>> Man: Let me check. >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering InterConnect 20 17. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Day two, we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. This is Silicon Angle's The Cube coverage of IBM's cloud event. The CEO, Ginni Rometty, was just on stage. We're kickin' off wall to wall coverage for three days. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante, here for all three days. >> And, our next guest is Andy Lin, who's the VP of (mumbles) Mark Three Systems. A, 20 plus year IBM platinum partner. Doin' some real cutting edge work with cognitive as Ginny Rometty said cognitive to the core, is IBM's core strategy. Data first, enterprise strong is kind of the buzz words. Andy, welcome to The Cube. Appreciate you comin' on. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> So, obviously, enterprise strong, you know, it's, it's a kind of whole nother, you know, conversation that we can go deep on, but data first and cognitive to the core is really kind of the things that you guys are really getting into. All kinds of data types. Automating it and making it almost frictionless to move insights out. So, take a minute to explain what Mark Three's doing and what your role is with the company. >> Sure. Absolutely. So, I'm Vice President of strategy in Mark Three, so I work sort of across all our initiatives, especially areas that are emerging. Just a little bit about Mark Three, just historically for background purposes. So, we're a 22 year IBM platinum partner, as you pointed out. We actually started in the mid 90's, actually doing IT infrastructure around the IBM stack at that time. So, we sort of been with IBM over the last 20 years since the beginning. We've sort of grown up throughout the stack as IBM's evolved over the last two decades. About two and a half years ago, we started a digital development unit, called BlueChasm. And what BlueChasm does, is it basically builds open digital and cognitive platforms on the IBM cloud that are around a lot of services you pointed out. And, we basically designed it based on use cases that the ecosystem and our clients talk about. And, to give you a couple examples, one of the, one of the big ones that we're seeing a lot of interest around is called video recon. Video recon is a video analytics platform that's API enabled and open at it's core. So, regardless of where the video comes from, if it's a content management system, if it's a camera, we're able to basically take in that video, basically watch and listen to the video using Watson and some elements of our own intellectual property. And, then basically return insights based on what it sees and hears along with time stamps, back to the user to actually take action. >> Yeah. I love the name BlueChasm. It brings up, you know, Jeffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. Blue, IBM, big blue, so you know, it's a nice clever play. The BlueChasm opportunity. So, in your mind, for people watching, squint through some of the trends and extract out where you see these opportunities. Because if you're talkin' about new opportunities are emerging because of cloud horsepower and compute and storage and all the greatness of cloud, and you got real time analytics kind of really hittin' the main stream. That's going to, that's highlighted by internet of things is you can't go anywhere these days without hearing about autonomous vehicles, industrial (mumbles) things, AI, Mark Benioff was sayin', you know, we've seen the movies like Terminator and we've all dreamed about AI, so we can kind of get excited about the prospects. But, the chasm you're talkin' about, this is where these things that were ungettable before, unreachable new things, what are some of those things that you guys are doin' in that chasm? >> Yeah, so I think some of the things that we're doing are basically enabling, like I'll use video recon as an example, right, we're enabling a class to be able to get new insights using basically computer vision, but in an open and accessible way, that they've never had been able to do before. Vision itself, I don't think is new or revolutionary. You know, a lot of folks are doing it, self driving cars, etcetera. >> John: Yeah. >> But, I think what is new is being able to make it open and easily accessible to the normal enterprise, the normal service provider. Up to now, it's been, you know you've had, really had to have your own team of, you know, really, really deep AI develops or PHD's to be able to produce it for your own platform. What we're trying to do is basically demarketize that. >> John: Yeah. >> So, to give you an example, some use cases that we're, we're sort of working on today, the ability to do things like read meters and gages, as an example, with a camera. That way you can avoid a situation where somebody has to walk around all the time, you know, look at different things that could be dangerous. That there could be issues actually looking at what you see from a metering perspective. Or to be able to, for instance, for in the media entertainment industry or the video production industry, be able to do things like identify shot types, be able to more quickly allow our enterprise users in that particular space to be able to create video content quickly. And, the underlying theme with all this, I think it's really about speed to market. And, how quickly can you iterate and please whatever your customers in that particular space that you're in. >> So with the video recon, so your, your videos are searchable, essentially. >> (Andy) Correct. >> So, so what do you do? Use Watson, natural language processing to sort of translate them? Now (mumbles), of course, you know, NLP is maybe I don't know 75, 80 percent accurate, how do you close that gap? >> Yeah, so video recon does both visual and audio. So, the audio portion you are correct. There is some degree of trade off in accuracy relative to what I think the average human can do today. Assuming the human is focused and able to really tag these videos accurately. So, we are able to train it based on things like proper words and things that are enterprise focused. Because I know there, there are a lot of different ways that I think you can maybe attack this today from a video analytics perspective, where we're focused primarily just on the enterprise, solving business problems with, with video analytics. So, you know, taking advantage of if Watson improves, cause we do use (mumbles) tech at it's core from, on the audio perspective. Applying some of our own techniques to basically improve the accuracy of certain words that matter most to the enterprise. One of the things we've noticed is it's an entirely collaborative relationship with our, with our, with our enterprise clients but really partners. Because what works well for one, may not work well for another. One thing about cognitive is it really depends on the end user as to if this is a good idea or not. Or if this will work for their use case, just based on error, as you pointed out. >> So, to your point, you're identifying enterprise use cases and then tuning the system. Building solutions, essentially, for those use cases. >> Andy: Absolutely. >> Now, you said 22 year IBM platinum partner, so you obviously started well before this so-called digital transformation. >> Andy: Yes. >> You see digital transformation as, you know, revolutionary, or is it more of an evolution of your business? >> I'd definitely say it's an evolution. I think, you know, a lot of the industry buzz words out there are all around, you know, transformation or transition, but for us it's been completely additive. You know, at the end of the day we're just doing what our clients want, you know. And, we're still continuing the core part of our business around modernizing and optimizing IT infrastructure, tech sacks in the data center, also infrastructure service in the cloud. Also, up through the middle where it's still really as strong as ever. I mean, in fact that business has actually been very much reinforced by some of these capabilities that we brought in on the digital development side. Because, at the end of the day, you know, clients may have a digital unit and they may have, you know, IT, but they're really viewed sort of all in the same. A lot of people try to put 'em in two different buckets bimodal or whatever you want to use. But, you know, inevitably, you know, clients just see a business problem they want to address. >> Yep. >> And, they're saying how can I address it the fastest and the most effectively as relative to what their stakeholders want. And, we just realized early on that we had to have that development capability, be able to build platforms, but also guide out clients. If they don't want one of our platforms, if they don't want video recon or cognitive call center platform, that's perfectly fine. We're more than happy to guide them on how to build something similar for their developers with our developers relative to their tech stack, you know, hopefully on the IBM cloud. >> Andy, one of the things you were pointing out that I think is worth highlighting is the digital transformation buzz word, which has been around for a few years now, really is in main stream right now. >> Andy: Yes. >> People are really working hard to figure this out. We're seeing the disruption on the business model side. You mentioned speed and time to market, that's agility. That's not just a technical development term anymore. It's actually business model. It's business related. >> Andy: Yes. >> But there's two axes of things going on. There's the under the hood, heavy lifting stuff that goes on around getting stuff digitally to work. That's IT, security, and you know, Ginni Rometty talks about a lot of that on stage. That's being enterprise grade or enterprise strong. The other one is this digitization of the real world, right? So, that's creative. That requires insights. That requires kind of a different, it's actually probably maybe more fun for some people, but I mean it depends on who your profile is, but you have kind of two spectrums. Cool and relevant and exciting and intoxicating, creative, user experience driven. You mentioned reading meters. >> Andy: Yeah. >> That's the analog world. >> Andy: Yes. >> That's actually space. That's the world. That's like, you got the sky you got the meter. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You got physical impressions. This is the digitization of our world. What's your perspective? How do you talk to customers when they say, "Hey I want to digitize my business." >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> How does it go? What do you say? I mean, do you break it down into those axes? Do you go, did they see it that way? Can you share some color on this digital transformation of digitizing business? >> Yeah, so I mean it really depends on, I think, it normally it has to do with interacting with some other stakeholders in a certain way, you know. I think from our perspective it really is about, you know, how they want to interface. And, most of the time you pointed out speed. Speed I think is the number one reason why people are doing the digital transformation. It's not really about cost or these other factors. It's how quickly can I adjust my business model so I can win in the market place? And, you know, I think I pointed this earlier, but like, you know IOT is huge now. It covers what I call three out of the five senses in my mind. It covers basically touch, smell and taste in many ways. And, for us, I think we're basically trying to help them even get beyond IOT with video. Video really covers, you know, sight and hearing as well. It covers all the five senses. And, then you take that and figure out how do I digitize that experience and be able to allow you to interact with your stakeholders. Whether it be your customers, your suppliers or your partners out in the market place. And, then based on that we'll take these building blocks on how we, you know, extend the experience, and work with them on their specific use case. >> So, you got to ingest the data, which is the, you know, the images or data coming in. >> Correct. >> Then you got to prep it available for insights. >> Correct. >> And, produce them in, like really fast. >> Andy: Yep. >> That's hard. >> Andy: It is, yeah. >> It's not trivial. >> No it is not, it's not a trivial problem. Yeah, absolutely. And, I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity here in the space over the next I think two to two to five years. But you're absolutely right. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean it is, it is a challenging. >> And, I want to get your thoughts too, and if you can share your reaction to some of the trends around machine learning, for instance. It's really kind of fueling this democratization. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You mention in the old days it was really hard, there was kind of a black art to, to machine learning or unique special, specialties. And, even data science that's at one level was really, really hard. Now you have common people doing things with visualization. What's the same with machine learning? I mean, you got more data sets coming in. Do you see that trend relevant to what you guys are working on in BlueChasm? >> Absolutely. I think at the core of it, and this wasn't our plan initially three years ago, we didn't realize that this was happen, but every single one of the platforms or prototypes or apps we've built, they all incorporate some degree of machine learning, deep learning within it's core. And, this is primarily just driven by I think what, to give a client a unique platform or a unique service on the market. Because, much of the base digitization, I mean Ginny likes to talk a lot about, you know, the key to being, differentiating yourself from digital world is being cognitive. And, we've seen this really play out in practice. And, I think what's changed, as you pointed out is, that it's easily accessible now to sort of the common man, as I put it. In years past, you really had to have people that are highly specialized. You build your own product. But now through open source- >> There's building blocks out there. >> Absolutely. >> You can just take an open source library and say hey, and then tweak the machine learning. >> Absolutely. And, the ramp up time has come down, you know, dramatically, even for our developers. Just watching them work. I mean, the prototype to video recon was built over the course of a weekend by one of our developers. He just came in one Monday and said, you know, is this, is this interesting? >> He's fired. >> Exactly. And, we were like, yes I think this is interesting. >> Well this is the whole inspiration thing that I talk about, the creativity. This is the two axes, right? >> You try to do that in the old days, I got to get a server provision. >> Andy: Yeah. >> I'm done. >> Andy: Right. >> You know, I'm going to go have a a beer. Whatever. I mean, there's almost an abandonment going on. We talked to Indiegogo yesterday about how they're funding companies. >> Andy: Yeah. >> You have this new creative action. >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> So you guys are seeing that. Any other examples you can share in terms of color around this kind of innovation? >> Yeah, so we, at BlueChasm we try to let our developers sort of have free reign over what they like to create. So video recon was spawned literally by a, on a side project, you know as with a lot of companies. It was, you know, a platform that sort of evolved into a commercial product, almost by accident, right? And, we've had others that have been anchored by like what clients had done, but like around the cognitive call center, which basically takes phone calls that are recorded and then basically transcribes and makes them easily searchable for audit reasons, training reasons, etcetera. Same kind of idea. We built things around like cognitive drones. A lot of folks are trying to do things with drones. Drones themselves aren't really not novel anymore, but being able to utilize them to collect data in unique ways, I think that industry is definitely evolving. We've built other things like, what I call the minority report board, after the scene in the movie where the board sort of looks at you and then based on what it sees of you, of different data points, it shows you an ad or shows you a piece of visual content to allow you to interact. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, these are, these are examples. You know, we have others. But, you know we've just seen like in this organization if we allow creativity to sort of reign, you know, have free reign. We're able to sort of bring it back in along with some of the strengths of core Mark Three about being (mumbles). >> I mean the cognitive is really interesting. It's a programmatic approach to life. And, if you think about it, it's like if you have this collective intelligence with the data, you could offer an augmented reality experience- >> Andy: Yes. >> To anybody now, based upon what you're doin'. >> Absolutely. So I mean, I think that the toughest part I think right now is figuring out which of the opportunities to pursue. Because, there are so many out there and everyone has some interest in some degree, you know. You have to figure out how to prioritize about, you know, which, which of the ones you want to address first. >> John: Yeah. >> And, in what order. Because, what we've noticed is that a lot of these are building blocks that lead to other greater and greater platform concepts, and part of the challenge is figuring out what order you want to actually build these into. And, through you know, microservices through retainerization all these, you know, awesome evolutions as far as like with cloud and infrastructure technology, you're really able to piece together these pieces to build amazing (mumbles) quickly. >> The cloud native stuff is booming right now. >> Yeah. >> It's really fun to watch. Microservices, (mumbles), this orchestration, composability is just kickin' ass. >> Absolutely. >> And, all your clients are basically becoming software companies. They're takin' your services and building out their own sas capabilities. >> Andy: Right. >> Right? >> Without a doubt. I mean, you know the cloud (mumbles), container revolution's been significant for us. I mean we, we added the audio component to video recon based on some of the work we've been doing on the call center side. It was almost by accident. And, we were able to really put them together in a day because we were able to basically easily compose the overall platform at that time, or the prototype of the platform at that time just by linking together those services. So, we see this as a pattern moving forward. >> Andy, thanks for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate it. In the quick 30 seconds, what are you doin' here at the show? What are you guys talkin' about? What's some of the activity? Coolest thing you're seeing? Share some insight, what's going on here in Las Vegas. Share some perspective. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, we have a booth here in Vegas. We're demoing some of the platforms we talked about: video recon, cognitive call center. We're at booth six 87, which is toward the center back of the expo center. We have four break outs that we'll be doing as well. Talking about some of these concepts, as well as some of our projects that involve, you know, modernization of the data center as well. So, the true what I call IBM full stack. >> And, for the folks that aren't here watching, is there, the website address? Where can they go to get more information? >> Yeah, absolutely. You can go to Mark Three sys. M A R K triple I S Y S dot com, which is our website. If you want to learn a little bit more about video recon you can go to video recon dot I O. We have a very simple demo page, but you know, if you're interested in learning more or you want to explore if we can accommodate your specific use case, please feel free to reach out to me. Also, Mark Three systems, M A R K triple I systems at Twitter as well, and I can get back to you. >> Well, you know we're going to follow up with you. Going to get all of our Cube videos into the cognitive era. You'll be seeing us, pinging you online for that. >> Yeah. >> Love the video recon, just great. BlueChasm, great, great initiative. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for comin' on. Its The Cube live here in Las Vegas. Day two of coverage, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More great interviews after this short break.

(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.

(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)