>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VM World 2018. Brought to you by VMware and Adziko System partners. >> Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay everybody in Las Vegas. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with David Floyer. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. We've got two sets here in the VM Village. 94 guests this week. It's a record for the CUBE. Thanks so much for watching. I've been in this business as long as Pat Gelsinger and ever since I've been in this business people have said, "oh infrastructure's dying", and you know what, storage is the gift that keeps on giving. And I just, we love the conversations. Guys from Infinidat are here. Jacob Broido is the Chief Product Officer and Neville Yates is the Senior Director of Data Protection Solutions at Infinidat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Happy VMworld 2018. >> Thank you >> Thank you >> All right Jacob, I'm going to start with you. >> Okay. >> So we have seen Infinidat come in. You're basically competing with all flash arrays, you're faster than Flash, and that's your sort of tag line. So you have this system designed for primary storage and then all of a sudden, you know last summer, around last summer, maybe it was the fall. We see you guys entering the data protection market with essentially the same architecture. How is it that you can take a system that's designed for primary storage faster than Flash, and then point it at data protection. Help us understand. >> That's a great question. So, it all starts with the fact that we designed our system to work with mixed workloads. And primary storage being our first keypoint, but the design and architecture supposed to work with any type of workload. And what we started seeing in the field is that our customers first displaced a lot of incumbent primary storage on us. And then we started seeing them putting backup workloads as well, and data protection workloads on our systems as well, and coming back and saying that this works amazingly led to more of that. This basically led us to a point of expanding on that strategy and introducing additional products and services. The key point for us in this was that it was remarkably easy for us to introduce additional capabilities because of the solid technical and architectural foundation. We're very fast. Our financial model enables us to do and go after the data protection market efficiently, and we're seeing this in the field. >> So Neville help us, paint a picture for us. You've got a long history in the data protection market. You were involved in disrupting tape, you've been a consultant in this space working with customers. What's the market sort of look like, the sort of available market for you guys? >> So when Jacob refers to the expansion into data protection, we took this technology as Jacob describes the InfiniBox, and we didn't just expand in one direction. We expanded in two directions, multi-direct, with the introduction of of InfiniSync, which is a means by which critical applications can enable a recovery point of zero, Jacob will go into more details on that. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we deliver a deploying InfiniGuard. Based on the same technology that Jacob described as the core, we're now able to be the target of factual re-enter, the typical grandfather/father/son, every 24-hours you do a backup, you do an incremental. And with deduplication as a front end to the core storage, now we've got a coverage across a data protection spectrum that nobody else can match. Recovery point of zero, leveraging replication technologies that Jacob will expand upon in a minute, Snap technology internal to InfiniBox, integrated with backup applications such as the dash-board management is all consistent, and then further down the spectrum, the InfiniGuard itself, dealing with the traditional kind of data protection schemes. A complete spectrum coverage. Nobody else can deliver it. Built on that technology core to the InfinityBox storage itself. >> So you got the full pyramid covered with the same fundamental architecture. But Jacob, you can't just throw the Box at data protection, you have to bring in other features, you got to be best of breed. So maybe you can talk a little bit about, double-click on some of those. >> Sure. So it all starts with kind of base foundation for our data protection that is InfiniSnaps. It's our snapshot core engine which from day one, we designed to work at multi-petabyte scale, and for us what that means is that you need to support hundred-thousands of snapshots and up to multiple millions. That's by design how we designed the system. But not only that, you have to have zero impact on performance. If you look at our systems in the field, our customers are doing thousands of snapshots per day. Some are doing tens of thousands or more per day with no performance impact, that's not even measurable on any of their performance graphs. This is the foundational technology on which we have built our forward looking additional data protection technologies. So, if we look upper in the pyramid of overall solutions for data protection, after that we introduce our asynchronous replication which is based on that snapshot technology for us. The reason we had such an efficient and groundbreaking snapshot technology, enables us to do the lowest RPO protection for async replication when comparing to any storage product on the market. We're talking about four seconds RPO, and this is something that no other vendor was able to do, because snapshots break at that pace. It's very hard to create and delete snapshots at scale at a such a short interval. >> Without performance degradation. >> Exactly, exactly. We were able to do this. And this is kind of one example of how our early days architectural planning and investment in our product architecture pays off year after year with every new feature. That's why it seems easy for now when we release features quickly, because we have such a solid technical foundation. >> One of the things that I was really fascinated by, was your purchase of Axxana. And how have you been able to use that to get this RTO zero, that you're claiming on that? I mean if you look at the marketplace at the moment, it seems to be that the storage vendors in general are owning this whole space of RTO, lower-RTO's, et cetera. >> That's a great question, but before we get into details about that I want to cover a kind of foundational technology for that, that enabled us to do this. And that is our synchronous replication within InfiniBox already. Which is also built on top of our async, which in turn, built on top of our snapshots. With our synchronous replication within InfiniBox, we're delivering the lowest possible latency for sync replication today. Just to give you an example of how low and how efficient that is, systems that are running synchronous replication on top of InfiniBox are having lower latency than a single all-flash array writing locally. Just imagine what it means. We're able to do the round trip right to another array, and complete the whole work faster than you'll have an all-flash array, a typical all-flash array doing. Now that foundational technology also is a key part of our InfiniSync implementation. Because what we did, we took a great product which comes from Axxana, which is the hardened black box, capable of withstanding any type of disaster, fire, floods, earthquake, whatever. And we essentially integrated it very closely with InfiniBox sync replication, where we're writing this very efficient low-latency sync operations to our InfiniSync appliance, and essentially enabling RPO zero over in the distance. So if you look at it from the heart things perspective which is the data path, we had existing capability, which is our sync replication within the array. We just had to integrate it with another great product, Axxana, and that essentially was more than anything an integration work rather than from scratch development. Because again, this is part of our philosophy, we plan ahead as far a our product, road map, and strategy, and when you lay out the foundation early on, you get to the point where some things look easy, because they were pre-made and prepared early on. >> So that's the tip of the pyramid. For those mission critical applications where you need RPO zero, you've now enabled customers to do that for much lower cost than let's say for instance, the three site data center. >> Yep. >> What about the sort of fat middle, Neville, of data protection, I think you guys call it InfiniGuard. Right? That's kind of your solution there. >> So InfiniGuard simply is InfiniBox storage, with all of it's resiliency and performance, and algorithms that outperform typical arrays, and in front of that we've integrated deduplication engines. These deduplication engines present themselves as targets to the traditional backup ecosystem, receive data, de-duplicate it, and use the resources of InfiniBox storage integrated into the InfiniGuard. And, it's been received well, because its ability to deliver aggressive recovery time objectives, because of its performance in terms of resource speeds. The traditional systems that have been designed ten or fifteen years ago were okay at doing backups, they were purposely built for backup processes. They suffer greatly as a byproduct of the process of deduplication, and the IO profile that that generates. InfiniGuard breaks through that, because of its performance in the underlying storage, in order to drive RTO's, for the recovery of those files that are under the 24-hour sort of data protection cycle. And the customers are receiving it well. They are amazed at the performance, the reliability, and the simplicity within which that fits into the existing ecosystem. So it completes. InfiniSync, InfiniGuard, with InfiniBox at the core in the middle. >> And so you partner with the backup software vendors. >> Of course. >> You're not writing your own backup software, right? >> No no no. So integration, Veeam, the ConVals, the Veritas OST's, et cetera. A little further integration when it comes to InfiniBox Snap technology. That is integrated into backup applications such as ConVal or Veeam. Specifically, you can use their dashboard and their scheduling scheme to trigger the snap that then is taken care of in InfiniBox. So, it's quite a comprehensive deliverable against the whole data protection paradigm. >> And have you made a cloud of that now? With your new service? >> Not yet, but as Jacob said, there's the vision, we are always building strategically, slightly ahead of the curve. So you can imagine that that's not lost on the radar screen. >> Right. >> I see this as a return on asset play. In other words, I've got the architecture, I've got my processes and procedures in place, I don't have to go out and buy a purpose built appliance for data protection now, I can use the asset that's on my floor, that people are trained on, what are your thoughts? >> Absolutely, it seems to me that you have, uh simplified tremendously, all of those previous steps, that took one to another to another, and put them all in the same box, and used the same technologies, to achieve much better end to end results. I think it's excellent. >> You're absolutely correct, and it's deliverable in a timely fashion, because the foundation is so strong. The investment that we made from day one, to make sure that that storage architecture was able to deliver the storage services at the right cost point, at the right resiliency, at the right performance levels, is the means by which we're able to accomplish that. No one else can do it. >> And there's another arc to this story. That we're constantly, we're continually investing into that foundation. Every, our customers, the one unique thing that they experience with us, is that their systems get better every time, every release that we have, every month they get better. Not only on performance, which is obvious, in that our systems are improving all the time. >> As opposed to the normal expectation is that >> Yes. >> as you fill it up it gets worse. >> Yeah. We are actually delivering the opposite. Our customers that are buying the system today, know that, the ones that experienced InfiniBox, know that it will become better over time. And that expands the whole spectrum. It's performance, it's reliability, but it also futures it. All of the things that we discussed here, were delivered free of charge through our software upgrade to our existing InfiniBox customers. And, without disclosing something specific looking forward, there are many more things in that area coming up pretty soon from us. >> Very innovative. You guys always solve problems differently, cutting against the conventional wisdom. You see, VMworld, a lot of glam. A lot of big market. And you guys, I was at your customer dinner the other night. A lot of happy customers. A very intimate event. And a lot of good belly to belly conversations. So congratulations. Final thoughts from each of you on VMworld 2018, the future of Infinidat, anything you want to share with us? Go ahead, Neville. >> Good show, the clients, the prospects that I've spoken to here, they get to open their minds in terms of our solution-offering, and it's generated a lot of interest, and it's going to be a good remainder of the year and a good 2019. >> Great, Jacob, final words from you. >> I agree as well. And we're, I'm seeing customers that are actually reaching out to new prospects for us, and telling the story of Infinidat, and that's catching on. And it's great to see that. >> Jacob, Neville, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Bringing you all the action from VMworld 2018, I'm Dave Vellante, for David Floyer. You're watching theCUBE, and we'll be right back after this short break. (light electronic music)

(upbeat music) 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 is the executive vice president of business development and relationships. And Neville Yates, who is a business continuity consultant. Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here in The Cube with us. >> Neville: Thank you. >> Bob: Thanks Peter, nice to be here. >> So there is a lot of conversation about digital business and the role that data plays in it. Now from our perspective, we have a relatively simple way of thinking about these things, and we think that the difference between business and digital business is the role the data plays in the digital business. A business gets more digital as it uses its data differently, specifically its 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 think? >> Bob: Sure, we're seeing the same thing as you are 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 they wanted to help them the best way that we can help them, is to go on and take on the high-end backup 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 with inside 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. You know, things around multiple petabyte 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, Neville; here 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 is a lot of failure that happens especially during restore processes and that cost again, a typical Fortune 1000 company 1.25+ billion dollars revenue over a 4 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 the performance. The way that we are unbelievable custodians of data and then we are 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 2 weeks ago. We were backing up a 3 terabyte database. This is not a big a amount of data, it takes about half an hour. We were saying let's do a restore, and the gentleman looked at me and said, "we don't have time." I said, "No, it's a thirty minute process." This person expected it to take 5 and 6 hours. Add that up in terms of dollars per hour, what it means to that revenue generating application and that's where those numbers come from. >> Peter: Yes, especially if it fails because of as you said, Bob; the lack of ease of use and a lack of simplicity. So we're here to talk about something. What is it that we're talking about and how does it work? >> Bob: Yeah, let me tell you. I'll cover the what it is, I'll let Neville get into a little bit on 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 1 petabyte usable configuration. We integrated in stateless d-duplication engines, what we call D.D.E.'s, and a high availability topology, that effectively protects up to 20 petabytes of data. We combine that with a vast certification and openness of independent software vendors in the data protection 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 V. >> Well, very importantly the idea of partnership and simplicity and ease of use, you want your box, the InfiniGuard, to be as high-quality and as productive as possible, but you don't want to force a dramatic change in how an organization works. So let's dig in to some of that, Neville. How does this work in practice? >> It's very simple. We have these d-duplication engines that front-end the InfiniBox storage. But what is unique, because there's other 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. D-duplication is a challenge for secondary storage systems. Because it is a random I/O profile that has to be gathered in a 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. >> Peter: So Neurocache helps you essentially sustain some degree of organization of the data, within the box. >> Absolutely. And as a byproduct of that organization that the ability to go and get it ahead of the ask allows us to respond to meet recovery time objections. >> Peter: And that's the way you go from 5 to 6 hours for relatively small restores to -- >> Neville: 30 minutes. >> Exactly. So by feeding the data back out to the system in an organized, pre-organized way the system is 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 6 hours. >> So we're talking about the difference between 30 minutes and 6 hours, but I also want to very quickly, Bob; ask you a question in the last couple of 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? >> Bob: Absolutely. So you know, 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 backup software side, the data protection side of the business. All of them have commented about the better business continuity solution that we've put together. In conjunction with their product as well. And the number 1 feedback that comes back is, "Wow, the restore times that you guys deliver to the market are unlike anything we've seen before." >> Peter: So to summarize it: It goes in faster. It works faster and it scales better, so that the business truly can think of itself of being protected, not just sets of data. >> Absolutely. >> Agreed. >> Alright. Bob Cancilla, EVP of business development and partnerships. Neville Yates, business continuity consultant. Thanks very much for being on The Cube. We'll be right back to talk multi-cloud after the short break. (upbeat outro music)

>> Hello everyone. On today's panel, the theme is Drug Discovery and how Artificial Intelligence can make a difference. On the panel today, we are honored to have Dr. Ryan Yates, principal scientist at The National Center for Natural Products Research, with a focus on botanicals specifically the pharmacokinetics, which is essentially how the drug changes over time in our body and pharmacodynamics which is essentially how drugs affects our body. And of particular interest to him is the use of AI in preclinical screening models to identify chemical combinations that can target chronic inflammatory processes such as fatty liver disease, cognitive impairment and aging. Welcome, Ryan. Thank you for coming. >> Good morning. Thank you for having me. >> The other distinguished panelist is Dr. Rangan Sukumar, our very own, is a distinguished technologist at the CTO office for High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence with a PHD in AI and 70 publications that can be applied in drug discovery, autonomous vehicles and social network analysis. Hey Rangan, welcome. Thank you for coming, by sparing the time. We have also our distinguished Chris Davidson. He is leader of our HPC and AI Application and Performance Engineering team. His job is to tune and benchmark applications, particularly in the applications of weather, energy, financial services and life sciences. Yes so particular interest is life sciences he spent 10 years in biotech and medical diagnostics. Hi Chris, welcome. Thank you for coming. >> Nice to see you. >> Well let's start with your Chris, yes, you're regularly interfaced with pharmaceutical companies and worked also on the COVID-19 White House Consortium. You know tell us, let's kick this off and tell us a little bit about your engagement in the drug discovery process. >> Right and that's a good question I think really setting the framework for what we're talking about here is to understand what is the drug discovery process. And that can be kind of broken down into I would say four different areas, there's the research and development space, the preclinical studies space, clinical trial and regulatory review. And if you're lucky, hopefully approval. Traditionally this is a slow arduous process it costs a lot of money and there's a high amount of error. Right, however this process by its very nature is highly iterate and has just huge amounts of data, right it's very data intensive, right and it's these characteristics that make this process a great target for kind of new approaches in different ways of doing things. Right, so for the sake of discussion, right, go ahead. >> Oh yes, so you mentioned data intensive brings to mind Artificial Intelligence, you know, so Artificial Intelligence making the difference here in this process, is that so? >> Right, and some of those novel approaches are actually based on Artificial Intelligence whether it's deep learning and machine learning, et cetera, you know, prime example would say, let's just say for the sake of discussion, let's say there's a brand new virus, causes flu-like symptoms, shall not be named if we focus kind of on the R and D phase, right our goal is really to identify target for the treatment and then screen compounds against it see which, you know, which ones we take forward right to this end, technologies like cryo-electron, cryogenic electron microscopy, just a form of microscopy can provide us a near atomic biomolecular map of the samples that we're studying, right whether that's a virus, a microbe, the cell that it's attaching to and so on, right AI, for instance, has been used in the particle picking aspect of this process. When you take all these images, you know, there are only certain particles that we want to take and study, right whether they have good resolution or not whether it's in the field of the frame and image recognition is a huge part of this, it's massive amounts of data in AI can be very easily, you know, used to approach that. Right, so with docking, you can take the biomolecular maps that you achieved from cryo-electron microscopy and you can take those and input that into the docking application and then run multiple iterations to figure out which will give you the best fit. AI again, right, this is iterative process it's extremely data intensive, it's an easy way to just apply AI and get that best fit doing something in a very, you know, analog manner that would just take humans very long time to do or traditional computing a very long time to do. >> Oh, Ryan, Ryan, you work at the NCNPR, you know, very exciting, you know after all, you know, at some point in history just about all drugs were from natural products yeah, so it's great to have you here today. Please tell us a little bit about your work with the pharmaceutical companies, especially when it is often that drug cocktails or what they call Polypharmacology, is the answer to complete drug therapy. Please tell us a bit more with your work there. >> Yeah thank you again for having me here this morning Dr. Goh, it's a pleasure to be here and as you said, I'm from the National Center for Natural Products Research you'll hear me refer to it as the NCNPR here in Oxford, Mississippi on the Ole Miss Campus, beautiful setting here in the South and so, what, as you said historically, what the drug discovery process has been, and it's really not a drug discovery process is really a therapy process, traditional medicine is we've looked at natural products from medicinal plants okay, in these extracts and so where I'd like to begin is really sort of talking about the assets that we have here at the NCNPR one of those prime assets, unique assets is our medicinal plant repository which comprises approximately 15,000 different medicinal plants. And what that allows us to do, right is to screen mine, that repository for activities so whether you have a disease of interest or whether you have a target of interest then you can use this medicinal plant repository to look for actives, in this case active plants. It's really important in today's environment of drug discovery to really understand what are the actives in these different medicinal plants which leads me to the second unique asset here at the NCNPR and that is our what I'll call a plant deconstruction laboratory so without going into great detail, but what that allows us to do is through a how to put workstation, right, is to facilitate rapid isolation and identification of phytochemicals in these different medicinal plants right, and so things that have historically taken us weeks and sometimes months, think acetylsalicylic acid from salicylic acid as a pain reliever in the willow bark or Taxol, right as an anti-cancer drug, right now we can do that with this system on the matter of days or weeks so now we're talking about activity from a plant and extract down to phytochemical characterization on a timescale, which starts to make sense in modern drug discovery, alright and so now if you look at these phytochemicals, right, and you ask yourself, well sort of who is interested in that and why, right what are traditional pharmaceutical companies, right which I've been working with for 20, over 25 years now, right, typically uses these natural products where historically has used these natural products as starting points for new drugs. Right, so in other words, take this phytochemical and make chemicals synthetic modifications in order to achieve a potential drug. But in the context of natural products, unlike the pharmaceutical realm, there is often times a big knowledge gap between a disease and a plant in other words I have a plant that has activity, but how to connect those dots has been really laborious time consuming so it took us probably 50 years to go from salicylic acid and willow bark to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin it just doesn't work in today's environment. So casting about trying to figure out how we expedite that process that's when about four years ago, I read a really fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times about my colleague and business partner, Dr. Rangan Sukumar, describing all the interesting things that he was doing in the area of Artificial Intelligence. And one of my favorite parts of this story is basically, unannounced, I arrived at his doorstep in Oak Ridge, he was working Oak Ridge National Labs at the time, and I introduced myself to him didn't know what was coming, didn't know who I was, right and I said, hey, you don't know me you don't know why I'm here, I said, but let me tell you what I want to do with your system, right and so that kicked off a very fruitful collaboration and friendship over the last four years using Artificial Intelligence and it's culminated most recently in our COVID-19 project collaborative research between the NCNPR and HP in this case. >> From what I can understand also as Chris has mentioned highly iterative, especially with these combination mixture of chemicals right, in plants that could affect a disease. We need to put in effort to figure out what are the active components in that, that affects it yeah, the combination and given the layman's way of understanding it you know and therefore iterative and highly data intensive. And I can see why Rangan can play a huge significant role here, Rangan, thank you for joining us So it's just a nice segue to bring you in here, you know, given your work with Ryan over so many years now, tell I think I'm also quite interested in knowing a little about how it developed the first time you met and the process and the things you all work together on that culminated into the progress at the advanced level today. Please tell us a little bit about that history and also the current work. Rangan. >> So, Ryan, like he mentioned, walked into my office about four years ago and he was like hey, I'm working on this Omega-3 fatty acid, what can your system tell me about this Omega-3 fatty acid and I didn't even know how to spell Omega-3 fatty acids that's the disconnect between the technologist and the pharmacologist, they have terms of their own right since then we've come a long way I think I understand his terminologies now and he understands that I throw words like knowledge graphs and page rank and then all kinds of weird stuff that he's probably never heard in his life before right, so it's been on my mind off to different domains and terminologies in trying to accept each other's expertise in trying to work together on a collaborative project. I think the core of what Ryan's work and collaboration has led me to understanding is what happens with the drug discovery process, right so when we think about the discovery itself, we're looking at companies that are trying to accelerate the process to market, right an average drug is taking 12 years to get to market the process that Chris just mentioned, Right and so companies are trying to adopt what's called the in silico simulation techniques and in silico modeling techniques into what was predominantly an in vitro, in silico, in vivo environment, right. And so the in silico techniques could include things like molecular docking, could include Artificial Intelligence, could include other data-driven discovery methods and so forth, and the essential component of all the things that you know the discovery workflows have is the ability to augment human experts to do the best by assisting them with what computers do really really well. So, in terms of what we've done as examples is Ryan walks in and he's asking me a bunch of questions and few that come to mind immediately, the first few are, hey, you are an Artificial Intelligence expert can you sift through a database of molecules the 15,000 compounds that he described to prioritize a few for next lab experiments? So that's question number one. And he's come back into my office and asked me about hey, there's 30 million publications in PubMag and I don't have the time to read everything can you create an Artificial Intelligence system that once I've picked these few molecules will tell me everything about the molecule or everything about the virus, the unknown virus that shows up, right. Just trying to understand what are some ways in which he can augment his expertise, right. And then the third question, I think he described better than I'm going to was how can technology connect these dots. And typically it's not that the answer to a drug discovery problem sits in one database, right he probably has to think about uniproduct protein he has to think about phytochemical, chemical or informatics properties, data and so forth. Then he talked about the phytochemical interaction that's probably in another database. So when he is trying to answer other question and specifically in the context of an unknown virus that showed up in late last year, the question was, hey, do we know what happened in this particular virus compared to all the previous viruses? Do we know of any substructure that was studied or a different disease that's part of this unknown virus and can I use that information to go mine these databases to find out if these interactions can actually be used as a repurpose saying, hook, say this drug does not interact with this subsequence of a known virus that also seems to be part of this new virus, right? So to be able to connect that dot I think the abstraction that we are learning from working with pharma companies is that this drug discovery process is complex, it's iterative, and it's a sequence of needle in the haystack search problems, right and so one day, Ryan would be like, hey, I need to match genome, I need to match protein sequences between two different viruses. Another day it would be like, you know, I need to sift through a database of potential compounds, identified side effects and whatnot other day it could be, hey, I need to design a new molecule that never existed in the world before I'll figure out how to synthesize it later on, but I need a completely new molecule because of patentability reasons, right so it goes through the entire spectrum. And I think where HP has differentiated multiple times even the recent weeks is that the technology infusion into drug discovery, leads to several aha! Moments. And, aha moments typically happened in the other few seconds, and not the hours, days, months that Ryan has to laboriously work through. And what we've learned is pharma researchers love their aha moments and it leads to a sound valid, well founded hypothesis. Isn't that true Ryan? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Yeah, at some point I would like to have a look at your, peak the list of your aha moments, yeah perhaps there's something quite interesting in there for other industries too, but we'll do it at another time. Chris, you know, with your regular work with pharmaceutical companies especially the big pharmas, right, do you see botanicals, coming, being talked about more and more there? >> Yeah, we do, right. Looking at kind of biosimilars and drugs that are already really in existence is kind of an important point and Dr. Yates and Rangan, with your work with databases this is something important to bring up and much of the drug discovery in today's world, isn't from going out and finding a brand new molecule per se. It's really looking at all the different databases, right all the different compounds that already exist and sifting through those, right of course data is mind, and it is gold essentially, right so a lot of companies don't want to share their data. A lot of those botanicals data sets are actually open to the public to use in many cases and people are wanting to have more collaborative efforts around those databases so that's really interesting to kind of see that being picked up more and more. >> Mm, well and Ryan that's where NCNPR hosts much of those datasets, yeah right and it's interesting to me, right you know, you were describing the traditional way of drug discovery where you have a target and a compound, right that can affect that target, very very specific. But from a botanical point of view, you really say for example, I have an extract from a plant that has combination of chemicals and somehow you know, it affects this disease but then you have to reverse engineer what those chemicals are and what the active ones are. Is that very much the issue, the work that has to be put in for botanicals in this area? >> Yes Doctor Goh, you hit it exactly. >> Now I can understand why a highly iterative intensive and data intensive, and perhaps that's why Rangan, you're highly valuable here, right. So tell us about the challenge, right the many to many intersection to try and find what the targets are, right given these botanicals that seem to affect the disease here what methods do you use, right in AI, to help with this? >> Fantastic question, I'm going to go a little bit deeper and speak like Ryan in terminology, but here we go. So with going back to about starting of our conversation right, so let's say we have a database of molecules on one side, and then we've got the database of potential targets in a particular, could be a virus, could be bacteria, could be whatever, a disease target that you've identified, right >> Oh this process so, for example, on a virus, you can have a number of targets on the virus itself some have the spike protein, some have the other proteins on the surface so there are about three different targets and others on a virus itself, yeah so a lot of people focus on the spike protein, right but there are other targets too on that virus, correct? >> That is exactly right. So for example, so the work that we did with Ryan we realized that, you know, COVID-19 protein sequence has an overlap, a significant overlap with previous SARS-CoV-1 virus, not only that, but it overlap with MERS, that's overlapped with some bad coronavirus that was studied before and so forth, right so knowing that and it's actually broken down into multiple and Ryan I'm going to steal your words, non-structural proteins, envelope proteins, S proteins, there's a whole substructure that you can associate an amino acid sequence with, right so on the one hand, you have different targets and again, since we did the work it's 160 different targets even on the COVID-19 mark, right and so you find a match, that we say around 36, 37 million molecules that are potentially synthesizable and try to figure it out which one of those or which few of those is actually going to be mapping to which one of these targets and actually have a mechanism of action that Ryan's looking for, that'll inhibit the symptoms on a human body, right so that's the challenge there. And so I think the techniques that we can unrule go back to how much do we know about the target and how much do we know about the molecule, alright. And if you start off a problem with I don't know anything about the molecule and I don't know anything about the target, you go with the traditional approaches of docking and molecular dynamics simulations and whatnot, right. But then, you've done so much docking before on the same database for different targets, you'll learn some new things about the ligands, the molecules that Ryan's talking about that can predict potential targets. So can you use that information of previous protein interactions or previous binding to known existing targets with some of the structures and so forth to build a model that will capture that essence of what we have learnt from the docking before? And so that's the second level of how do we infuse Artificial Intelligence. The third level, is to say okay, I can do this for a database of molecules, but then what if the protein-protein interactions are all over the literature study for millions of other viruses? How do I connect the dots across different mechanisms of actions too? Right and so this is where the knowledge graph component that Ryan was talking about comes in. So we've put together a database of about 150 billion medical facts from literature that Ryan is able to connect the dots and say okay, I'm starting with this molecule, what interactions do I know about the molecule? Is there a pretty intruding interaction that affects the mechanism of pathway for the symptoms that a disease is causing? And then he can go and figure out which protein and protein in the virus could potentially be working with this drug so that inhibiting certain activities would stop that progression of the disease from happening, right so like I said, your method of options, the options you've got is going to be, how much do you know about the target? How much do you know the drug database that you have and how much information can you leverage from previous research as you go down this pipeline, right so in that sense, I think we mix and match different methods and we've actually found that, you know mixing and matching different methods produces better synergies for people like Ryan. So. >> Well, the synergies I think is really important concept, Rangan, in additivities, synergistic, however you want to catch that. Right. But it goes back to your initial question Dr. Goh, which is this idea of polypharmacology and historically what we've done with traditional medicines there's more than one active, more than one network that's impacted, okay. You remember how I sort of put you on both ends of the spectrum which is the traditional sort of approach where we really don't know much about target ligand interaction to the completely interpretal side of it, right where now we are all, we're focused on is, in a single molecule interacting with a target. And so where I'm going with this is interesting enough, pharma has sort of migrate, started to migrate back toward the middle and what I mean by that, right, is we had these in a concept of polypharmacology, we had this idea, a regulatory pathway of so-called, fixed drug combinations. Okay, so now you start to see over the last 20 years pharmaceutical companies taking known, approved drugs and putting them in different combinations to impact different diseases. Okay. And so I think there's a really unique opportunity here for Artificial Intelligence or as Rangan has taught me, Augmented Intelligence, right to give you insight into how to combine those approved drugs to come up with unique indications. So is that patentability right, getting back to right how is it that it becomes commercially viable for entities like pharmaceutical companies but I think at the end of the day what's most interesting to me is sort of that, almost movement back toward that complex mixture of fixed drug combination as opposed to single drug entity, single target approach. I think that opens up some really neat avenues for us. As far as the expansion, the applicability of Artificial Intelligence is I'd like to talk to, briefly about one other aspect, right so what Rang and I have talked about is how do we take this concept of an active phytochemical and work backwards. In other words, let's say you identify a phytochemical from an in silico screening process, right, which was done for COVID-19 one of the first publications out of a group, Dr. Jeremy Smith's group at Oak Ridge National Lab, right, identified a natural product as one of the interesting actives, right and so it raises the question to our botanical guy, says, okay, where in nature do we find that phytochemical? What plants do I go after to try and source botanical drugs to achieve that particular end point right? And so, what Rangan's system allows us to do is to say, okay, let's take this phytochemical in this case, a phytochemical flavanone called eriodictyol and say, where else in nature is this found, right that's a trivial question for an Artificial Intelligence system. But for a guy like me left to my own devices without AI, I spend weeks combing the literature. >> Wow. So, this is brilliant I've learned something here today, right, If you find a chemical that actually, you know, affects and addresses a disease, right you can actually try and go the reverse way to figure out what botanicals can give you those chemicals as opposed to trying to synthesize them. >> Well, there's that and there's the other, I'm going to steal Rangan's thunder here, right he always teach me, Ryan, don't forget everything we talk about has properties, plants have properties, chemicals have properties, et cetera it's really understanding those properties and using those properties to make those connections, those edges, those sort of interfaces, right. And so, yes, we can take something like an eriodictyol right, that example I gave before and say, okay, now, based upon the properties of eriodictyol, tell me other phytochemicals, other flavonoid in this case, such as that phytochemical class of eriodictyols part right, now tell me how, what other phytochemicals match that profile, have the same properties. It might be more economically viable, right in other words, this particular phytochemical is found in a unique Himalayan plant that I've never been able to source, but can we find something similar or same thing growing in, you know a bush found all throughout the Southeast for example, like. >> Wow. So, Chris, on the pharmaceutical companies, right are they looking at this approach of getting, building drugs yeah, developing drugs? >> Yeah, absolutely Dr. Goh, really what Dr. Yates is talking about, right it doesn't help us if we find a plant and that plant lives on one mountain only on the North side in the Himalayas, we're never going to be able to create enough of a drug to manufacture and to provide to the masses, right assuming that the disease is widespread or affects a large enough portion of the population, right so understanding, you know, not only where is that botanical or that compound but understanding the chemical nature of the chemical interaction and the physics of it as well where which aspect affects the binding site, which aspect of the compound actually does the work, if you will and then being able to make that at scale, right. If you go to these pharmaceutical companies today, many of them look like breweries to be honest with you, it's large scale, it's large back everybody's clean room and it's, they're making the microbes do the work for them or they have these, you know, unique processes, right. So. >> So they're not brewing beer okay, but drugs instead. (Christopher laughs) >> Not quite, although there are pharmaceutical companies out there that have had a foray into the brewery business and vice versa, so. >> We should, we should visit one of those, yeah (chuckles) Right, so what's next, right? So you've described to us the process and how you develop your relationship with Dr. Yates Ryan over the years right, five years, was it? And culminating in today's, the many to many fast screening methods, yeah what would you think would be the next exciting things you would do other than letting me peek at your aha moments, right what would you say are the next exciting steps you're hoping to take? >> Thinking long term, again this is where Ryan and I are working on this long-term project about, we don't know enough about botanicals as much as we know about the synthetic molecules, right and so this is a story that's inspired from Simon Sinek's "Infinite Game" book, trying to figure it out if human population has to survive for a long time which we've done so far with natural products we are going to need natural products, right. So what can we do to help organizations like NCNPR to stage genomes of natural products to stage and understand the evolution as we go to understand the evolution to map the drugs and so forth. So the vision is huge, right so it's not something that we want to do on a one off project and go away but in the process, just like you are learning today, Dr. Goh I'm going to be learning quite a bit, having fun with life. So, Ryan what do you think? >> Ryan, we're learning from you. >> So my paternal grandfather lived to be 104 years of age. I've got a few years to get there, but back to "The Infinite Game" concept that Rang had mentioned he and I discussed that quite frequently, I'd like to throw out a vision for you that's well beyond that sort of time horizon that we have as humans, right and that's this right, is our current strategy and it's understandable is really treatment centric. In other words, we have a disease we develop a treatment for that disease. But we all recognize, whether you're a healthcare practitioner, whether you're a scientist, whether you're a business person, right or whatever occupation you realize that prevention, right the old ounce, prevention worth a pound of cure, right is how can we use something like Artificial Intelligence to develop preventive sorts of strategies that we are able to predict with time, right that's why we don't have preventive treatment approach right, we can't do a traditional clinical trial and say, did we prevent type two diabetes in an 18 year old? Well, we can't do that on a timescale that is reasonable, okay. And then the other part of that is why focus on botanicals? Is because, for the most part and there are exceptions I want to be very clear, I don't want to paint the picture that botanicals are all safe, you should just take botanicals dietary supplements and you'll be safe, right there are exceptions, but for the most part botanicals, natural products are in fact safe and have undergone testing, human testing for thousands of years, right. So how do we connect those dots? A preventive strategy with existing extent botanicals to really develop a healthcare system that becomes preventive centric as opposed to treatment centric. If I could wave a magic wand, that's the vision that I would figure out how we could achieve, right and I do think with guys like Rangan and Chris and folks like yourself, Eng Lim, that that's possible. Maybe it's in my lifetime I got 50 years to go to get to my grandfather's age, but you never know, right? >> You bring really, up two really good points there Ryan, it's really a systems approach, right understanding that things aren't just linear, right? And as you go through it, there's no impact to anything else, right taking that systems approach to understand every aspect of how things are being impacted. And then number two was really kind of the downstream, really we've been discussing the drug discovery process a lot and kind of the kind of preclinical in vitro studies and in vivo models, but once you get to the clinical trial there are many drugs that just fail, just fail miserably and the botanicals, right known to be safe, right, in many instances you can have a much higher success rate and that would be really interesting to see, you know, more of at least growing in the market. >> Well, these are very visionary statements from each of you, especially Dr. Yates, right, prevention better than cure, right, being proactive better than being reactive. Reactive is important, but we also need to focus on being proactive. Yes. Well, thank you very much, right this has been a brilliant panel with brilliant panelists, Dr. Ryan Yates, Dr. Rangan Sukumar and Chris Davidson. Thank you very much for joining us on this panel and highly illuminating conversation. Yeah. All for the future of drug discovery, that includes botanicals. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Tom Yates. He is the Deputy CIO of Howard County. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Sure. It's great to be here. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about your role. >> I'm the Deputy CIO for Howard County, and anything that you receive in terms of services, from a county government from trash pick up, to emergency responder services, police, fire, emergency notification, rec and parks, all of those departments are our clients inside our IT. >> Okay so you've just, that's absolutely, you just painted this version of being a citizen, and all of the things that you go to, all the services that you receive, so now tell me the idea that you had in the CIO department to change that. >> Well it started with pain, so when I started about three years ago, our IT department really didn't know what we didn't know, in terms of what was on our network. I was the new guy, and I started running the change management meeting, which is an internal IT meeting, and I approved a change that ended up causing a four hour outage. That's when we really started looking for a platform that would give us visibility into our network. It really started out internal IT, focus on uptime. I got a demo of Discovery from a vendor in the area, and I was hooked at that point because that's exactly what I was looking for to run these change meetings. I want to know what's connected to what. I want to be able to map business services to our particular configuration items. That was really important to me but then once you start getting into the platform, it's very sticky, and it's very work flow oriented and you see all of these processes across your organization that are siloed, that are paper based, and so we just saw the platform as a great place to aggregate that type of work flow and business process automation and it sort of evolved from there and what we have recently thought about is a way to connect our citizens to a portal using the CSM platform that would allow them to have one place, one sign on where they could go in and have access to the full range of services that our county government provides. >> How will that work? I mean, can you describe what it's like to be a citizen in Howard County? >> Sure Howard County, for those of you who don't know, is located right between Washington DC and Baltimore. We're a fairly affluent county. The citizenry is very connected and involved and they have high expectations of government. We provide services like trash, water bills, you name it. People will come on to our website and they'll want to pay their water bill, or they want to check the status of a permit, or a license request that they have, or they'll want to get information on their property tax bills. Just normal stuff. You have to go to different system and have a different login account for each one of those services. So the feedback that we're getting, and for me as well as a Howard County citizen, is that's not really the best way to present our county. What if there were a way to have a single sign on and provide access with transparency and accountability, where you could go in and see the status of your permit request in real time without having to call anyone, because the younger you are the less desire you have to talk on the telephone. We're looking at different ways to interact with our citizens and to have government be there when they are ready to interact with government, not when government is ready to be interacted with. >> And government has a tough reputation. I mean, you think about any government, any time you have to interact with the government it's tedious, it's time consuming, it's inefficient. What is your, sort of, mission in all of this? What's your over arching objective? >> I would like to treat our citizens like they're human beings. >> That's a worthy goal. >> I have a memory of what it's like to go to the DMV and wait in line and not be treated as customer service oriented as you feel like you should be treated. One of the nice things that we have in our county is our government employees really care and we're looking to build some of these automations so that they don't get distracted by the busy work, and they can really focus on what matters and what matters is taking care of our clients, the citizens of the county. >> Are you hoping that it will drive civic engagement, too? >> Absolutely, so one of the things that we're doing is we're piloting a CSM implementation for one of our council districts. Howard County's broken into five council districts and the council is like the legislative branch. The county executive is like the governor. They all receive questions, issues, complaints from the citizens that are in their particular districts and we're looking at having this platform as a way for the citizens to interact with their legislators as well as report trees down, pot holes, and things like that. Where then the council person interacts back with the administration, so it can get really interesting. Especially if you have state legislators that are involved that are outside of our county. So now we have external resources and finding out, just discovering the work flows of what the process is to most efficiently take care of some of these issues, is the information that we're looking to extract put in a business process, and then automate that work flow. >> Now, how are you going to measure the return on investment? Is it really just shortening the time to value or how else are you thinking about how you're going to measure it's value? >> With government measuring, value is a lot different than it is in the private industry. What I look for inside IT is uptime. If there is a tool that we can have that will prevent us from shooting ourselves in the foot in IT, and accidentally causing an outage, that has value. That's actual value in terms of people's hours of lost productivity that we can not have. In terms of value to the citizens, I think it would be you hear the feedback from people that they're able to interact with the government more smoothly and efficiently and have that level of transparency and accountability that people, during election cycles, talk about. Then after the election, we need to deliver. >> How are you at this this conference? I mean, you hear so much about customers being here, this is a really customer centric event. Are you talking to other customers, learning from them? Are best practices emerging? Are you getting ideas that you're going to take back with you to Howard County? >> Absolutely, and I have a lot of friends in local government and state government that are here, but I get more value really talking from the commercial clients because we are going to be, just by definition of government, a little bit farther back on the adoption curve. For a government I think we're on the cutting edge, but there are things that are being done by private companies. I saw what Comcast is doing and Comcast is another one of the companies that has a reputation. (host laughing) I'll leave it at that. >> Don't get me started. >> But they're taking active measures to improve their customer response, and as a Comcast customer I totally appreciate that because I would have issues sometimes, finding the time to block off, say an hour, to be on a call with Comcast during business hours, right? So, the things that they're doing are really cool. Chatbot, machine learning, AI to help people self-discover what the answers to common problems are. Building knowledge into their platform. I think seeing that and seeing how I, as a customer, interact with that and appreciate that, we just take that and flip it over to the government side. >> What's next for you? >> Well, I would really like to get that 311 system. It's going to be a journey because we do have a lot of systems with a lot of different logins. I think the step that we would like to take first is create that portal where the citizen can register, and then after that we just take the applications that they're using, and we bring them in behind the covers. So, we're basically skinning those applications with one login. It might be a little clunky at the beginning until we get them more integrated. Over time, the idea is we just drive that traffic to that one location, so regardless of what new service we offer or what you're looking for, you'll know that there's one place that you can go to get it and you get it when you want it, not when we want to give it to you. >> Finally, we've heard so much about this transforming role of the of the CIO, and it's a much broader role today than it was even five or ten years ago. What's your personal experience with that? >> I have been with Howard Country government for three years and during those three years, I've seen a big change in the way IT is viewed inside government because we are now business partners with our client departments, as opposed to that shop that you call when something's broken, or I need a computer. Technology is everywhere now and I think it's so permeated, every facet of our organization, that people want to have those conversations now. They want to say, what can we do with technology that could help us. Especially in the age of budget freezes and hiring freezes. Everybody needs to do more with less and the only way to do that consistently is with technology. >> Tom, that's a great final note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. My pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. This has been theCUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. (energetic music playing)

>> 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)