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

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

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

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