>> (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.