from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this cube conversation Michael Gray is here is the chief technology officer of Boston based thrive Michael good to see you coming on glad to be here so tell us about thrive what do you guys all about you know thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider but really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider primarily now we're focusing on cybersecurity cloud hosting and public cloud hosting as well as disaster recovery so dig into that next generation yeah people use that term but what does it mean well the needs of our customers really changed over time before you could maybe simply roll out some antivirus and do some desktop management some server management but with the way some of the innovation is exploded in the cloud and the way application development has changed all of our businesses we've noticed that our customers have all kinds of new needs that includes much higher focus on cybersecurity these things can't be an after afterthought the other things with all the data that we see coming from our customers they may need a much higher level of performance than they ever did before from their their local hosting or or in the cloud so what Amazon Web Services came out you know 2006 timeframe every set up ms P's like drive they're in big trouble the exact opposite is happening for your business yeah yeah yeah you know why is that number one and number two how do you compete with the big cloud providers you know somebody like Amazon or even Azure those services are not easy to roll out you still need someone to understand what the businesses are and then translate those into technology solutions for us when someone starts asking how do I transform my business whether it be in the public cloud or the private cloud that's a tremendous opportunity to bring our knowledge and all of our engineering support to those customers to help them transform so I mean I I liken it to you know I could hire a plumber I could hire an electrician I could hire but I don't want to be the general contractor I'm happily happy to pay an expert at that who's got contacts deep expertise and and push the responsibility on them is that a fair analogy yeah I do think it is fair you know obviously it's a it's a much more technical environment than something like that so it's much more complicated you know the other thing is when we start to understand some of these business problems and pull the pieces apart we have a tremendous amount of expertise and experience where we can help those customers understand how to solve those business problems how to implement the technology and then how to be successful in whatever way they're trying to transform their business so you sort of touched on some of the trends in your business did talk more about your customers it's my understanding is it's mostly small and mid-sized customers is that correct you know there's far more mid-market than there ever were before I think people in the mid market are realizing that they do need to take some of these services outside their walls I notice a lot of mid-market customers that are focusing on their core business if you're a manufacturing company a biotech financial services company you can realize very quickly that you're not in the cloud hosting business and no matter how many people they hire grow your staff can be very difficult to actually be successful in these technologies despite all the different pieces that Amazon or Azure offers in the public cloud you still have to figure out how these systems work and how they apply to your business well to midsize companies and especially small companies they obviously aren't the resources that a large company has so you bring a lot of that infrastructure expertise along yeah and I think part of it is you know we have such a big exposure to a very large customer base so a problem that a customer may see that they think is maybe perhaps special to them we've solved that problem maybe hundreds of times and we can give them a lot of insight into how other companies of similar verticals have solved those problems you start out as sort of a local MSP and that have expanded over time yeah that's correct so we've expanded pretty rapidly over the past three to four years now we're we have five offices primarily in the East Coast and really started to help the mid-market who's now started to understand that they need to frankly outsource some of these solutions or get in business with a partner like us who can help them take those outside their walls and provide them a much higher level of service often at the end of the day the investments much lower for the customer so paint a picture of your your infrastructure what that look like yep so we have a data centers you know I have three primary data centers in New England the New Jersey New York area and then in the south all those data centers actually have infinite at storage which is you know something that I'm a huge fan of and one of the things that I like to offer in all of our data centers is I don't necessarily it doesn't matter to me geographically where the customer would like their workloads that's one of the things that the public cloud offers you can move resources around geographically depending maybe where your headquarters is or some of your branch offices we provide the same solutions at often a much higher performance level and we've extracted all the complications of where to put these so if a customer is in San Francisco and they'd like to dr2 New England not an issue but all of a sudden if they change their headquarters or maybe they do an acquisition and they need to change that footprint I can change that on the fly for them so and I've walked through many data centers of MSPs over the years yeah and ten years ago yeah you had one of everything yeah yeah compact server yeah yeah yes so I would imagine you had similar challenges you mentioned Infini debt yeah trying to essentially run your entire storage yeah yeah so we've um we've acquired several other MSPs over the past several years we had a lot of disparate storage platforms a lot of investments made some of them hung on to maybe for too long some of them you know were purchased for a specific business reason that might not be there anymore at this point we've standardized on Infini debt it's enabled our business to do a lot of new and innovative services so high performance storage replication similar to what you'd see in the public cloud but also we can support very complicated very data hungry clothes so you're sexually replacing so older storage systems with infinite at maybe you can describe the before and after you know frankly with with acquiring a lot of msps you name a storage platform we had it at some point through this standardization the the beauty of it is a consolidation so I can leverage the folks that manage our infinite at across the country all right so my TCO on something like this is is is really kind of amazing I can leverage a lot of experience with the defender that when I go in and need to do a data center consolidation I have some things that are knowns there's a lot of unknowns and acquisitions and all the due diligence in the world there's still going to be things that maybe not every detail has been figured out but when I roll out an infinite at I know I've solved one very foundational problem right out of the gate so and I want to come back on the TCO but before I do when I talk to people like you and I'm not a CTO but a lot of times I infer that people are comparing the the latest and greatest in this case infinite at yeah with what they had that's five six seven years old sure of course the TCO is the share that okay so I'm a push a little bit is is I presume you looked at infinite ad and other storage suppliers and I'm interested in what you found in those comparisons is it is it is it just great TCO relative to what you had that was five years old or is it real after the other yeah yeah so you know when it comes right down to it I've seen every marketing pitch for a storage platform you can possibly imagine I've seen every bullet list of features I've seen every we have proprietary technology that does X&Y you know eventually when you put it on the floor it's not everything that was in the sales process maybe there's something that was uncovered on a licensing side maybe the performance wasn't quite what someone said it would be the thing about infinite at is they've delivered on everything they've said in the sales process and you don't find that very often the other thing I need to mention too is that even post sale the discussion about the technology continues it's always a discussion about how the technology is built and how it enables you it's not we have a new feature coming on the roadmap that is gonna solve X&Y problem they've worked out the very foundational problems you know the other thing I do want to mention about Infini debt is being such a strong engineering company I know the best an engineer I can rely on them to make good engineering decisions so I want to ask you about performance because when I first saw infinite out you know we were on the on the flash bandwagon we got early on that yeah and these guys came in and said actually we can beat flash performance using our architecture and software and so forth yeah be like really so I'll ask you yeah have you found that from a performance standpoint so I have and you know I run into a lot of situations where there's technology leaders that are maybe buying into a specific brand name you know if we put X technology in I know for a fact that it's gonna beat the performance of an infinite at my approach with that is I have seen all the platforms and I agree there's a lot of great products out there high performance sit down and take a look at the way the technology has been built and have an open mind and you'll most likely be convinced that that technology is the right answer a lot of times I like to sit back and and say look I'm not gonna push any vendor any software partner any manufacturer on you take a step back and have an open mind of technology it'll make a big difference when you actually listen well I'm sure you've heard the sales pitches are you using those slow spinning business mic spinning discs or mechanical yeah yeah yeah yeah your experience has been and we've had Brian Carmody on yep yes of others yeah so then we have Moshe come in here yes Blaine that's sure and so but I always like to talk to the customer and get the affirmation yes yeah well again to me the the conversation with infinitive is always about engineering you know it's not a great deal of marketing first of course everybody does marketing that happens on a regular you have to do that to run a business but if you want to talk purely about how things have been designed that conversation often eclipses a lot of other marketing from other storage vendors so talk about your your how you spend your time yeah it's acting you know infrastructure roadmaps and so forth to get more sort of I got to get this stuff up and running today describe yeah you know we've set a path to build a very high performance nationwide cloud we are going up against the public cloud by the way I'm a public cloud partner right I do both we do hybrid hosting I want to give the customer the best of both worlds which may be a cliche but we really are aiming to get there that's one of my primary tasks is establishing a technology vision you know I can describe to a customer where our cloud is going and I can stand behind that with the public cloud we do have to Lou a little bit of reading the tea leaves so I I help people with trying to understand what you know maybe the public cloud vision might be but also how I fit together with that that public cloud with private cloud hosting and the other thing primary goal of mine is bringing in some of these different functions of IT so for instance high-performance cloud private cloud Plus cyber security I can bring those two together for you in a cohesive solution that that's what I spend a lot of my time so as you look out you know put on your your your binoculars maybe even your telescope big trend in one of the big trends is hyper-converged in bringing in storage compute and networking all together yep if I'm inferring correctly you're going for more of a Best of Breed approach yet and yet in you guys have the engineering expertise you have to do that can you can you talk about the philosophy there sure sure well one of the things that I like to do is just abstract some of these confusing and complicated conversations from our customers you know if we're gonna talk about SD win and make sure I have SD weigh in in my data center I can tell the customer I can give you that functionality and you don't have to worry about how these different pieces go together I'm happy to be transparent you know there's a lot of things in the public cloud that simply information you can't get I'm actually willing to share how those solutions that I built go together because I want people to see that transparent I want them to trust us so you know when when we go and start putting these together these are things where when the customer does have a question they want to drill in because they have concerns I can eliminate those very quickly you talking about private cloud earlier I want to come back to share and just so we always say on the cube bring the cloud experience to your data wherever it lives yeah it's all about that operating mom yep yeah so as you see tool chains like kubernetes yep yeah a cloud native stuff yeah come in you want to have that cloud experience you want to have yourselves a fantasy pass that on yep do you have customers yeah how do you look at that yeah what role does storage infrastructure playing to me and this is something that's primary to thrive focuses application enablement we're an application enablement company so if your application is best run in Azure and then we want to put it there a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies we have to build private clouds or even for security reasons we want to build private cloud or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees you know they didn't realize a lot of the maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number so you know we want to really look at people's applications and enable them to be highly high-performance but also highly secure I want to come back to the TCO I said oh yeah sure when you do the total cost of ownership analysis yeah what you find is it really boils down to the to the labor yeah piece of yep and see I'm curious as to when you brought in Infini debt yeah what the business impact was you know economically yeah no there's other non TCO thing yeah more so was it the labor cost that got reduced did you redeploy those resources well actually Hardware first and foremost and you know this is going back many years but and and I think I would say this is true for any datacenter cloud provider the minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow we're losing money okay because we've had to pick up the if someone needs to address that we have eliminated all storage performance helpdesk issues it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore we have we know that we can rely on our performance and we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis and that is not in question now the other thing is really as we started to expand our infinite at footprint geographically we suddenly started to realize not only do we have this great foundation built but we can the leverage and invest when we made to do things that we couldn't do before maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology maybe we could do them or they required some more licensing something like that but really when we started the standardization we did it for operational efficiency reasons and then suddenly realize that we had other opportunities here and I have to hand it to infinity they're actually the ones that helped us craft this story not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of so talk about the performance I want to ask you yeah I've had certainly Brian Carmody Craig Hobart and I have sat down and Craig actually made the statement you know the only bottleneck really is when the the system gets filled yeah you just dive in the architecture has that been your experience if this so reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks oh absolutely and you know I mentioned before that this is sort of formance is now becoming afterthought to me you know and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is weet from a performance standpoint not a capacity standpoint we can throw whatever we want at the infinite at and sort of the running joke internally is it will just smile and say is that all you got you mean like mixed workload so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload yeah yeah and you know I can imagine as someone that might be listening to what I'm saying well hey come on you know they can't really be that good and I'm I'm telling you from seeing a day-to-day again you can just throw the workloads at it and it will do what it says it does you don't see that every day now as far as capacity goes you know they there's capacity on demand model which you know we're a huge fan of they also have some other models the flex model which is very useful for budgeting purposes what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for an affinity it's very off-putting at first on day one and I remember my reaction but again as I saying earlier when you start peeling back two pieces of the technology and why these things are and the different flexibility on the financial side you realize that this actually isn't a downside it's an upside so the asset leverage of that floor tile as well exactly also make a big deal about a petabyte yes Gail is it important to you or what kind of scale are we talking about in terms of if you can share yeah absolutely so you know we obviously have multiple petabytes of storage for thrive for our customers again you know when someone has a large data set if we were to say we cannot handle that we're gonna be out of business pretty quickly this is one of the things the infinite flexibility of the public cloud again if you consider the public cloud both our competition and our partner you know we need to be able to offer that same kind of electricity in that same kind of endless capacity and at this point although I don't have completely unless capacity I have a tremendous amount of options I have workloads I can move different places and again a lot of times now it's more about performance than it is capacity oh you gotta give me something okay something that you wanna that should be doing to make your life better yeah I mean I gotta tell you it solves so many problems that is actually hard to come up with and again I'm smiling here because I've been down this road with those storage providers I've been let down by other storage writers I guess the son degree I maybe I'm waiting for them to let me down but I don't think they're going to that's a really interesting part I think that I'm you know the new trees cloud which is something that's been added over time you know a public cloud interaction is something that is desperately needed in the storage space so I'm interested to see how that product grows if I'm gonna give you something you know but again these are enablement platforms these aren't you know we need to do a feature comparison between a cloud and a public cloud and a private cloud last question some gifts are stuff you're working on yes II always like the SCT oh is that question yeah you know one of the the really interesting things to me is that we're finally getting there with anomaly detection not only you know just pure we found one event that that went out somewhere that doesn't make sense but we're profiling user behavior now AI and machine learning has been one of the big items that we've been promised for years but a lot of times it was just a tag line I think a lot of things that are happening in the public cloud computing space around profiling users and being able to reduce the amount of noise in the security space I think we're finally here and I think you know in the next 12 to 18 months AI isn't gonna become a cool feature said it's going to become a standard of a lot of security products so applying machine intelligence to a lot of the data that you have a lot of metadata yeah infrastructure metadata yeah yeah and you know even if you take for instance you know I'll pull it back to our storage conversation earlier if there's a storage activity is some sort of activity that's outside the norm that actually could be a security incident itself so you know pulling in data feeds is something that we've conquered its what are you gonna do with it now and we needed some humans to be able to pull that off before I think AI and machine learning is finally at the point where it's not out of reach for your average customer it doesn't take someone with a data analytics degree or something like that we can now buy these kind of products off the shelf and and leverage them for a lot of value oh Michael you've been a great guest thanks so much if you're welcome back anytime all right happy to be here all right and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante in the cube we'll see you next time

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this special cube conversation we're gonna do a drill down into cybersecurity with the chief technology officer thrive Michael Gray Michael good to see you glad to be here so tell us a little bit about thrive yes so thrives really a next-generation mansur immense service provider have been in business for quite some time we've gone through it quite a bit of M&A over the past couple of years and really building ourselves into a much larger hemisphere being able to offer a lot of dedicated services that typically were out of reach for a smaller MSP so let's get right into it security has evolved quite dramatically in the past decade no longer is it just hacktivists with annoying malware yep yeah I'm talking you know big money yeah cybercrime yep and now of course nation-states yeah so talk a little bit about what's changed in in security just in terms of the attackers yeah yeah the money coming out of the attackers is actually larger than the entire illicit drug industry or market whatever you want to call that so they've the bad guys have kind of realized that the money to be made off of maybe hacking or phishing at this point far outweighs other activities that might have been been into before so your role as a security expert yeah lower the ROI sure sure so one of the best ways to lower the ROI is to increase the the denominator yeah cost yeah actually yep yeah getting through yeah what was that yeah I mean and by the way we have a tremendous amount of experience in dealing with different environments different kinds of attacks we have close to a thousand customers so I've seen a lot of different environments be attacked in a lot of different ways that kind of experience is something that we can bring as a service provider to our customers you know at this point too I think those of us in the IT industry have realized that it's not about just making sure that there's some software deployed and doing basics the belt-and-suspenders really matters now you not only need the traditional patching antivirus solutions but anomaly detection vulnerability management full visibility into all the traffic on the network these things are not something that maybe is reserved for the enterprise it is needed both in the mid market and the small business so it used to be focused on hardening the perimeter you know building a moat or digging a motor yeah so yeah yeah the Queen wants to leave her castle yeah that doesn't work anymore I have have you seen in your own business that investment shift from the perimeter or to other areas and what are those other areas absolutely and you know there is no perimeter anymore either fortunately or unfortunately I think for a lot of employees out there the fact that there's no perimeter we can work from a coffee shop now it's great a lot of people that I notice actually end up working from their phone at these at this point which is actually great now you know as far as how you solve that problem so typically you know I look at as let's wrap around a let's wrap a suit of armor around our end-users and then look at their applications so put these two pieces together figure out how to protect them but we also can't stop them from doing work so they've got to be able to get their jobs done they need to be secure and we need to make sure that we stay out of their way while providing that security so what is the biggest challenge for a security practitioner the stealthy viruses like Stuxnet or is it phishing I mean it sounds probably all of the above but maybe you could give us a sense yeah what I notice is you know primarily the most successful attacks are those based on social engineering you know and these are actually not sophisticated from a technology standpoint they are sophisticated from a psychology standpoint hideous yeah impersonations you know and there's a lot of influx into security education which I'm personally a huge fan of the interesting thing is that there's a statistic now that even if you do all the security awareness training that you possibly can there's still a 4% exposure there are people that are going to make a mistake security awareness trainings only going to take you so far and I think you know in the cyber security community the preach of defense-in-depth has been there forever you know making sure you have several layers several gates locks for people to get through at this point you know you can't necessarily ignore those points anymore you can't just say that we have that and then not act do them all so you know what I'm seeing now is that a lot of customers are finally understanding that these aren't nice-to-haves their necessities and that makes my job a little bit easier from an organizational standpoint what are your biggest challenges I hear from a lot of people that this they have so many incidents that they have difficulty prioritizing and understanding which ones they should focus on first based on they know the business impact yeah is that a problem for you how are you doing yeah the one thing I will say is I notice a lot of mid-market reaching for different technologies you know maybe they're reaching for a machine learning and anomalous detection in their data center well their problem is the end user in the branch office so what I notice is oftentimes we're forgetting about to do forgetting to do some of the basics you know and I mentioned belt-and-suspenders earlier are you doing the very foundational security items and that's a lot of times to where those kinds of solutions can be moved to a partner for a better service at a better investment point so you know you got to do those basics and then build up your stack now a lot of people what we run into is they don't even know where they are in the spec and that to me is something where when we can educate a customer and help them understand where they are and their security journey we can really start to protect them because they're not understanding what investments they need to make and what's going to work for them what's your security organization look like what's what's the regime yep so the sec ops team yes so you know to whom does that individual report describe that yes so security team is higher level what I would call analysts now we obviously have a very large amount of engineers that handle day-to-day security operations whether it be from analysis of anomalous traffic or all the way down to someone got a simple virus on their machine we've been doing that for years but again because we have such a breadth of engineers we can take teams of engineers and dedicate them to specific functions like security smaller providers that's very difficult to do often what they end up doing is maybe the engineer who was best at working with antivirus or best at working with firewalls they said oh you're our security engineer now as opposed to a security practice and as we've grown that's been something that's been personally very exciting to me to be able to build out a dedicated team of engineers that can set a goal and a vision and then execute on so do you have a you know I am the de facto C so I have a lot of background in security it absolutely interested me in a lot of our product development which I'm also a key member of that team is in cyber security so it's really to our advantage as an organization you know my my role as CTO may not be exactly just that one role and that's okay with me I like to get into different pieces of our business but again we can't have security be an afterthought to people you can't have someone who is talking about your high performance cloud who doesn't know how security works things are gonna fall apart very quickly so I have to say just an observation I mean I sensed a little defensive 'no syn your answer yeah it's an advantage oh absolutely and here's why is because you know a lot of times organizations say oh that's the security teams problem yeah and it's not the right regime for security is everybody's has to take responsibility so if the CTO was actually has some responsibility there that's an advantage to in my view anyway because more people are aligned yeah and focused on I really look at myself as someone that is not only protecting thrive as an organization but protecting our customers a lot of times when perhaps someone reaches out that is not doing what they should be on the security front a customer potential prospect is looking at maybe we need to improve our security posture I'll say does your senior leadership care about this problem are they interested in solving the problem it's gonna be very difficult as a business to raise that level of security unless the senior leaders are interested in solving it you know as someone who's a senior leader at thrive that that is you know sort of a key focus of mine and with our CEO okay now here's the hard question yes Erica on that to the end do you report you report the CIO the CEO oh I report to the CEO yeah and you know security is very much a prime conversation between he and I you know he will say you know this is something that we cannot take chances on and to me that's an enablement now that I know that it's a priority for him it was already a priority for me so do you have a CIO I know we do not okay so you're fact OCIO as well yeah that's correct I mean you know again because we've grown over times for acquisition you know pulling these pieces together is something that you know is an advantage to thrive because I can speak to these different issues and I can train our teams to speak to those issues as well our hosting team our cloud our cloud team understands compliance requirements not only for thrive but for our customers so we've used the combination of some of these needs internally to build an advantage for us so you've established the security as a CEO has visibility on that absolutely is it a board level issue absolutely absolutely so fry vis a sock to compliant and there are sock to controls that are sort of speak to the board visibility into security issues so I present to the board regularly on security strategy if there were any needs that we needed to go over it is primary to our board as well again this isn't something that's an afterthought it's a primary goal I want to make another observation yeah see if you can validate it or refute it I've observed it so 10 years ago I feel like there was a failure equals fire mentality yep insecurity that that and in fact the security team but sometimes it hide yeah but the bad news yeah I think there's been an awareness now that look it's gonna happen bad guys are going to get through its its those gates that they have to get yes the cost escalating that cost that that's our challenge yes our response mechanism yeah okey so yeah is that valid and if so how has your response mechanism evolved so we work on the principle of assume breach we're constantly looking around what if someone's in the network right now how would we know and when you have that mentality in the back of your head you can really start to think about where am I where are the gaps in my security organization now the other thing there is that when it comes to security and you start to look around at these different pieces you can now surface what if this happens you know there's a something the tabletop and security operations I'm sure you might be familiar sitting down and doing a tabletop exercise where you're assuming a breach especially with other people in the organization who not aren't part of the technical infrastructure it's very eye-opening you know and when I talk about a little bit of Education I actually put tabletop in that that group you know someone will say to me could this happen maybe the HR person say could this happen and when they ask me that question I know we've started to succeed in solving some of these problems because the answer is yeah it could very well may let's think about how we avoid that from happening to finish up on your question though response and remediation needs to be part of your security practice nothing is 100% there is no gate that cannot be broken through you mentioned earlier about nation states some of these nation states are committing real resources to break into companies and extract revenue out of them however they can so if you don't have remediation in response as part of your security infrastructure you really missing the boat because you cannot lock every door it's not possible you well you've seen the stats on how long it takes to identify an infiltration and sometimes I've seen up to a year yeah how is is data and analytics of doing that and do you expect that that number I think it already is dropping in the last couple of years yeah yeah expert Stampede yeah well the the question I I turn back on the customers can you tell me what's more normal in your environment do you know what normal looks like do you know that your users are maybe visiting websites in foreign countries whether they're malicious or not can you tell me what when I look at your web traffic or whatever I might be looking at from a Internet traffic perspective can you tell me what's typical because you if you can't start there it's gonna be very difficult to come along and remove noise and look at that so the thing I always start with is let's build a profile what's normal as quickly as possible we can't have six months to build a baseline but even a days is a decent baseline in two days and you can grow that over time so that's one of the biggest things is establishing normal and then be able to pick up on what that normal oh my oh this is very instructive thank you very much you go a tough job because as they say the bad guys only have to succeed once you know the one thing I will say is it's a little bit when it comes to ite it's one of the few areas where it is good guys and bad guys so a little bit there is a you know I I noticed a cooperation a collaboration of coming together not only between engineers but also customers and partners everybody has a clear goal they know what they don't want to happen and that's why you know I get very excited when we want to sit down and talk about security because there's a clear goal there's a clear need and something that we can solve and every now you see some of the bad guys flip yeah because they probably realized they could make more money legally and it's illegal yeah helping out the good guys yeah so yeah it's like the protagonist and catch me if you can hey there you go absolutely Frank every day I have a happy valley yeah so anyway Michael thanks very much thank you it really great to have you all right and thank you for watching this is Dave Volante in the cube we'll see you next time

(orchestral music) >> Hi everybody my name is Dave Vallate and welcome to the special CUBE community event. You know, customers are on a digital journey. They're trying to transform themselves into a digital business, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Well we think it's the way in which they use data. So we're here with a company Infinidat who's all about using data at multi petabyte scale. We have news, we have announcements, we're gonna drill down with subject matter experts, and we're gonna start with Brian Carmody, who's the chief technology officer of Infinidat. Brian, it's good to see you again. >> Good to see you too, Dave. And I can't believe it's been a year. >> It has been a year since we last sat down. If you had to summarize, Brian, the last twelve months in one word, what would it be? >> How about two words, "insane growth". >> Insane growth, okay. >> Yes, yes. >> Talk about that. >> Yeah so, as of this morning at least, Infinidat has a hair over 4.6 exabytes of customer data under management, which is just insanely cool and I'm not sure if I counted all of the zeroes properly, but it looks like it's around 180 trillion IOs served to happy customers so far as of this morning. >> Some mind boggling numbers, so let me ask you a question. Is this growth coming from, sort of traditional workloads? Is it new workloads, is it a mix? >> Oh, that's a great question. So you know, early in the Infinidat ramp, our early traction was with core banking, transaction processing applications. It was all about consolidation and replacing rows of venoxes with a single floor tile, Infinibox. But in the past year, virtually all of our growth has been an expansion outside of that core, and it's a movement into greenfield applications. So basically, obviously our customers are going into hardcore digital transformation, and this kind of changes the types of workloads that we're looking at, that we're supporting, but it also changes the value proposition, consolidation and stuff like that is all about the bottom line, it's about making storage more efficient, but once we get into the digital transformation, these greenfield applications which is what most of our new growth is, it's actually all about using your digital infrastructure as a revenue generating machine for opening up new markets, new opportunities, new applications et cetera. >> So when people talk about cloud native, that would be an example, using cloud native tool chains, that's what's happening on your systems. Is that correct? >> Yeah absolutely. And I can give you some examples. So I recently spent a day with a group of engineers that are working with autonomous vehicle sensor data. So this is telemetry coming off of self driving cars. And they're working with these ridiculously large, like multi petabyte data sets, and the purpose of this system is to make the vehicles more smarter, and more resistance to collisions, and ultimately more safe. A little bit before that, me and a bunch of other people from the team spent a day with another partner, they're also working with sensor data, but they're doing biometrics off of wearables. So they've perfected an algorithm that can, in real time, detect a heart attack from your pulse. And will immediately dispatch an ambulance to your geolocation of where, hopefully your arm is still connected to your body. And immediately send your electronic medical health records to that nearest hospital, and only then you get a video call on your phone from a doctor who says hey, are you sitting down? Your gonna be fine, you're having a heart attack, and an ambulance is gonna be there in two minutes. And the whole purpose of this is just to shave precious minutes off of that critical period of getting a person who's having a heart attack, to get them the medical care they need. >> Yeah, I'd say that's a non traditional workload. And the impact is saving lives, that's awesome. Now let's talk a little bit about your journey. You know, our friends at Gartner, they do these magic quadrants, a lot of people don't like 'em, I happen to think they're quite useful, as a guidepost, you guys have always been strong on the vision, and you've been executing. Where are you today in that quadrant? >> Yeah, it's an extreme honor. Gartner elevated us into the Leader's Quadrant last year, so customers take that very, very seriously. And the ability to execute access, is, what Gartner says it's, are you influencing the market? Are you causing the incumbents to change their strategies? And with our disruptive pricing, with our liability guarantees, our SLAs and stuff like that, Gartner felt like we met the criteria. And it's a huge honor, and we absolutely have our customers to thank for that because the magic quadrant isn't about what you tell Gartner, it's about what your customers tell Gartner. >> Congratulations on that, and I know the peer insight, you guys have done very well on that also. I want you to talk about the team, you're growing. To grow, you've gotta bring on good people. You've added some folks, talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, yeah, well speaking of Gartner, we got Stan Zafos who recently joined. He's gonna be running product marketing for us. We're working with Doc, so he's a legend in the industry, so we're delighted to have him on board. Also, Steiny came over from Pure to join us as our field CTO, another legend who needs no introduction. So really, really happy about that. But also, it's not just, those are guys that customers see. But we're also experiencing this on the engineering side. So we, for example, we recently were very amused to realize that there are now more EMC fellows working at Infinidat, if you count Moshe, more EMC fellows working at Infinidat then working at Dell EMC, which is just, you know a humorous, kind of funny thing. So as the business has grown and has gotten momentum, you know, just like we're continuously amazed by the creativity and the things our customers are doing with data, every day, I am continuously amazed and humbled by the caliber of people that I get to work with every day. >> That's awesome. >> We're really, really happy about that. >> All right, well thank you for the recap of the past year, let's get into sort of some of the announcements today, and I wanna talk about the vision, so you have this Infinidat elastic data fabric, I'm interested in what that is, but I'm also, frankly even more interested in why. What's the "why" behind that? >> Sure. So elastic data fabric is Infinidat's roadmap, and our shared vision with customers for the future of enterprise storage. And the "why" is because customers demanded it. If we look at what's happening in the industry and the way that real customers are dealing with data right now, they have some of their data, and some of their workloads are running across public clouds. Some of them are in managed service providers. Some of them are SASs, and then they have on premises storage arrays, and elastic data fabric is Infinidat's solution that glues all of that together. It turns it into a single platform that spans on premises, colo, Infinidat powered managed service providers, Google, Amazon and Azure, and it glues it into a single platform for running workloads, so over the course of this of these presentations, we're gonna drill down into some of the enabling technologies that make this possible, but the net net, is that it is a brand new, next generation data plane for let's say for example, within a customer data center it allows customers to cluster multiple Infiniboxes together into what we call availability zones, and then manage that as a single entity. And that scales from a petabyte up to an exabyte of capacity per data center, and typically a customer would have one availability zone per data center and then one availability zone that can span multiple clouds, so that's the data plane. The control plane is the ability to manage all of this, no matter where the data lives, no matter where the workload is or needs to be and to manage it with a single pane of glass. And those are the kind of pieces of enabling technology that we're gonna unpack in the technical sessions. >> Two questions on that if I may. So you've got the data plane and the control plane, if I want to plug in to some other control plane, you know VMware control plane for instance, your API based architecture allows me to do that? Is that correct? >> Oh yeah, it's application aware, so for instance if you're running a VMware environment or a Kubernetes environment, it seamlessly integrates into that, and you manage it from a single API endpoint, and it's elastic, it scales up and down, and it's infinite and immortal. And probably the biggest problem that this solves for customers is it makes data migrations obsolete. It gives us the ability to decouple the data lifecycle from the hardware refresh lifecycle, which is a game changer for customers. >> I think you just answered my second question, which is what makes this unique? And that's at least one aspect of course. >> Yeah, I mean that's the, data migrations are the bane of customer's existence. And the larger the customer is, the more filer and erase sprawl they have, the more of a data migration headache they have. So when we kicked this project off five years ago, our call to action, the kernel of an idea that became elastic data fabric, was find a way to make it so that the next generation of infrastructure engineers that are graduated from college right now, will never know what a data migration is, and make it a story that old men in our industry talk about. >> Well that's huge because it is the bane of customers' existences. Very expensive, minimum $50,000 per migration, and many, many months, thanks Brian, for kicking this off, we've got a lot of ground to cover, and so we're gonna get into it now. We're gonna get into the news, we're gonna double click on some of the technologies and architectures, we're gonna hear from customers. And then it's your turn, we're gonna jump into the crowd chat and hear from you, so keep it right there. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming music) We're back with Doc D'Errico, the CMO of Infinidat. We're gonna talk about agility and manageability. Good to see you Doc. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> All right, let's start in reverse order, let's start with manageability. What's your story there? >> Sure, happy to do that, you know Dave, we get great feedback from our customers on how simple and easy our systems are to manage. We have products like Infinimetrics which give them a lot of insights into the system. We have APIs, very simple and easy to use. But our customers keep asking for more insights into their environment, leveraging the analytics that we already do, now you've also heard just now about our elastic data fabric, which is our vision, Infinidat's vision for the data center, not just for today, but into the future. And our first instantiation of that vision in answering those customer responses, is a new cloud based platform, initially to provide some better monitoring and analytics, but then you're going to go into data migrations, auto provisioning, storage availability zones, and really your whole customer experience with Infinidat. >> So for my understanding, this is a SAS solution, is that correct? >> It is, it's a secure, multi site solution, so in other words, all of your Infinidat systems, wherever they are around the world, all visible through a single pane of glass. But the cloud based system gives us a lot of great power too, it gives us the agility to provide faster development and rapid enhancement based on feedback and feature requests. It also then provides you customizable dashboards in your system, dashboards that we can create very rapidly, giving you advisors and insights into a variety of different things. And we have lots of customers who are already engaged in using this. >> So I'm interested in this advisors and insights, my understanding is you guys got a data lake in the backend. You're mining that data, performing analytics on it. What kinds of benefits do customers get out of that? >> Well they can search into things, like abandoned volumes within their system. Tracking the growth of their storage environment. Configuration errors, like asymmetric ports and paths, or even just performance behaviors, like abnormal latencies or bandwidth patterns. >> So when you're saying abandoned volumes, your talking about like, reclaiming wasted space? >> Absolutely. >> To be able to reuse it. I mean people in the old days have done that because of a log structured file and they had to do it for performance, but you're doing it to give back money to the customers, is that right? >> That's exactly right, you know customers very often get requests from business units to spin off additional volume sets for whether it be a test environment or some specific application that they're running for some period of time. And then when they spin down the environment they sometimes leave the data set there thinking that they might need it again in the not so distant future, and then it sort of dies on the vine, it sits there taking up space and it's never used again, so we give them insights into when the last time things were accessed, how often it's accessed, what the IO patterns are, how many copies there might be, with snapshots and things like that. >> You mentioned strong customer feedback. Everybody says they get great customer feedback. But you've been with a lot of companies. How is this different, and what specifically is that feedback? >> Yeah, the analytics and insights are very unique, this is exactly what customers have been asking for from other vendors. Nobody does it, you know we're hearing such great stories about the impact on their costs. Like the capacity utilization, reclaiming all that abandoned capacity, being able to put new workloads and grow their environment without having to pay any additional costs is exciting to them. Identifying and correcting configuration issues, getting ahead of performance problems before they occur. Our customers are already saving time and money by leveraging this in our environment. >> All right let's pivot to agility. You've got Flex, what's your story there? What is Flex? >> Well Dave, imagine a world if you will, if you didn't have to worry about hardware anymore, right, it sounds like a science fiction story but it's not. >> Sounds like cloud. >> It sounds like cloud, and people have been migrating to the cloud and in the public cloud environment, we have a solution that we talked about a year ago called Neutrix Cloud, providing a sovereign based storage solution so that you can get the resilience and the performance of Infinibox or Infiniguard in your system today, but people want that experience on premises, so for the on premise experience, we're announcing Infinibox Flex, and Inifiniguard Flex, an environment where, you don't have to worry about the hardware, you manage your data, we'll manage the hardware, and you get to pay for what you use as you need it. You can scale up an down, we'll guarantee the availability. 100% availability, and with this environment, you'll get free hardware for life. >> Okay a lot of questions, so this sounds like your on prem cloud, right, you're bringing that cloud experience to the data, wherever it lives, you say you can scale up and scale down, how does that work, you're over provisioning, or, and you're not charging me for what I don't use, can you give us some details there? >> Well just like with an Infinibox, we're going to try to provide the customer with the Infinibox that they need not just for today, but for tomorrow. We're gonna work with the customer to look into the future and try to determine what are their performance requirements and capacity requirements over time. The customer will have the ability to manage the data configuration and the allocation of the storage and add or remove storage as they need it. As they need it, as they scale up, and we'll build them based on the daily average, just like the cloud experience, and if, as they reduce, same thing, it will adjust the daily average and build accordingly. >> Am I right, the customer will make some minimum commitment, and then if they go over that, you'll charge 'em for it, if they don't, then you won't charge 'em for it, is that correct? >> If they go over it, we'll charge them for the period they go over, if they continue to use it forever, we'll charge them that. If they reduce it back, then we'll charge them the reduced amount. >> So that gives them the flexibility there and the agility. Okay 100% availability, what's behind that? >> You know, we have a seven nines reliability metric that we manage to on a day to day basis. We have customers who have been running systems for years without any noticeable downtime, and when you have seven ninths, that's 3.16 seconds of availability per year. Right, the life cycle of an IO timeout is much longer than that, so effectively from the customer's application perspective, it's 100% available. We're willing to put our money where our mouth is. So if you experience downtime that's caused by our system at any time during that monthly period, you get the next month for free for the entire capacity. >> Okay, so that's a guarantee that you're making. >> That's a guarantee. >> Okay, read the fine print. But it sounds like the fine print is just what you said it is. >> It's pretty straight forward. >> Free hardware for life. Free, like a puppy? (laughs) >> No, free like in free, free meaning you're paying for the service, we're providing the capacity for you to put your data, and every three years, we will refresh that entire system with new hardware. And the minimum is three years, if you prefer because of your business practices to change that cycle, we'll work with you to find the time that makes the most sense. >> So I could do four years or five years if I wanted. >> You could do four years or five years. You could do three years and three months. And you'll get the latest and greatest hardware. We'll also, by the way provide the data migration services which is part of this cloud vision. So your not going to have to do any of the work. You're not going to have to pay for additional capital expense so that you have two sets of hardware on the floor for six months to a year while you do migration and work it into your schedules. We'll do that entire thing transparently for you in your environment, completely non disruptive to you. >> So you guys are all about petabyte scale. Hard enterprise problems, this isn't a mom and pop sort of small business solution, where do you see this play? Obviously service providers are gonna eat this stuff up. Give us some -- >> Yeah you know, service providers is a great opportunity for this. It's also a wonderful opportunity for Infiniverse. But any large scale environment this should be a shoo-in. And you know what, even if you're in a small scale environment that has a need that you wanna maintain that environment on premises, you're small scale, you wanna take advantage of your data more. You know you're going to grow your environment, but you're not quite sure how you're gonna do it. Or you have these sporadic workloads. Perhaps in the finance industry, you know we're in tax season right now, taxes just ended half a month ago right, there are plenty of businesses who need additional capacity for maybe four months of the year, so they can scale up for those four months and then scale back down. >> Okay, give us the bottom line on the customer impact. >> So the customer impact is really all about greater agility, the ability to provide that capacity and flexible model without big impact to their overall budget over the course of the year. >> All right Doc, thank you very much. Appreciate your time and the insight. >> It's my pleasure, Dave. >> All right, let's year from the customer, and we'll be right back. Right after this short break. >> Michael Gray is here, he's the chief technology officer of Boston based Thrive, Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, glad to be here. >> So tell us about Thrive, what are you guys all about? >> You know, Thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider. But really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider, primarily now, we're focusing on cyber security, cloud hosting and public cloud hosting, as well as disaster recovery. To me, and this is something that's primary to Thrive's focus, is application enablement. We're an application enablement company. So if your application is best run in Azure, then we wanna put it there, a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies, we have to build private clouds. Or even for security reasons, we want to build private cloud, or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees. You know they didn't realize a lot of the, maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number. So you know, we wanna really look at people's applications and enable them to be high performance but also highly secure. >> So I'm curious as to when you brought in Infinidat, what the business impact was economically. There's all the sort of non TCO factors that I wanna explore, so was it the labor costs that got reduced, did you redeploy those resources? Was it actually the hardware, or? >> First and foremost, and you know this is going back many years, and I think I would say this is true for any data center cloud provider. The minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow, we're losing money. Okay, because we've had to pick up the phone and someone needs to address that. We have eliminated all storage performance help desk issues, it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore. We know that we can rely on our performance. And we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis, and that is not in question. Now the other thing is really, as we started to expand our Infinidat footprint geographically, we suddenly started to realize, not only do we have this great foundation built but we can leverage an investment we made to do things that we couldn't do before. Maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology, maybe we could do them but they required some more licensing. Something like that, but really when we started the standardization, we did it for operational efficiency reasons, and then suddenly realized that we had other opportunities here. And I have to hand it to Infinidat. They're actually the ones that helped us craft this story. Not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of. >> Has that been your experience, that it's sort of reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks? >> Oh absolutely, and you know I mentioned before that storage forms have now become an afterthought to me. You know, and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is from a performance standpoint, not a capacity standpoint, we can throw whatever we want at the Infinidat, and sort of the running joke internally is that we'll just smile and say is that all you got? >> You mean like mix workloads so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload? >> Yeah, and you know I can image that as someone who might be listening to what I'm saying, well hey come on, it can't really be that good. And I'm telling you from seeing it day to day, again you can just throw the workloads at it, and it will do what it says it does. You don't see that everyday, now as far as capacity goes, there's this capacity on demand model, which we're a huge fan of, they also have some other models, the flex model, which is very useful for budgeting purposes, what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for Infinidat, it's very off putting first on day one, and I remember my reaction. But again, as I was saying earlier, when you start peeling back the pieces of the technology and why theses things are, and the different flexibility on the financial side, you realize this actually isn't a downside, it's an upside. >> We're gonna talk performance with Craig Hebbert who's vice president with Infinidat, he focuses on strategic accounts, Craig, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so let's talk performance, everybody talks about performance they have their bench marketing, everybody's throwing Flash at the problem, you guys, you use Flash, but you didn't hop on that all Flash bandwagon, why and how are you different? >> Great question, we get it a lot with our customers. So we innovated, we spent over five years looking at the big picture, what the box would need today. What it would need in the future, and how would we arrive there by doing it economically? And so as you said, we use a small amount of Flash, that's a small percentage, two, three, four percent of the total box, but we do it by having a foundation that nobody else has, instead of throwing hardware at the solution, we have some specific mechanisms that nobody else has, we have a tri, which is a multi value structure that allows us to dynamically trace and track all of the IOs that come into the box, we ship intelligence. Everybody else ships dumb blocks of data. And so their only course of action to adopt new strategies is to bolt on the latest and greatest media. I've had a lot of experience at other companies where they've tried to shoehorn in new techniques whether it be a NAS Blade into an existing storage box or whether it be thin provisioning after the fact. And things that are done sort of like after the design is done never pan out very well. And the beauty with Infinibox is that all our protocols work the same way. I-ska-zin, NAS Block, it is all structured the same way. And that makes performance equal over all those protocols. And it makes it also easy to manage via the same API structure. >> So you're claiming that you can give equivalent or better performance with a combination of Flash and Spinning Disk than your competitors who are all Flash. Can you kind of add some color to that? >> Absolutely, so we use DRAM, all of our writes are ingested into the box through DRAM. We have 130 microsecond latency. Which is actually the lowest speed that fiber channel can attain, and so we're able to do things very, very quickly, it's 800 times faster NAND which is what our competitors are using. We have no raid structure on the SSD at all. So as things flow out of DRAM and go onto the SSD, our SSD is faster than everybody else's. Even though we use the same, so there's a mechanism there that we optimize. We write in large sequential blocks to the SSD. So the wear rate isn't the same as what our competitors are using, so everything we do is with an optimization, both for the present data and also the recall, and one of the things that culminates in a massive success for us, how we have those three tiers of data, but how we're able to out performance all Flash arrays, is that we do something, we hold data in cache for a massive amount of time, the average write latency in something like a VMAX is something like 13 seconds, the maximum is 28, we hold things for an astounding five minutes, and what that allows us to do is put profiles around things and remove randomness, randomness is something that's plagued data storage vendors for years. Whether it's random writes or random reads. If you can remove that randomness, then you can write out what are the slowest spinning disks out there, the Nearline SAS drives, but they're the fastest disks for sequential read, so if everything you write out is sequential, you can use the lowest cost disk, the Nearline SAS disk, and maximize their performance. And it's that technology, it's those patterns, 138 patterns that allow us to do all of these 38 steps in the process which augment our ability to serve customers data at a vastly reduced price. >> So your secret sauce is architecture intelligence as you call it, and then your able to provide lower cost media, and of course if Flash were lower cost, you'd be able to use that. There's no reason that you couldn't. Is that correct? >> We could but we wouldn't gain anything from it. A lot of customers say to us, why aren't you using more Flash, why don't you build an all Flash array? Why don't you use NVME? And we are actually the next version of the soft-wool-ship and the ME Capable as well as storage class memory. Why we don't do it is because we don't need it. Our customers have often said to us why don't you use 16 gig fiber channel or 32. And we haven't made that move because we don't move bottlenecks, we give customers a solution which is an end to end appliance, and so when we refresh the software stack, and we change the config with that, we make sure that the fiber channel is upgraded, we make sure that the three port, the Infiniban, everything comes with an uplift so there's not just one single area of a bottleneck. We could use more SSD but it would just be more money and we wouldn't be able to give you any more performance than we are today. >> So you have some hard news today. Tell us about that. >> Yeah I will. So we are a software company, and going back to the gen one I was here on day one when we started selling in the United States, when the first box was released it was 300,000 IOs, Moshe said he wanted a million IOs without changing the platform. We got up to about 900,000, that's a massive increase by just software tweaks, and so what we do is once the product has gone through its second year we go back and we optimize and we reevaluate. Which is what we did in the fall of 2018. And we were able to give a 30% uplift to our existing customers just with software tweaks in that area, so now we move to another config where we will introduce the 16, the 32 gig fiber channel cards and the MEO for fabric and storage class memory and all those things that are up and coming, but we don't need to utilize those until the price point drops. Right now if we did that, we'd just be like everybody else, and we would be driving up the price point, we're making the box ready to adapt those when the price point becomes accessible to our customers. >> Okay, last question, you spent a lot of time with strategic accounts, financial services, healthcare, insurance, what are some of the most pressing problems that you're hearing from them that you guys are helping them solve? >> It's a great question, so we see people with sprawl, managing many, many arrays, one of our competitors for instance for Splunk, they'll give you one array with one interface for the hot indexes, another mid tier array with another interface for the warm indexes. >> Brute force. >> Yeah, and then they'll give you a bunch of cold now storage on the back end with another disparate interface, all three of them are managed separately and you can't even control them from the same API. So what customers like about us, and just Splunk is one example. So we come in with just one 19 inch array and one rack, the hot indexes are handled by the DRAM, the warm indexes are handled by the SSD, and cold data's right there on the Nearline Sass drives. So they see from us this powerful, all encompassing solution that's better, faster, and cheaper. We sell on real, not effective, and so when encryption and things like this get turned on, the price point doesn't go up with Infinidat customers. They already know what they're buying. Everything else is just cream. And it's massive for economical reasons, as well as technological reasons. >> Excellent, Craig, thank you. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Okay keep it right there everybody. We'll be right back after this short break. (calming music) We're back with Ken Steinhart who's a field CTO with Infinidat, Ken, good to see you again. >> Great to see you Dave, it's been a long while. >> It sure has, thanks for coming back on the CUBE here. So you have the customer perspective. You've worked with a lot of customers. You've been a customer, availability, high availability, obviously important, especially in the context of storage. What's Infinidat's story there? >> Well high availability's been a cornerstone for Infinidat obviously from the beginning. And it's really driven some pretty amazing things. Not the least of which has been seven nines of availability proven by the product. What's new and different now, is we're extending that with the ability to do active active clustering and it's the real deal, we're talking about the ability to have the exact same volume now at synchronous distances, presenting itself to both sites as if it were just a single volume. Now this is technology that's based upon the existing synchronous replication and Infinisnap technology that Infinidat has already had, and this is gonna provide always on, continuous operation, even able to be resilient against site failures, component failures, storage failures, server failures, whatever, we will provide true zero RPO and true zero RTO at distance, and it's able to provide the ability to provide consistency also by using a very lightweight witness which presents itself as a third, completely separate fault domain to be able to see both sites to ensure the integrity of information, while being able to read and write simultaneously at two sites to what logically looks like one single volume. This is gonna be supported with all the major cluster software and server environments. And it's incredibly easy to deploy. So that's really the first point associated with this. >> So let me follow up on that, so a lot of people talk about active active, a lot of companies. How is this specifically different? >> It's different in that it is going to be able to now change the economics, first and foremost. Up until now, typically, people have had to trade off between RPO, RTO and cost, and usually you can get two of the three to be positive but not all three. It's sort of like if you buy a car. RPO equates to the quality of the solution, RTO equates to the speed or time, cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast it won't be cheap, if it's good and it's cheap, it won't be fast, and if it's fast and it's cheap it won't be good, so we're able to break that paradigm for the first time here, and we're gonna be able to now take the economics of multi site, disaster tolerant, cluster type solutions and do it at costs to what are comparable to what most people would do for just a single site implementation. >> And your secret sauce there is the architecture, it's the software behind it. >> Well it's actually a key point, the software is standard and included. And it's all about the software, this is an extension of the existing synchronous replication technology that Infinidat has had, standard and included, no additional costs, no separate quirky gateways or anything, being able to now have one single volume logically presented to two different sites in real time continuously for high availability. >> So what's the customer impact? >> The customer impact is continuous operation at economics that are comparable to what single site solutions have typically looked like. And that's just gonna be huge, we see this as possibly bringing multi site disaster tolerance and active active clustering to people that have never been able to afford it or didn't think they could afford it previously. That really brings us to the third part of this. The last piece is that, when you take an architecture such as Infinidat with Infinibox, that has been able to demonstrate seven nines of availability, and now you can couple that across at distance in synchronous distances to two data centers or two completely different sites, we are now able to offer a 100% uptime guarantee. Something that statistically hasn't really been particularly practical in the past, for a vendor to talk about, but we're now able to do it because of the technology that this architecture affords our customers. >> So guarantee as in, when I read the fine print, what does it say? >> Obviously we'll give the opportunity for our customers to read the fine print. But basically it's saying we're gonna stand behind this product relative to its ability to deliver for them, and obviously this is something customers we think are gonna be very, very excited about. >> Ken, thinks so much for coming on the CUBE, appreciate it. >> Pleasure's mine, Dave. As always. >> Great to see you. Okay, thank you for watching, keep it right there. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming music) Okay we're back for the wrap up with Brian Carmody. Brian, let's geek out a little bit. You guys are technologists, let's start with the software tech that we heard about today. What are the takeaways? >> Sure, so there's a huge amount of content in here, and software is most of it, so we have, first is R5. This is the latest software release for Infinibox. It improves performance, it improves availability with active active, it introduces non disruptive data mobility which is a game changer for customers for manageability and agility. Also as part of that, we have the availability of Infiniverse, which is our cloud based analytics and monitoring platform for Infinidat products, but it's also the next generation control plane that we're building. And when we talk about our roadmap, it's gonna grow into a lot more than it is today, so it's a very strategic product for us. But yeah, that's the net net on software. >> Okay, so but the software has to run on some underlying hardware, so what are the innovations there? >> Yeah, so I'm not sure if I'd call 'em innovations, I mean in our model, hardware is boring and commoditized and really all the important stuff happens in software. But we have listened, customers have asked us for it, we are delivering, 16 gigabit fiber channel is a standard option, and we're also giving a option for a 32 gig fiber channel, and a 25 gig ethernet, 25 gig ethernet, which is again, things that customers asking for 'em, and we've delivered, and also while we're on the topic of protocols and stuff like that, we're also demonstrating our NVMe over fabrics implementation, which is deployed with select customers right now, it is the world's fastest NVMe over fabrics implementation, it is a round trip latency of 52 microseconds which is half the time, roundtrip for us, is half the time that it takes a NAND Flash cell to recall its data, forgetting about the software stack on the round trip, that's gonna be available in the future for all of our customers, general availability via a software only update. >> That's incredible, all right, so to get out what that means for the road map. >> Oh sure, so basically with our road map, is we're laying out a very ambitious vision for the next 18 months of how to give customers ultimately what they are screaming for which is help us evolve our on premises storage from old school storage arrays and turn them into elastic data center scale clouds in my own data centers, and then come up and give us an easy, seamless way to integrate that into our public cloud and our off premises technologies, and that's where we're gonna be. Starting today, and taking us out the next 18 months. >> Well we covered a lot of ground today. Pretty remarkable, congratulations on the announcements. We covered all the abilities, even performance ability. We'll throw that one in there. So thank you for that, final word? >> The final word is probably just a message to our customers to say thank you, and for trusting us with your data. We take that covenant very seriously. And we hope that you with all of this work that we've done, that you feel we're delivering on our promise of value, to help them enable competitive advantage and do it at multi petabyte scale. >> Great, all right thank you Brian. And thank you, now it's your turn. Hop into the crowd chat, we've got some questions for you, you can ask questions of the experts that are on the call. Thanks everybody for watching. This is Dave Vallante signing out from the CUBE.