>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here, day three coverage, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. VMworld 2017, we're in the the VM village for wall to wall coverage of VMworld. Our next two guests, Erik Kaulberg who's the senior director of cloud solutions and Jason Chamiak who's the senior systems engineer of Peak 10. Guys, welcome back. Infinidat, you guys are doing great. >> Absolutely, it's been a wonderful year for us. >> We were just talking on camera, got surprised when we kind of went live. Day three, and we were just talking about Infinidat's history and the growth you guys have and just kind of the DNA of the company, how you guys attack the accounts and then kind of profile storage guys you go after and you're disruptive but you're not doing anything super-radical technically, you just come in blocking and tackling with storage solutions for big industrial clients. Give us this update. >> Absolutely, I mean I'd say that the disruption is in two areas. One, it's in how we're approaching the clients and where we're going in the data center. Most typical disruptors would start at the edge and eventually get to the core but Infinidat's modus operandi, from day one, was let's start in the core and then broaden the aperture so we're out there displacing VMAX, we're out there displacing legacy storage arrays that are used for Tier 1 workloads from day one and that strategy has worked out great for us with 260% year over year growth just this past quarter. It's been a wild ride. >> So one of the things that people may or may not know is that this whole scene here at VMworld is all about disruption, oh, the computer industry's thrown upside down. You guys have a very simple approach, come in and just get a better price performance, more bang for the buck if you will, but really deliver some of that core storage. Can you just take a minute to elaborate on that specific point? >> Absolutely, so the story line is really about commodity hardware paired with awesome software that makes all the difference versus the traditional architectures. So what we do with our combination of flash and DRAM and high-capacity hard drives allows us to make sure that the workloads are in the right place at the right time all the time and that means something transformational for our large-scale clients. And the challenge that we see as, versus all the other startups in this space or the smaller companies in this space, that ultimately you have real challenges doing that at scale unless you have the intelligence and the expertise that our three generations of storage leadership have really brought together. >> So Jason, I wonder if we can bring Peak 10 and ViaWest, recent merger, but bring you into the conversation. Maybe talk about, briefly, your company and your role. >> Yeah, sure, so Peak 10 and ViaWest were a hybrid IT company. We specialize in collocation and cloud services and we package that in with managed and professional services. We were looking for a way to consolidate a bunch of the dedicated client arrays that we had out there and we needed a good shared solution that offered high performance that we could throw a bunch of different workloads onto. We evaluated a bunch of flash arrays and other hybrid arrays and Infinidat just happened to outperform pretty much everything that we benchmarked. >> And your role is to look after that infrastructure? >> Yeah, so currently, we have 11 InfiniBox arrays ranging from the 1000 series up to the 6000. We have about four petabytes of physical space and almost 10 petabytes of virtual space. >> So, before we get into the environment, we want to do that, what are the, I mean, as a service provider, obviously, SLAs are super important, you're merging companies so you got a bunch of different infrastructure, you're going to have to deal with that down the road. But like a lot of service providers, you mentioned sort of you wanted to consolidate things, you are probably servicing different workloads with different types of infrastructure but what are the big drivers in your business? You know, cloud obviously, the big wave is here, what are the things that are driving your business that effect IT specifically? >> So one of the things is we want our clients to be able to get to market faster. So, with the InfiniBox, the implementation and configuration of it is extremely simplified over some of the other storage products that we've used in the past. So we're able to get our clients up to speed, they start to use the infrastructure sooner and the performance benefit is amazing. We've actually had testimonials from clients that have put their workload that they had residing on other vendor products, as soon as we put them on, even a shared InfiniBox, not even a dedicated but a shared InfiniBox with other workloads running, they've seen as much as a 500% to 800% improvement in application performance. >> So, paint a picture of your environment, at least the part that you're responsible and have visibility on. What's it look like? I mean, kind of workloads, servers, storage capacities, I mean, whatever you feel comfortable sharing. >> Yeah, sure. So I work on the platform engineering team and we're responsible for the infrastructure and code that make up our client center cloud offering and that is based on VMware and the InfiniBox. So we have a mixed workload. We have clients that have physical servers connecting that run Oracle RAC installations. They'll have Hadoop clusters, large SQL servers, whether that's normal OLTP or analytical workloads in addition to large and small VMware deployments. And we just run that all together on the same unit and there's no hotspots. >> Dave: Are you virtualizing RAC? >> I don't believe so, we may have some. >> Dave: But it's not possible and common that people don't? >> Yeah, I can tell you we do have some virtualized SQL server clusters out there along with physical, you name it, we have it out there. >> Okay, so take us back to pre-Infinidat. What was life like? What was the conversation like with Infinidat? You know, small company comes in knocking at your door, hey, I got an array to sell you. Take us through that story. >> We ended up with, like I mentioned before, we ended up with a lot of dedicated arrays for clients. I think, at one point, we were over 70 dedicated arrays. >> Dave: 70? >> Yeah. So that becomes kind of a management nightmare when it comes to patching and things like that. But even before we get to how we got that many, for each individual client, we try and talk to them, take a look at their workload and then from that, we would have to model what kind of RAID groups we need, how many disks within those RAID groups, so there was a lot of consulting time involved in getting the correct configuration for them. Moving to the InfiniBox, we don't have that problem. We don't have an option to do different types of RAID groups, everything just works within the infrastructure that's there. So we've saved a ton of time having to do all that consulting work beforehand and that also adds to, you know, quicker time to market for our clients. >> So you essentially consolidated a large number of arrays down to an InfiniBox infrastructure, is that right? >> Yeah, so we have, like I said before, we have 11. We have those scattered across multiple locations. >> Okay, and the biggest impact was what, time? People time or? >> Time, there's less time for deployment configuration. We spend less time looking at performance problems so we have more time to focus on the more important things. We do a lot of monitoring and things like that for these arrays now, we do trending and everything. We have time to actually put forth for creating those scripts and those infrastructures. >> So can you talk about performance? I mean, Erik, you could maybe address this too. Infinidat has basically said, look, you don't need an all-flash array, we can deliver a little bit of flash and a lot of spinning disk and work our algorithmic magic and deliver better performance than an all-flash array. Am I summarizing your point of view correctly? >> You got it, exactly. I mean, we would say that the all-flash array movement is great for certain workloads but by and large, for the 80, 90% of common data center environments, it's just a way to make storage expensive again. (laughing) >> Hear, hear, come to the party. And so Jason, from your experience, can you talk about the performance, did you look at other all-flash alternatives or other alternatives to Infinidat? >> Yeah, so we actually started looking at all-flash arrays to start off with because we knew that, with a cloud type infrastructure, we're going to be putting all these varied workloads on there. And we tested several flash arrays, we benchmark those when we get them in, and we actually saw more consistent and better performance across all those workloads from the InfiniBox. And, as you know, with the flash, you pay a lot for a much smaller amount of capacity so that was a problem too. So, from a cost perspective and performance perspective, the InfiniBox pretty much beat out all the competitors. >> I'm sorry if I missed this, how much capacity are you managing? >> So, right now, we have four petabytes of physical, about 10 petabytes of virtual. >> And how many people manage that? >> Probably just a handful of people and it's basically set it and forget it. >> So it's arms and legs? You know, like constantly tuning and... >> Yeah, we don't have to do any of that stuff, it's optimized from the start. >> And that was obviously different prior to the installation of Infinidat or? >> Yeah, before, there was a lot of, you know, like I said, tweaking of disconfigurations and storage pools and cache settings and things like that so there was a lot more hand-holding. >> So, what'd you do with all that time that freed up? I mean, what did you do with that labor resource? Where did you point it? >> We put that into our analytics and monitoring platform on the backend so we create a lot of scripts to help us kind of trend capacity and performance for the InfiniBox arrays. >> Erik, I want to ask you the final question for me. The story I'm hearing at VMworld is that as you do more of these projects, some of the costs kind of add up. Where are you guys seeing kind of the opportunity to come in, stabilize operations from storage to endpoint, free up that time, that's always a great value proposition, reduce steps and save time and money. But where is the action happening where the costs start to get out of control, when people start thinking about true private cloud, hybrid cloud, where's the hotspots that customers should look at saying, if you don't be careful, that's going to blow out of control in terms of costs. >> I personally think it's all about scale at some level. Whether you're thinking about a large-scale public cloud deployment or whether you're thinking about going from five all-flash arrays to 50, let's say, that's when the cumulative costs grow at an exponential rate. And that's the opportunity for companies like Infinidat, successfully bringing these multi-petabyte architectures to fruition while managing all the labor costs and all the implementation costs and operational costs. >> So vSAN's been growing like crazy, for instance, let's take that as an example. Those things can add up in price. How do you guys compare to, say, vSAN? >> So, head-to-head against vSAN at scale, there is no comparison frankly. Whether you're looking at-- >> John: You guys benefit over them or? >> Yeah, definitely us over them. When we look at multi-petabyte scale deployments of which there are relatively few in the market today, you have so much investment. One customer quoted $12 million to do what Infinidat could do for $2 million comparing against the vSAN base. >> I'm kind of skeptical on those numbers, I'd like to see, that's a huge delta so we'll have to kind of follow up on that. >> Erik: You'll have to see it to believe it. >> I mean, that's a $10 million savings. >> Erik: Absolutely. >> You're saying that you guys, it's going to save $10 million off the vSAN number. >> In terms of TCL, when you look at, again, it's not the cost of the hardware or even necessarily the software so much but it's the cost of the implementation, it's the opportunity cost versus all of the innovation, like he was mentioning previously, that really eats into the overall budget-- >> Okay, so let's go to the customers, okay, so that's a good value proposition, puts a stake in the ground, good order of magnitude in terms of solar system of value, right, two versus 12, that's significant. How does that play out in reality when you think about those kinds of numbers? Where's that saving coming from? Just the box deployment, the consolidation, where's that coming from? >> It's pretty much all over. So, part of the cost savings that we have too is once you have a large number of individual arrays, you've got to re-up on maintenance costs and things like that. So we're able to have a much lower number of arrays to service that same workload. We've saved there, we save on man-hours for configuration, for performance troubleshooting and things like that. So across the board, we're saving on time for our employees. >> John: Awesome, Erik, Jason, thanks so much for sharing. Bold statement, huge stake in the ground. Good job you guys are aggressive and hey, lower prices and potential performance is what people want so congratulations Infinidat. Here inside The Cube I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, back with more live coverage, day three of three days of coverage after this short break. Back from VMworld 2017. (electronic music)