>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to bright and sunny San Francisco. Gorgeous day here in the City on the Bay. Dave Vellante, John Walls. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE VMworld 2019 with Doc D'Errico from Infodant, CMO. Doc, good to see you again, sir! >> Infinidat. >> Oh Infinidat! Sorry, sorry, sorry. (Doc laughs) But, good to see you! >> I missed my opportunity but thanks, Dave, yeah, it's good to be back. >> John: You bet. Marc Creviere, who is principle systems engineer at US Signal. Good to see you again, Marc here. You were here just last year, right? >> Yeah, I'm an alumni now. >> We'll touch base on that in just a little bit. Doc, first off, let's just talk about the show from your perspective. What you're doing here, explain to our viewers at home what it's all about and what you find the vibe that's going on this year. What kind of sense do you get? >> The vibe is fantastic The sense is great. Coming back to San Francisco, I'm not sure what we were really expecting but it's a really good tempo, a lot of great people, lot of great feedback on our recent launch. A lot of people looking at what're we doing, especially with VMware and availability. Lots of new use cases for snapshot technologies which is fantastic. The 100% availability, it's great getting people come up to you who say "Hey, this is incredible. "You guys actually put some teeth behind your guarantees," "you know, you're not just promising "some future discounts or something. "In the VMworld environment where I've got my VMs, "I need that kind of guarantee, I need that support. "I need to know that my systems "are going to be there when I need them, "because that's my business," right? It's just an incredible vibe. >> And had your party last night? >> We had our party last night. And guess who was there? (laughs) >> I did stop by, it was a very cool venue. The San Francisco Mint, which is, it was kind of awesome. >> Yeah, it was a great, great environment. It was great having people like Dave there, and some of the other industry luminaries talk to our customers. >> I didn't get the tour of the Vault. >> Doc: I'll get you a picture. (laughing) >> So, Marc, I mentioned in the intro, we had you on last year. So, let's look back at the last 12 months for you. US Signal, and what's been going on with you, and what are you seeing here and kind of feeling here in terms of business? >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been another great year at US Signal. We are planning on opening a new data center in the Detroit Metro area, coming up online Q1 of 2020, so that's exciting for us. Purpose built, wholly owned and operated by us, so that's great. It's going to add to our capabilities in that region. We've had a heavy focus on DR technologies, DR as a Service technologies in the past year. Seeing a lot of success, a lot of really good conversations with customers and developing their plans, and bringing our new capabilities to be able to service those needs. >> So, tell us more about the DR as a Service. I mean, that's obviously one of the early sort of cloud-use cases? >> Marc: Yeah. >> Add some color, what is it all about, how does it relate to some of the other DR solutions that are out there and what role do these guys play? >> Yeah, well we conducted a survey of a little over 100 of companies in our region, a little over 100 respondents, and three out of four respondents told us that their biggest concerns were either distributed denial of service or ransomware. Obviously, we've got these bad actors out there. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad actor, it could be something force of nature making data unavailable, right? It doesn't matter how great the equipment is if either a bad actor or nature takes it out for you. So, having that protection, we're able to have replication technology. We actually have three separate technologies that we use now. We enhanced our Zerto-based offering to include multi-cloud so we can now have customers replicate to either multiple cloud destinations, us being one of them, or they can replicate to one of their sites and us as a tertiary site, so that's new. They're able to bring their existing licensing. One thing that's exciting to me, near and dear to my heart, is drafts for VMware based on the vCloud availability platform. So, we're a big VM, vCloud shop, big consumer of VMware technologies, that's why we're out here, and that's really exciting to me because it uses built in VMware replication technologies. There's not a lot of learning curve, there's not a lot of extra components. Super simple to get up and running and get RPOs as low as 5 minutes, and it's easy, and it's relatively cheap on an OPX-type platform, where you're paying for storage and per VM and that's it. And then we've also spun up a replication for Veeam, Cloud replication for Veeam based on that ecosystem. So, we've got a lot of entry points, a lot of different ways that we can protect that data and bring it in and get a copy in our data center, so in the event that it becomes unavailable at the source, it's either managed or customer managed. We can get it up and running in a short time frame on our infrastructure. >> And Infinidat is the primary storage underneath all this? >> Marc: Yeah. >> So, explain more about... So, Doc, you and I have had these conversations. The state of the art, whatever, 15 years ago, was three-site data centers, very complex, extremely expensive. I'm interested in how we're attacking that problem today. You obviously, with multi cloud, it's multi-site, but how are we attacking the cost problem, the complexity problem, the "I can't test because I can fail over "but I'm afraid to fail back" problem? >> Well, you know, there's so many different ways to cover all of these. We're talking just about ransomware, you know, ransomware are immutable snaps, become an important play and we have Snap Rotator which will allow you to build a certain number of snaps and have them just rotate through so you're not just creating an infinite number, you're not wasting time and space. And, by the way, time and space, our snapshots are zero-overhead. There's zero performance penalty, unless you want to crash consistent copy, and there's really zero data overhead because it's only the incremental data that you write. So, by creating this, you can do it every couple seconds, and then create some immutable copies of that. You know, make them time out, so they can't be modified, 30 days, 60 days, whatever you decide administratively. So that's great. If you're looking for the DRaaS, the DR as a Service-type capabilities, whether it's single site or multi site, going to cloud service providers makes a lot of sense. 'Cause now, even if it's on premises to a cloud service provider, now you're not having to worry about that second set of infrastructure, you're not having to worry about the management of it, you're not having to worry about the systems integration of it, or even go CSP to CSP, right? Go from one data center within your favorite cloud service provider, hopefully US Signal, to another or any one of our great partners would be super, too. And then, of course, InfiniSync, where if you really want that longer distance capability, why bother with a bunker site? Why bother with all that complexity and that cost and overhead? Put in an InfiniSync appliance in with a VM, and you've got the recoverability. You can go asynchronous distances, and have a zero RPO. >> For way, way less. >> Oh, a fraction of the cost. It'll cost you less for the InfiniSync appliance than it'll cost you for the telecoms equipment that you need for a bunker site. >> If I don't want to build another data center... Go ahead. >> What I'm curious about; I heard a number yesterday in one of the interviews we had, about ransomware. The number kind of blew me away, and I thought about one out of every three companies will be a victim of, or at least a ransomware attack within the next two years, which means everyone, over the next six, if you extrapolate that out. Does that sound about right from what you're seeing? That the intrusions are reaching that kind of frequency? >> I'm surprised it's that low, but I'll let Marc try and answer that. >> We've done some events where we actually demo how easy it is, like, through a phishing attack, to get that in there. So, it's not just about having those protections in place, it's your user training; that's a huge area, training those users what to look for in those emails to avoid that sort of thing, but it's not perfect. People are imperfect. >> Dave: And yeah, you got to have both the protection on the front end, the training for the people, and those recovery options in the event it does get in. In our survey, the average monetary damage was over $150,000 per incident. And that means that some people got off a little lighter and some people paid a lot more, if that was the average. >> Should you pay the ransom? >> Uh, not if you've got a good plan in place that can test it. (laughs) >> But it is, it's a reasonable question. >> Huge quandary. Some are, some aren't, right? Atlanta says "no, we're going to pay a boatload "to protect against it, but we're not going to pay that," what was it, 55,000 or whatever it was? >> Let's negotiate. >> Yeah, I think I said last time I was here that until you've tested your plan, you don't really have one. You know, it rings just as true today. >> What's your business worth? I mean, it's a great question, really. What is your business worth to you? Your business is probably worth a lot more, and they probably throw these numbers out there, thinking "Well...", then becomes a no-brainer for you to pay, and that's the whole point. Because what is ransomware? It's malware that's recoverable, maybe. You're not even sure of that. >> Is it usually, is it operator error? Is it human error that allows that to work more often than not? Or, is it a mixture of technical chops, or just...? >> It's a mixture; you've got to know what vulnerabilities are out there on your infrastructure, you got to make sure you're staying up to date on patching those vulnerabilities, paying attention to any compliance practices, if you're a compliant organization. You know, HIPAA, PCI, our entire infrastructure footprint is actually HIPAA and PCI compliant at the levels that we control. So, it's a heavy lift. You got to stick with it. >> But just to kind of bring it full circle to the comment about the ransom and paying it, you know Marc said something really important, "Have a good plan." I would argue, have a good partner. If you don't have a CISO who's got the chops to be dealing with these types of problems, that's when you need a partner like US Signal to really step in and take you through what's involved in a realistic plan, something that's not going to break the bank, something that's really going to protect your business going forward, because these things are very real. >> One of the concerns I have in this topic is that things happen really fast these days. So, if there are problems, they replicate very, very quickly. How do you address that problem? Is it architecture, analytics, I'm sure process, maybe you could add some color to that. >> All of the above. Having those controls in place, those segregations, we've got, obviously, clear segregation between our management and customer data plans. And each of our customer data plans are separate from each other. It's secure multi-tenancy, not just multi-tenancy. So yeah, it's important to keep those delineations, user access, making sure that people only have access to what they need, and a lot of that, again, is covered by those compliance practices and paying close attention to what they have. There are reasons they have these guidelines and these rules and these audits. It's to help, in large part to protect against that. >> You mentioned before, Marc, you're a heavy VMware user, Infinidat, it's kind of the new kid on the block. People said "Oh, they'll never be--" >> Marc: Not for us. >> What's that? >> Not for us. >> Not for you, right, but for the storage industry. Doc and I have been in the storage industry a while. But, I'm curious as to what you want from a supplier like Infinidat, why you chose Infinidat? How're they doing with regard to VMware affinity, all those things people tend to talk about as important. >> Marc: All right, well-- >> What do you think is important? >> Well, in the Infinidat experience, the company experience, the support experience, it is the benchmark by which we judge all other vendors now. It's that good. The working with us whenever we need equipment, obviously they've got, the price per terabyte is hard to beat with the way they're able to leverage that technology. The responsiveness, if we've needed something in a hurry they've been able to get it to us in a hurry, It ties in extremely well with our infrastructure because we scale so quickly, right? Trends are very hard with us, because there's all these hockey sticks. It's going, going, going, we get a big order and it goes up really fast. I think the theme right now is scale to win? >> Yep. >> So that resonates with us because by having that in place and having that scale ready to go, we don't even need to anticipate those hockey sticks because it's already there. >> Great. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Doc, Infinidat. (laughs) >> Thank you very much it's great to see you both again. >> John: Look forward to see you in 2020, right? >> I'll be back. >> Yeah, it's become an annual thing. >> Michael said we'll be celebrating our 20th year, so I'm looking forward to seeing-- >> And this is our 10th year here, so anniversaries all across the board. >> Congratulations. >> Congratulations. >> Have a good rest of the show, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Back with more VMworld 2019, we continue our coverage live here on theCUBE. We're at Moscone Center North in San Francisco. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by Vmware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and Dave and I are at VMworld and this is day three for us. Two sets, Dave, 94 interviews over Monday, Tuesday, today, excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Brian Carmody, CTO of INFINIDAT. Hey Brian, good to see you. >> Hey guys, how are ya? >> And we also have from US Signal, Marc Creviere, principal systems engineer, one of your customers. Marc, nice to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> So day three, everyone has their voices, that's impressive. Lots of news, lots of buzz. I've heard that this is the biggest VMworld so far. I think we've heard upwards of 25,000? >> I think it's a little over 21, 22 maybe, yeah. >> More than last year. Brian, would love to get your take on VMworld, but let's start with the business overview. What's new at INFINIDAT? >> Oh, things are going great. So this past summer, or this summer, we surpassed four exobytes of customer deployments. >> Congratulations. >> Yeah, our customers just have an enormous amount of capacity deployed globally. In March, we launched our portfolio, so we announced four new products including our flagship F6212. It's our highest capacity, our fastest InfiniBox ever. It's on track to be the fastest selling model and it's specifically designed to handle the explosive growth that we're seeing from multi petabyte per rack requirements and it's all being driven by demand in the analytic space and also in the cloud and service provider spaces. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing here at VMworld, your customers' responses to some of the huge momentum that you just described? >> Right, I mean, what customers ask for is number one, they want us to kind of double down on the fundamentals, which is make the unit cost, the unit economics of storage, go down every quarter. The product has to get cheaper every quarter. The second is maintaining reliability levels, so all of our systems come with a seven nines SLAs with less than three seconds of down time per system per year. In service provider environments, that's incredibly important because their customers are entrusting them with their operations, but the biggest change that we're seeing over time is this nonlinear, insatiable growth for increases in capacity. When we brought InfiniBox to market in 2013, our largest configuration was a petabyte of capacity per rack. We now have configurations with 10 petabytes of effective capacity per rack and we have customers that are screaming at us, asking us to double and triple that density. If there's one thing that doesn't change from year to year, is that there's always an awesome vibe at VMware, and that demand for storing huge massive amounts of information only increases every year. >> It's a place for practitioners to gather, right? The great thing about VMworld is this event has been hardcore practitioners, IT folks, and they haven't lost that. Marc, let's turn it to you, I mean US Signal, what are you guys all about, what's your role there, and I really want to get into how you're using INFINIDAT technology. >> Absolutely, I'm a principal systems engineer in our cloud engineering department. US Signal is an IT services provider based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We've got a whole stack, we're network, co-location, data protection, infrastructure as a service, and disaster recovery, all as managed services. One thing that we're able to do, we actually have a fiber optic network that's about 14,000 route miles throughout the Midwest, so we're able to deliver a door to data center design, that's everything. As soon as that data leaves the customer premises, it never leaves our assets, which is a great thing we're able to deliver and we layer on top of that our data protection suites. We've had explosive growth in all these areas. That's one of the ways that INFINIDAT's really helped. We used to work in the challenges of managing hundreds of terabytes an hour on multi petabyte scale. Our infrastructure footprint has actually been doubling year over year, so it's matching what you're seeing as far as demand, I think we're matching that demand in our environment. It's not just data on an array, this is our customer's business, so we're really intensely focused on protecting that and delivering solutions and INFINIDAT's really helped us along that journey. >> We're going to get into that but the data center business is on fire. What do you see is the big growth drivers in your business? >> A lot of the drivers for us specifically is reduction of scope of PCI compliance and HIPPA compliance. Our entire offering is actually HIPPA and PCI compliant, so that's a big driver. We got a lot of traction in the financial and healthcare verticals. In organizations, you know, they've got initiative to get to the cloud. We're a very concierge level service. We help people get there whether it's into our cloud ideally or we even help people get to a hybrid approach, leveraging other partnerships as well. That's a big driver, and data protection. We're experts in disaster recovery and helping people not only have it in place but executing on the plan, testing the plan, because until you've tested it, you don't have a DR plan. >> You know Lisa, over the years I've had an opportunity to visit facilities of cloud service providers and I'd notice years ago, maybe it's even still this way in a lot of places, they had one of everything. They had a lot of diversity, a really heterogeneous environment, very hard to manage, a lot of stove pipes and so I'm interested in what led you to INFINIDAT. You got big platform, we just heard earlier that it can both do primary storage and data protection with the same fundamental architecture, so what was it about INFINIDAT that attracted you? Give us the before and after, if you would. >> Yeah, we'd made a pretty significant investment in another vendor's technology, and part of our role is determining cost and lead time as customer projects come in. We had a couple initiatives, one, reduce cost of course, two, reduce the wait time between when that request comes in and figuring how much is it going to cost, how long is it going to take to get in. One of the strongest areas that INFINIDAT was able to solve for us in that is that it's a known cost, the capacity's there. It's gone from a lot of variables on that to have an order come in, and they'll ask when can this be provisioned and I'll shoot an email back saying it's there, send the bill. >> Very cloud-like sort of model in terms of your customer's consumption. What has that meant for your business? >> It's allowed us to be a lot more agile. It's allowed us to be more competitive as far as executing on time frames and cost, as I just said. The relationship with INFINIDAT, I mean, we work with a lot of vendors that tell us here's the product, here's how to use it, whereas INFINIDAT, we really have a good dialogue of here's how we'd like to use it, can we make that work, and being involved in their product pipeline and really, not only being able to provide input but getting feedback on that input and in many cases, seeing it turn into actual product features. >> Is it a common theme that you hear amongst customers? How have you taken the US Signal input? Maybe you can give us some perspective on that. >> I think one of the ways that a lot of the incumbents whose businesses are evaporating and are being disrupted, a lot of places where they got in trouble is they thought okay, we're the 800 pound gorillas so we're now going to kind of decide what's happening in the market and how things should be and dictated that kind of ivory tower model of product management down into their customers. It turns out that if you're paying attention, your customers are way smarter than anybody in your business, because they're closer to where the rubber meets the road. We have what I think is a very successful program, we call it Social Product Management, where guys like US Signal get involved very early in the product development process. We come to them with ideas, hey, this is something we're thinking about building or this is a way we're thinking about modifying our API, and we bring prototypes and we have the kind of relationship where we can iterate on things starting with ideas all the way through to general availability, and the end result is we end up being able to leapfrog the incumbents who have those kind of traditional waterfall ivory tower models of innovation, and they end up with these impedance mismatches, where you're not really building the things that customers need for their next big challenge. >> That's why we're all here, right? We hear that at every event, and you do too, it's all about customers, giving them choice. At the end of the day though, you have to be able to, sounds like, Brian, what you guys have at INFINIDAT, is the symbiotic relationship with your customers who are helping to significantly influence the product development because that's who, it's the US Signals of the world who need to be using this technology so you're not creating it in a vacuum. Sounds like a very highly collaborative environment that is allowing you, it sounds like, to leapfrog your competition. >> It is, it's highly collaborative and it's really hard, I'm not going to lie, because if you go and you ask 50 different customers how we should do something, you're going to get 50 different answers, and that's why you need a really strong product management team to kind of be able to tease out what customers want versus what customers need and oftentimes what they need, they don't know yet because it's a little bit ahead of the curve, and that's where the art of the product management comes into play. >> Marc, I've known Brian for a while. You've briefed me many times, we've done a lot of interviews together. I want to test something that Brian has convinced me of, but I want to hear it from the customer. >> Sounds like trouble. >> Think about INFINIDAT. I hear all the time, simplicity, cost effective, but yet faster than Flash and a variety of use cases with the same architecture. I can use the system for both primary and secondary storage, and then the innovations that come along through with software I can roll back to serial number 001. Every system is able to take advantage of that. All true, has that been your experience? >> Absolutely, yeah, delivers on every one of those. >> Any deviation from those things, I mean come on, tell us the truth. >> No, no, we beat em up. One thing that's interesting about the service provider space is we don't necessarily know or control what the workload is. We know just anecdotally that we've got SQL, we know anecdotally that we've got Oracle and SAP in our environment, and the system stands up to all of it. I mean, it outperforms the platform that we came from by multitudes of degree. As an example, we've got previous platform, multi day preparation for an upgrade. We do 40 minutes a piece and we're done. We're off the phone, it's amazingly simple as compared to other platforms we've worked with. >> These guys, you go on the floor here, there's a lot of buzz, there's a lot of hype. These guys aren't a hype company. I've talked to dozens of your customers and have very similar stories, so I kind of already knew what the answer was. Kind of boring, but consistent. But were you nervous about working with a supplier that probably a lot of folks in your organization hadn't heard of? How'd you get through that? >> That was definitely a challenge early on. We had some people in the department that were very set in the mindset, like they knew what they wanted before the project started, right? Just rigorous testing and vetting and looking at the pedigree of Moshe, the founder of the company. There was a lot of trust put in what he's been able to do and seeing those progressions and yeah, it was a little bit of a leap of faith and we're absolutely glad we did it because it's been nothing but huge payoff. >> Yeah, guy who invented the modern storage business, I guess that helps, alright, good. >> Well Brian, you can't have anything more validating than the voice of a successful customer, so Marc, thanks so much for sharing what you're doing with INFINIDAT. Brian, thanks for stopping by and giving us an update. Sounds like we're going to be hearing some more great things coming from both of you guys in the near future. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks guys, thank you. >> Bye. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, we are at VMworld 2018, day three, stick around. We'll be back after a break. (upbeat music)