>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, buddy. This is David Lantz. Welcome to this cube. Conversation with Dr Rico is the CMO of infinite out. It's still I still have a hard time saying that doctor or an engineer and I love having you on because we could talk storage. We could go deep and we could talk trends and marketing trends, too. But so welcome. Thanks for coming on my sled. So tell me what's new since the scale to win launch that you guys had. Tell me what you know. Is everything shipping Now What's the uptake been like with customers? And the reaction? Yeah, >> they're the reaction has been phenomenal. This, as you may recall, you were there. It was biggest launch in our history, which was fantastic. And the reaction has just been overwhelmingly positive, with customers with partners with analysts. Human scum cases with competitors is an interesting you know, we had a lot of things that were already shipping. They were an early customer release. There were a few things that we had started shipping in December on the things that we said we'd be coming in three Q. We G eight on time. So there, there now all generally available except the stuff that we talked about that would be available in 2020 which right now looks like it's on track. It's doing very, very well. >> So VM wear VM world eyes coming up later on this month, things are obviously changing. There was announcement recently that that VM wears gonna choir pivotal. So a little bit of financial engineering going on stock stock rose 77% on the day when the Dow dropped 800. So okay, the funny money. But things are changing in the V m where ecosystem you certainly saw we we This is our 10th year the M world. We go back and you hear Tod Nielsen back in the day, talk about for every dollar spent on a V M where lice and 15 was spent a Negro system, you know, we're kinda del izing vm wear now, which is sort of interesting, but I'm curious as to what you're seeing what that all means to you. I mean, still half a million 600,000 customers, you've got to be there you guys have great success at that show. So your thoughts what's going on? But VM world this year? Yeah, I >> kind of kind of loaded their first of all congratulations on the milestone. That's great. 10 years is super. Remember, probably seeing you with the 1st 1 there. Of course we knew each other longer. Uh, you know, and sure I get the incestuous, you know, money changing of hand there, I think I think it's it's good in one respect. You certainly CBM where, you know, making big inroads with VM wear on AWS. And this isn't now with Pivotal will be a good launching platform for Della's well, a svm where to be a little bit more in control of their own destiny. And it's certainly the way a lot of people are going. We're doing a lot of that ourselves. Not so much, in a sense. We don't have a cloud platform that we sell is a total encompassing platform. But of course, with new tricks cloud on big players and then certainly a large portion of our our customer base, our cloud service providers, they love our stuff. It helps them compete. It actually gives them in some respects, a competitive advantage, but VM world itself. Lots going on there. We have amplified our presence once again because VM where does represent a large portion of our customer base? So we're we're very proud of that. We're very proud to be a technology alliance partner of the M wears Andi. We're expecting to see a really good show in a really good cloud. A cloud crowd has they return back to their home base in San Francisco for us this year, it's It's gonna be a different experience. Were tellingme or of the software story, more of the portfolio story more about how you scare scale the win. We have a virtual presence this year, which is going to be very helpful in telling that story. Customers can come in and they can see more than just a ah box that in our world is really not important because it's for us. It's all about the software and stuff we do. We even in Booth Theater, we have some private meeting spaces well, to take people into a bigger, deeper drill down. But the virtual experience will allow them to touch and feel stuff that maybe they didn't get to do before, and that's gonna be kind of exciting as well. >> So you mentioned C S P s. We had Michael Gray thrive on a while back, and you know, he was saying that Look, he likes your product because it allows him to do other things. And don't worry about, you know, the old sort of tuning and managing and ableto re shift labor. I felt like that was an interesting discussion, primarily because you've got all these cloud service providers that everybody thought aws was just gonna kill. And if anything, it's elevated them. What are you seeing in the CSP space? Yeah, you know, >> Michael had a lot of interesting things to say that definitely love the fact that we enable multiple workloads without them having to do lots of cautious planning and re planning and shifting and shuffling. And we are seeing C S P is becoming more value. Add to a lot of businesses, especially the mid market and the smaller enterprise where people may want more than just infrastructure. You know, they don't they need that application level support and companies like thrive in some of our other really good customer, US signal and you know they're all capable of Flex Central's. Another one they're all capable of providing service is beyond the hardware they're capable of providing that application support the guidance and, in the case of Thrive, the cybersecurity guidance especial Really, which is really, really critical. So they're growing, and they're also, by the way, working with eight of us and Google and Azure to provide that capabilities well, when necessary. >> Well, that leads me to the sort of multi cloud discussion in our industry. We tend to have this alphabet soup of acronyms like another reason I like talking to you because we can kind of cut through that. And, you know, I love the marketing. I think marketing helps people understand what's going on differentiate. It gives you an indication of where the industry is going, and multi cloud is one of those things that I mean. I've kind of said it's a symptom of multi vendor and more so than a strategy. But increasingly it seems like it's becoming a strategy with customers, and you just gave an example of thrive working with multiple cloud vendors. Clearly, VM where wants to be in that business. What your thoughts on multi cloud and and hybrid. What does it mean for for infinite at What's your strategy there? You know, it's it's interesting because I >> just read an article the other day about you know, the definition of multi cloud on whether it's being abused and, you know, I I look at it as someone just trying to tell their story and give it. Give it some favor. I think at the end of the day, uh, every business is going to be talking to multiple platforms whether they want to or not. You know, there are many customers and companies out there, businesses who are in our customers who have gone the way of the cloud and repatriated. Certain things is they've they found that it it may work. It may not work, and there are many cloud providers who were trying to do things to accelerate migration of applications because they see that certain applications don't work. You know, we got one of the cloud providers buying Ah, now as provider, another one buying very recently, you know, an envy me based flash company to try to pick up those loose workloads where they might struggle today. But the end of the day everybody's going to be multiple. And whether it's because they're using cloud service is from from a software perspective or whether they just need to basically broker and maintain sort of that that independence so that they can maintain some cost control, availability, control, security, control and in some cases it will remain on premises. And some of things will be off just so they could get the applications closer to their end users. So you know what is multi Cloud? Multi Cloud really is just one of those terms that literally means what it says. It's your business running in multiple places. It doesn't have to necessarily be simultaneously by the same application. >> A big part of your value proposition is the simplicity. We've heard that from your customers, and you guys obviously push that out there. I want to ask you because you mentioned repatriation and you know, Cloud keeps growing like crazy. Sure, and the on prem not so much. You guys are smaller company. You're growing your stealing share, So yep. So maybe is that simplicity thing. Here's my question. So it's around automation. The cloud providers, generally an Amazon specifically have have driven automation. They've attacked the IittIe labor problem and they're able to charge for that on Dhe. So my question is, are you seeing that you're able to attack that labor problem in a similar sense and bring forth the value proposition to customers is Look, we can create a cloud like experience on Prem if you want MacLeod. Great. But if you want to stay on Prem, you're gonna get the benefit of being able to shift. Resource is two more strategic things and not have to worry about all this heavy, heavy lifting. You You seeing tangible evidence of that? >> We're seeing significant tangible evidence of that on and, you know, a couple of things. You know, you talk about growth, right? And I think when we did the launch, you know, only a few months ago we were at about 4.6 exabytes of capacity shipped. We just passed 5.1. That's some significant growth in in just a few months. It's like a 33% growth just from the same time last year, which is which is fairly significant. And of course, if you're familiar with the way we talk, you know you have an engineer is the head of marketing. We like to tell the truth. You know, we don't like to mask, do many things and confuse people. We don't like talking about effective storage because effective capacity doesn't really mean much to some people. So that's, you know, this is what we This is what we shipped and it's growing rapidly. And a lot of that is growing, in part because of the significance of the message and in part because of this need to control costs, contain costs and really operate in a more modern way. So get back to your comments about cloud and cloud operation. That's really what people want. People like the consumption model of cloud. They don't always like the cost on hidden costs. So simplifying that, but giving them the flexibility Thio have either an op X or cap ex that allows him to grow and shrink as they move workloads around. Because everybody grows even on Prem is growing. It's just, you know, it's the law of numbers, right? Cloud is growing, absolutely. But on Prem really is growing. And then the other thing I want is they want the operational flexibility. And that's what we talked about in our elastic data fabric. They don't like constantly having to re jigger and re balance workloads. Infinite box by itself. The platform of infinite Box takes away a lot of that mystery and magic, because it it kind of hides all of the complexity of that workload. And it, you know, we take the randomness out of the I o. I think maybe Craig Hibbert mentioned in his video is he was describing in detail how that happens. Remember Michael Gray talking about that as well, you know, So those those things come out in a single infinite box. But even if you said well, I still want to move my workload from, uh, you know this data center to an adjacent data center or perhaps a data center in another facility. Um, excuse me, Another city. So that's closer to the end user. Making that transparent to the applications is critically important. >> Yes, he talked about growth in about 1/2 a PETA bite. Sorry, half an exabyte in just a few months. A couple months? Really Right. That's that's growth. But I want to ask you about petabytes. Petabytes scales. Kind of key of companies that don't do that in a year day, eh? Exactly. So that's a petabytes scale. Is big party of marketing two questions? Why is that relevant? Or is that relevant to VM? Where customers? Why so and then, does it scare some people owe you? Asked a great question. >> It absolutely scared some people. And I know that there are some pundits out their industry pundits who who basically don't agree with our messaging. But this is this is the business problem that we we targeted the solve rate. Um, there are a lot of people out there who don't think they're petabytes scale yet because maybe they're individual applications aren't petabytes scale. But when you add it up, they get there and a lot of our customers are existing. Customers didn't start with infinite at at petabytes scale. They started a couple 100 terabytes, perhaps, but they're petabytes skill now. In fact, over 80% of the customers and systems that we have out there today or above the petty bite. We have customers that are in the tens of petabytes. We have customers that are in the hundreds of petabytes. They grow, they grow rapidly on. Why is that? Well, to two factors. Really. Number one, if you go back to. Probably when I first met you back when I had your hair, at least in quantity, way had way. Were kind of crusting that terabyte mark. Right? Right. And what was the problem? The problem was nobody could figure out how to deal with the performance. Nobody wanted to put that much risk on a single platform, so they couldn't deal with the availability. And they really didn't know how to deal with even the serviceability of that scale. So terabyte was a problem solved No, 25 years ago, and then things were rapidly from there. Now we're at the same juncture, just three orders of magnitude later. Right? >> Well, that's interesting, because, you know, you're right. People didn't want to put all all that capacity under an actuator that cost performance problems. They were concerned about, you know, just availability. And then two things happen so simultaneously, flash comes along. And, you know, you would say was put sort of a Band aid to some of the performance problems. Sure. And you guys came up with, like, this magic sauce to actually use spinning disc and get the same performance or better performance you would argue with flash. And so as a result, you were now able to do a lot Maur with the data, the concerns about that much date under the actuator somewhat attenuated because, I mean, you've got now so much data, you've got to do something that's almost that's flywheel effective. You've got tons of data machine intelligence and a I. Now, coming into the picture, you've got Cloud, which has been this huge tail when for the industry and for data creation in general. And so I see. You know, you see, like the I. D. C numbers and for forecasting growth of data and storage could be low. I mean, the curve could be bending, you know, kind of more than exponentially your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting observation. I think what it really comes down to is our storyline is math is greater than media, all right? And when you when you look at the flash being, you know, the panacea to performance it was just a step in the evolution, right? You go back and and say, spinning disc was the same solution to the performance problem 20 years ago. 25 years ago, even it was 5400 rpm discs and then very rapidly. Servers got faster. The interconnects got a little bit faster. They were still mostly differential. Scuzzy. There was 7200 rpm discs. And I promise you, by the way, that if you're running 5400 rpm desk, you install 7200 rpm. All yours performance problems will go away until the day you install it. And then it was 10,000 rpm discs and I was 15,000 rpm disc, and it still wasn't getting fast enough because, you know, you went to Fibre Channel One Gig Fibre channel and then to Geek Fibre, Channel four, Gig fibre, Channel eight, gig fibre channel. The unified connects got faster. The servers got faster. That was more cash on the servers. Then this thing came along, cuts called solid state disc. Right. And then it was it was SLC single layer cell technology. But don't worry about it's very expensive. Not a problem. You only need 4% of your application, right? Jerry? No, no, I'm sorry. percent. No, I'm sorry. 30%. What the heck? You know, M l c is now a little bit more reliable, so let's just make make it all slash. Right? So that was the end of the story, right? No. Servers continue to get faster. Uh, the media continue to get faster and denser, right? So now the interconnect isn't fast enough, So envy me. Is that the answer to life? The universe and everything? Well, wait. I got a better answer for your test. CIA storage class memory in parallel with that. By the way, there are some vendors out there who said that's still not fast enough. We want to put more d ram and the servers and do things in memory. We went in memory databases. I guarantee whatever you do from a media perspective on my personal guarantee to you, it's obsolete by the time you're up and running. By the time you get your applications migrated, configured and running with business value, it's already obsolete. Some vendors got something better coming out. The right answers. This stuff you talked about, the right answer is everything that you're doing for your business. APs. It's a it's a Mel. It's solving the problems in software and, you know, you said we use disc and make it fast. It's not despite itself, of course, right? It's D Bram. It's a lot of the Ram, which, by the way, is orders of magnitude faster than flash the NAND flash. And even if its ECM and still orders of magnitude faster than that, what we use the disk for today in the architecture is the cost factor. We take the random ization out in the flash and we take the >> end and in the in the diagram >> and we used the SAS in the back end to manage costs. But we use it in a way that it performs well, which is highly sequential, massively parallel. And we take full advantage of that Beck and Ben with to do that with that massive dear am front end. Our cash ratios are unparalleled in the industry and and we use it even more effectively that way. But if architecture already evolves, so if if SCM becomes more stable and becomes more cost effective, we can replace that that S S D layer with the cm. And if you know, if the economics of Q L C or something beyond that. Come down will replace the back end with that, do you? Do >> you ever look at what you're doing today as sort of a modern day symmetric. So I mean, a lot of things you just said. I mean, you've got a lot of memory. You've got a massive back end. You know, those were two of the characteristics of symmetric snow. Of course. Fast forward. Whatever. 30 years, right. But a lot of it was sort of intelligence and understanding. Sure. So how data works, is it Is it a fair sort of, or is it radically different? Well, in terms of mindset, I mean, I know the implementation is >> right, right? >> Yeah. I mean, it's not an unfair comparison. I mean, tiered storage was around before some metrics. Right? So it's certainly existed existed then, too. It was just at the time. It was a significant innovation course to layer at the time, right? A big cash front, ending some slower media and then taking advantage of the media on the back end. The big difference today is that if you look at what some metrics became through its Evolution's DMX and V Max and now Power Max. It's still tiered storage, you know, you still have some cash. That's that's for unending some faster media with power. Max, you're you're dealing now with us with an SS a back end. But what happened with those types of architectures is the tearing became more automated. But you're still moving information around. You're still moving Information from one said it This to another set of this leader in the cycle. You're still trying to promote things you know, to to the cash up front. We're doing it in real time. We're >> doing it by analyzing >> the data on the way it comes in. We're reassembling it again, taking the random ization out we're reassembling it and storing it across multiple disks in a way that it it increases our probability of pulling that information associated information back when we need it later. So there's there's no movement. Once its place, we don't have to replace it. You know it's already associated with other data that makes sense, and that gives us a lot of value. >> And secret sauce is the outcome of the secret sauce is you're able to very efficiently. Well, historically, you haven't been able to do a lot of garbage collection, a lot of data movement, and that just kills performance. There's >> really no garbage collection necessary in our in our world way. Also use very modern data structures or patents. Ah, lot of them on our neural cash Deal with the fact that we use a try data structure. So we're not using old fashioned hash tables and you know, l are you algorithms, You know it Sze very, very rapid traverse a ll of these trees >> and you're taking advantage of machine intelligence inside the software architecture. That really is some of the new innovation that really wasn't around to be able to take advantage of that 20 years ago. Maybe it was it was just not cost effective. Do the math was there, put it that the math of the mouth was there and >> there there There's been lots of evolutions of that over the years, a swell, but we continue to evolve and innovate. And, you know, one of the one of the cool things I think about working infinite at is is the multiple multiple generations of engineer where you've got people who understand that math they understand the real nuances of what it means to operate in a world of storage, which is quite a bit different than operating, saying networks or proceed be used because data integrity is paramount. There's lots of lots of things that go on there as well. But we also have younger generations, generations who like new challenges and like to re invent things so they find newer and greater ways to do things. >> This is exciting. So systems, thinkers and I mean server thinkers. I mean, people who understand, you know, systems designed it all the way through and and, you know, newbies who are super smart like you say, wanna learn and solve problems? Go back to the petabytes scale discussion, >> solve problems at petabytes scale, right? Even if the customer doesn't need that necessarily to solve that problem is critically important because even if you look at Les, just take, you know NFS, for example, most NFS systems deal with thousands of objects. Hundreds to thousands of objects are an F s. Implementation deals with billions, right? Do you need billions? How many applications you know that have billions of objects, But being able to do that in a way where performance doesn't degrade over time and also do it in a way where we say our nlm implementation isn't impacted by any any type of service events, we can take a note out, and it doesn't impact in ln There's no no degradation and performance. There's no impact or outage in service. All that's important. Even when you're dealing with smaller application sizes because they add up, they really do add up. He also brought up the point about, you know, density and actually intensity. Great. You know, back 25 years ago, when we were dealing with, you know, the first terabyte storage system, you know, how much how much stories did you have on your laptop? How much you have today, right? You know, you're probably more than a terabyte. They were laughing about putting things terabyte on the floor. And now you get more than a terabyte on your laptop. Things changing? >> Yeah. Um, I wanna ask you where you see the competition. We talked about all flash. We've had a long conversation, long, many conversations in the past about this, But you really, you know, the all flashy kind of described it as a Band Aid, essentially my words, but it was sort of a step function. Okay, great. Um, you have one company, really us who achieve escape velocity in that business in terms of pure But is that where you see in competition and you're seeing it from, you know, the hyper scale er's where you Yeah, you know, >> it's interesting. You know, you look at companies like, you know, we admire what they dio, especially with regard to marketing. They do a really good job of that. They also, um I have some really interesting ideas innovating the media, which is which is great. It helps us in the long run as well. Um, we just look at it as a component of our system, not these system, which makes it different. We don't really see the A f a. You know, the small scale a FAA is are the majority of our competition. We do run into them, but typically it the lower end of the opportunity. Even within the bigger companies that have competitors to those products, we run into them and smaller opportunities, not bigger opportunities where we run into them where there's a significant performance advantage as long as you don't mind the scale out approach to solving the problem. Unfortunately, when you're using a phase two skill out, you know you're putting all of the intelligence requirements on some poor storage administrator or system administrator to figure out what those where right, we take all of that away. So once it starts to scale, that's where we come in a plan. We don't see tons of competition there. Certainly, we're seeing competition from the clouds. And the competition from the clouds is more born of customer mandates and company mandates. Sometimes they I'm not quite sure that everybody knows why there who think to the cloud and we're problem they're trying to solve. But once they start to see a story that says, Hey, if the reasons are and you do understand those reasons, if the reasons are agility and financial flexibility and operational agility not as well as his acquisition agility, you know, we have answers to that and it starts to become a little bit more interesting and compelling. >> All right. One of the highlights of the M world each year is your dinner. Your customer I crashed in a couple of years ago when there were no other analysts there. And then last year again, it was in Vegas. Shows a nice steak house. This year we're in San Francisco, but But I had some great conversations with customers. I remember speaking to one customer about juxtaposing the sand thio to infinite debts platform. And you know the difference. The Sands taken off doing really well, but But he helped me understand the thinking from their standpoint of how they're applying it to solve problems and why v san wasn't a good fit. Your system was, um that was just one of many conversations last year had again other great conversations with customers. What do you do in this year? You have a customer dinner. We are? Yeah. We love to have you in and gave the invitation there. Yeah, the invitation. Is that definitely there? You know, a couple of >> years ago we didn't invite analysts, and you know what it was? It was a mistake. We and we learned that lesson into a large part. We credit you for for showing us how wrong we are. Our customers are very loyal. They're some of the most loyal in the industry. Don't take my word for it going. The gardener Pierre Insights and and look at our numbers compared to everybody else's any pick. Pick a vendor. We're at the top of the list with regard to not only the ratings but, more importantly, the customers willingness to recommend in every category, too. By the way, it's It's not just product quality and performance, and it's it's service support. It's easy doing business. It's an entirely different experience. So we love having the customers there, and the customers love having you there, too. They love having you and your appears in the industry there because they love learning from you and they love answering the questions and getting new insights. And we'd love to have you there. We're gonna be in the Mint this year. San Francisco meant not the not the current one that that's pretty coins, but the original historical site on duh. You know we have. We have invitations out thio to about 130 people because there's only so much room we have it at the event, but we're looking forward to a great time and a great meal and good conversation. >> That's great. Well, VM World is obviously one of the marquee events in our industry. It's the It's the fat middle of where the IittIe pro goes on dhe We're excited. Used to be Labor Day started the fall season. Now it's VM world. Well, Doc will see you out there. Thanks very much for your good to see you. All right. Excellent. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is day Volonte in the Cube will see you next time we'll see you at the M World 2019.