And we're, I'm seeing customers that are actually reaching out to new prospects for us, and telling the story of Infinidat, and that's catching on. And it's great to see that. >> Jacob, Neville, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Bringing you all the action from VMworld 2018, I'm Dave Vellante, for David Floyer. You're watching theCUBE, and we'll be right back after this short break. (light electronic music)

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

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

(upbeat music) Thanks Dave, I'm Peter Burris and I'm here in our Palo Alto The Cube Studios, and I'm being joined here by Bob Cancilla, who is the executive vice president of business development and relationships. And Neville Yates, who is a business continuity consultant. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here in The Cube with us. >> Neville: Thank you. >> Bob: Thanks Peter, nice to be here. >> So there is a lot of conversation about digital business and the role that data plays in it. Now from our perspective, we have a relatively simple way of thinking about these things, and we think that the difference between business and digital business is the role the data plays in the digital business. A business gets more digital as it uses its data differently, specifically its data assets. Which means that the thinking inside business has to change, from data protection or asset or server protection, or network protection to truly digital business protection; what do you guys think? >> Bob: Sure, we're seeing the same thing as you are saying there, Peter. In fact, our customers have asked us, to spread our influence in their data protection. We have been evaluating ways to expand our business, to expand our influence in the industry. And they came back and told us, if they wanted to help them the best way that we can help them, is to go on and take on the high-end backup and recovery solutions, where there really is one major player in the market today. Effectively, a monopoly. Our customers words, not our own. At the same time, our product management team was looking into ways of expanding our influence, as well. And they strongly believed and convinced me, convinced us; our leadership team with inside Infinidat, to enter into the secondary storage market. And it was very clear that we could build upon the foundation, the pillars of what we've done on the primary storage side and the innovations that we brought to the market there. You know, things around multiple petabyte scale with incredible density, faster than flash performance. The extreme ease of use and lowering the total cost of operation at the enterprise client. >> So, I want to turn that into some numbers. We've done some research, Neville; here at Wikibon. That suggests that a typical Fortune 1000 company because of brittle and complex restore processes, specifically, too many cooks involved, a focus on not the data but on devices, means that there is a lot of failure that happens especially during restore processes and that cost again, a typical Fortune 1000 company 1.25+ billion dollars revenue over a 4 year period. What do you say, as you think about business continuity for some of these emerging and evolving companies? >> That translates into time is money. And if you need to recover data in support of revenue generating operations and applications, you've got to have that data come back to be productively usable. What we do with InfiniGuard is ensure that those recovery time objectives are met in support of that business application. And it is the leveraging of the pillars that Bob talked about in terms of the performance. The way that we are unbelievable custodians of data and then we are able to deliver that data back faster than what people expect. They're used today to mediocrity. It takes too long. I was with a customer 2 weeks ago. We were backing up a 3 terabyte database. This is not a big a amount of data, it takes about half an hour. We were saying let's do a restore, and the gentleman looked at me and said, "we don't have time." I said, "No, it's a thirty minute process." This person expected it to take 5 and 6 hours. Add that up in terms of dollars per hour, what it means to that revenue generating application and that's where those numbers come from. >> Peter: Yes, especially if it fails because of as you said, Bob; the lack of ease of use and a lack of simplicity. So we're here to talk about something. What is it that we're talking about and how does it work? >> Bob: Yeah, let me tell you. I'll cover the what it is, I'll let Neville get into a little bit on how it works. So the what it is, we built it off the building block of our InfiniBox technology. We started with our model F4260, a 1 petabyte usable configuration. We integrated in stateless d-duplication engines, what we call D.D.E.'s, and a high availability topology, that effectively protects up to 20 petabytes of data. We combine that with a vast certification and openness of independent software vendors in the data protection space. We want to encourage openness and an open ecosystem, we don't want to lock any customer out of their preferred software solution in that space. And you can see that with the recent announcements that we've made about expanding our partnerships in this space, specifically Commvault and V. >> Well, very importantly the idea of partnership and simplicity and ease of use, you want your box, the InfiniGuard, to be as high-quality and as productive as possible, but you don't want to force a dramatic change in how an organization works. So let's dig in to some of that, Neville. How does this work in practice? >> It's very simple. We have these d-duplication engines that front-end the InfiniBox storage. But what is unique, because there's other ways of packaging this sort of thing. But what is unique is when the InfiniGuard gets the data, it builds knowledge of relationships of that data. D-duplication is a challenge for secondary storage systems. Because it is a random I/O profile that has to be gathered in a fashion, to sequentially feed this data back. Our knowledge-building engine, which we call Neurocache in the InfiniBox, is the means by which we understand how to gather this data in a timely fashion. >> Peter: So Neurocache helps you essentially sustain some degree of organization of the data, within the box. >> Absolutely. And as a byproduct of that organization that the ability to go and get it ahead of the ask allows us to respond to meet recovery time objections. >> Peter: And that's the way you go from 5 to 6 hours for relatively small restores to -- >> Neville: 30 minutes. >> Exactly. So by feeding the data back out to the system in an organized, pre-organized way the system is taking care of a lot of the randomness and therefore the time, necessary to perform a restore. >> Exactly, and other systems don't have that capability. And so they are 6 hours. >> So we're talking about the difference between 30 minutes and 6 hours, but I also want to very quickly, Bob; ask you a question in the last couple of minutes here. You mentioned partnerships. We also want to make sure that we have a time-to-value equation, that works for your average business. Because the box can work with a lot of different software that really is where the operations activities are defined, presumably it comes in pretty quickly and it delivers value pretty quickly. Have I got that right? >> Bob: Absolutely. So you know, we have done a vast amount of testing. Certification, demos, POCs, you name it. With all the major players out there, that are in this market, on the backup software side, the data protection side of the business. All of them have commented about the better business continuity solution that we've put together. In conjunction with their product as well. And the number 1 feedback that comes back is, "Wow, the restore times that you guys deliver to the market are unlike anything we've seen before." >> Peter: So to summarize it: It goes in faster. It works faster and it scales better, so that the business truly can think of itself of being protected, not just sets of data. >> Absolutely. >> Agreed. >> Alright. Bob Cancilla, EVP of business development and partnerships. Neville Yates, business continuity consultant. Thanks very much for being on The Cube. We'll be right back to talk multi-cloud after the short break. (upbeat outro music)