(bright music) >> You know, there's a lot of negative press around the technology industry these days. The tech lash is somewhat understandable, people are struggling and yet the tech industry is booming, creating incredible wealth for a relatively select group of people. I get it. But the reality is, that the technology industry has guided us through the pandemic, allowing us to work remotely, securing our employees, keeping goods and services flowing, and using data and analytics to track COVID and accelerate the development of vaccines. And many in the tech industry are passionate about giving back and applying their talents to solve real world problems. I'll give you an example. After accidents, cancer is the number one cause of death among young people. In the middle of the 20th century, the survival rate for kids with cancer was 0.0%. Today, it's above 85%. Cancer in kids is much different than in adults. The types of cancer, the diagnoses, the treatments, they vary. Different types of research are required to attack the problem. And that takes money. And one of the people here in Boston and beyond that's using his talents, his creativity, his network, and yeah, his wealth, to attack this problem, is my friend, Chris Lynch, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. Chris, awesome to see ya. Welcome back to theCUBE my friend. >> Thanks, Dave. It's great to be here. >> So, listen, this personal story of yours, how'd you get into, where's the passion come from for kids with cancer? >> Dave, it's actually related to one of my startup endeavors. When you're starting, bootstrapping your company, you're typically staying at people's homes to save money. >> Sleeping on couches. Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. And for the years of these startups, I've developed relationships with families all over the world, 'cause I've literally lived with them for periods of time until the companies got to points where we didn't have to do that. And there was a family in Seattle that I used to stay with, and they had a son that was a similar age to one of mine and he ultimately passed of cancer. And I stayed with the family, and I stayed with them a few times while they were going through this, and I was touched, I was inspired by their courage, how positive they were. I was thinking in my own circumstance, how could I, I would just hate the world. And in these families, I stay there, they call me Uncle Chris. And I was having dinner at the family home and I was looking at the boy, and I excused myself, went to the bathroom and I started sobbing, and he knocks on the door, comes in and says, "Uncle Chris, it's okay. My dad tells me you can do anything. Just do whatever you can so that other kids don't have what I have." You know and... >> Wow. Wow. And I can see the emotion that you're feeling right now, bringing us back to that moment. >> Well. Yeah. >> It's unbelievable. All right, so you got Tech Tackles Cancer. Is this your latest venture? I think the last one was 2018. It's coming back, took a break 'cause of COVID, and this is going to go down on the 21st at The Sinclair in Harvard Square. Bring a bunch of people in. We got a number of people who have signed up to, actually you're one of them, of course, but to sing karaoke, raise a bunch of dough, and then there's like a little contest, right? So... (he chuckles) Alex, bring up that slide. I got to show the audience who we got here. And this is, Chris, this is your competition. So, here you go. We got, Steve Duplessie, right? That's a great picture, Steve. Thanks for doing this, right. Nathan Hall, who's at Pure Storage. Steiny, Ken Steinhardt, from INFINIDAT. And you got George Hope at HPE. And Joe Lemay, who's an inventor, he's the CEO of Rocketbook. Any of these guys worry you? >> I'm going to sleep easy tonight. (Dave laughs) >> So, how did you get into rock and roll? You wrote a blog one time. You quoted Nietzsche saying that life without music would be a mistake. Rock and roll. Rock on. How'd you get into rock and what's your passion there? >> Well, I always loved rock and roll but I had someone that was staying with us who was a student at BU, and he went to his semester abroad, he went to the UK. And he came back with all this punk rock music, the Sex Pistols and all this stuff. And I heard it and it just triggered something in me. And then I didn't want to do anything but play music and try to be a musician, and my grades and everything else suffered as a result. But music's always inspired me, the creativity, the boldness. A lot of things that I think I apply to my startup life. >> How could people help? Let's say they want to get involved. I mean, obviously, they can attend the event, they donate. What should people do? They could sing? >> Yeah. So they can certainly sponsor the event. There are a number of sponsorship opportunities. They can participate. They can volunteer for the event. It is an all-volunteer organization. Every dollar that we raise goes to the charities that we've listed. And we handle everything else through a lot of arm twisting and whatnot. >> Great. So it's June 24th, sorry, June 21st, at The Sinclair, which is right in Harvard Square. So it's live band karaoke, right? >> Correct. >> I've seen some of the, we're going to share a little clip there. And so, it's a call to action to all you rock and roll technology gods out there. You know, we showed you the five folks plus Chris who were doing it, and so we're dying to see you up there again, you must be really excited about it. >> I am, I am. I'm going to be much better than last time. >> Okay. Well, so just on that note we'll close with a little taste of what's in store for June 21st. We'll see you there. ♪ Now my loneliness ♪ ♪ Is killing me now ♪ ♪ You know I still believe ♪ ♪ Midnight, midnight to six ♪ ♪ Midnight, midnight to six ♪ ♪ Midnight, midnight to six ♪ ♪ Believe in things that you don't understand ♪ ♪ then you're su... ♪ (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> On June 21st in Cambridge mass at the Sinclair in Harvard Square, Tech Tackles Cancer is back after a COVID hiatus with live band karaoke and some local tech celebrities raising money for a great cause. The Cube is a media sponsor of the event and Josh Epstein, local marketing exec and one of the events organizers is here to tell us more. Josh, good to see you, welcome. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> So tell us about this event. What's going on? What are the logistics? How's that all work? >> Yeah, we're super excited. So as you said, June 21st at the Sinclair in Harvard Square, Sinclair, if you haven't been there is just the great old school rock club. So we'll be there from 6:00 to 10:00. We will have live band karaoke. So the main event and kind of the primary fundraising approach here is that we have some celebrity technology rock gods these featured performers like Chris Lynch who was the founder of Tech Tackles Cancer, who are are raising money from basically now, up until June 21st. Then at the event, their fundraising will culminate with them singing a live song backed by a live band. And the awards will be given out to the most money raised, the best performance and the best stage presence. So it will be a lot of fun. >> So the fundraising format is I sign up to sing do the karaoke with a live band which is a little bit different. And then I raise as much dough as possible. So obviously that's competitive. >> It's competitive, I think that we ask for a minimum of $10,000 targeted for each of the fundraisers but knowing these guys, knowing guys like Chris Lynch, they don't like to lose. So the bet here is that people are going to go out, they're going to hit their network and they are going to look to kind of raise the most money. So we anticipate this to be a great event with a lot of money raised and a lot of fun. >> So we have a graphic from Alex. If you could bring that up of the people who have signed up for this already. We got Steve Duplessie, founder of of ESG, senior analyst. They sold their company to Tech Target, which is awesome. Congratulations to those guys and thank you for stepping up. George Hope, who heads partner sales for HPE, Joe Lemay of Rocketbook Nathan Hall from Pure Storage, system engineering guy and of course, Steiny, Ken Steinhardt from Infinidat. He was at EMC, he's the field CTO now. He's going to be up there singing. So of course, Chris. >> Absolutely, these are just the early entrance here. So we just started really working our networks. And obviously, I'm a Boston tech guy kind of working the storage networks, the networking networks and kind of the other folks that are around. So as we come out of stealth here in April and start really recruiting, we anticipate having probably 10 to 15 of these featured performers, really fundraising performers that we'll sing. And then we're also obviously soliciting broader donations from anyone who wants to come to the event or just give to the cause and the corporate sponsorships as well. >> All right, so you got corporate sponsorships. You can sing, you can donate you can be there just to support it. That's fantastic and the awards, how's that work? >> Yeah, so we're excited. So first off, most money raised wins an award. So we'll have a leaderboard on the website, we'll be able to kind of track who's raised what, at the event, we're going to have some celebrity judges that will be actually voting for their favorites and then have a crowdsource component as well. So we'll introduce what that mechanism is. But as people, either at the events or a watching in streamed live on LinkedIn live, we'll actually vote for their favorite performance as well as their their pick for best stage presence which we know in rock and roll is half the battle. >> Now this cause has raised a bunch of, I think last time, you guys did this, it was probably a quarter million or close to it and you support multiple causes. What causes are you supporting? >> Sure, yeah, actually I think since they founded the event several years ago they raised over $2 million. This year for this format where we're looking, we can really up our game here but this year we're supporting two really great causes that are both focused on pediatric cancer. The first is St. Batrick's that is really committed to raising funds for research to really help stamp out pediatric cancer really. The approach to researching cures and treatments to pediatric cancer is very different from regular adult cancer. So St. Batrick's does a great job of picking those research projects that really target in on those pediatric cancer causes. And then the second is one mission. And one mission really outlooks to help make pediatric cancer patients that are spending time in the hospital, making their time less stressful, less painful, less sad, less boring. And so they do a lot of fundraising and contributions targeting children's hospitals, really around the country for those pediatric cancer floors. >> Josh, amazing cause. Thanks so much for coming onto the Cube and explaining all that. >> Great, thanks David. >> All right, June 21st, go to ttcfund.org, Tech Tackles Cancer fund, ttcffund.org for more information and you can donate. We'll see you there. (soft music)

[Music] you know there's a lot of negative press around the technology industry these days the tech lash that's somewhat understandable people are struggling and yet the tech industry is booming creating incredible wealth for a relatively select group of people i get it but the reality is that the technology industry has guided us through the pandemic allowing us to work remotely securing our employees keeping goods and services flowing and using data and analytics to track covet and accelerate the development of vaccines and many in the tech industry are passionate about giving back and applying their talents to solve real world problems i'll give an example after accidents cancer is the number one cause of death among young people in the middle of the 20th century the survival rate for kids with cancer was 0.0 percent today it's above 85 percent cancer in kids is a much different than in adults the types of cancer the diagnoses the treatments they vary different types of research are required to attack the problem and that takes money and one of the people here in boston and beyond that's using his talents his creativity his network and yeah his wealth to attack this problem is my friend chris lynch entrepreneur investor and philanthropist chris awesome to see you welcome back to thecube my friend thanks dave it's great to be here so listen this personal story of yours how did you get into where's the passion come from for kids with cancer dave it's actually related to one of my startup endeavors when you're starting bootstrapping company you're typically staying at people's homes and you know to save money sleeping on couches yeah yeah pretty much and um you know through the years of these startups i've developed relationships with families all over the world you know because i've literally lived with them you know for periods of time until the companies get to points where we didn't have to do that and um there was a family in seattle that i used to stay with and they had a son that was a similar age to one of mine and he ultimately passed of cancer and i stayed with the family and i stayed with them a few times while they were going through this and i was touched i was inspired by their courage how positive they were i was thinking in my own circumstance how could i i would just hate the world and you know in the you know in these families i stay there you know they call me uncle chris and um i was having dinner at the you know at the family home and i was looking at the boy and uh i excused myself went to the to the bathroom and i started sobbing and um he knocks on the door comes comes in and says uncle chris it's okay my dad tells me you can do anything just do whatever you can so that other kids don't have what i have you know in it wow wow and i can see the emotion that you're feeling right now bringing bringing us back to that moment it's it's unbelievable and and the thing is when you started st baldrick's it wasn't it was obviously about the kids but it was also about the family as well right because they're going through right i mean you know we all know as parents how hard it is to be a parent can you imagine having a parent that's you know got a disease like that so it's not just about you know the the cancer and the research it's about the supporting the families as well right that's right and that's why one mission is you know one one of our um you know big beneficiaries you know of of the work we do um because it's obviously we want to find cures um but people you know families are affected every day and we need to provide them the kind of support um you know that that they any child should have and any family should have in this circumstance all right so you got tech tackles cancer this is your latest venture i think the last one was uh 2018. it's coming back took a break because of covid obviously uh but so it's live band karaoke it's the tech industry your network and beyond really kind of giving back how does that all work well basically you know we we once i learned that pediatric cancer was different and that there was it was underfunded we wanted to raise awareness for that we wanted to raise funds to take a different approach applying sort of venture principles how i invest in companies and find the best research in the world which is not in any four walls of any sort of research center so we get the best research from around the world and that we decided to put the money invest the money as well as the support services around those that you know are affected today yeah okay so we've got actually so what's going to happen and this is going to go down on the the 21st at the sinclair and harvard square bring a bunch of people in we've got a number of people who have signed up to actually you're one of them of course but to to sing karaoke raise a bunch of dough and then there's a little contest right no alex bring up that slide i gotta i gotta show the audience who we got here this is chris this is your competition uh so here you go you got we got steve duplessi right he has great picture steve thanks for doing this right nathan hall who's at pure storage steiny ken steinhardt from infinidat and you got george hope at hpe and joe lemay who's uh he's inventor he's a ceo a rocket book any of these guys where are you i'm going to sleep easy tonight [Laughter] how did you get into rock and roll you wrote a blog one time you you quoted nietzsche is saying that life without music would be a mistake you know rock and roll rock on how did you get into rock and roll well i always loved rock and roll but i had that was staying with us he was a student at bu and he he went to his semester abroad he went to the uk and he came back with all this punk rock music the sex pistols and all the stuff and um i heard it and it just triggered something in me and that i didn't want to do anything but play music and you know try to be a musician and um you know my grades and everything else suffered as a result but music's always inspired me the creativity the boldness a lot of things that i think i apply to my startup life how can people help let's say they want to get involved i mean obviously they can attend the event they donate what what should people do they could sing yeah so they could they could certainly sponsor the event there are a number of sponsorship opportunities um they can participate they can volunteer for the event it is an all volunteer organization every dollar that we raise goes to the charities that we've listed um and we handle everything else through a lot of arm twisting and you know and whatnot great so it's june 24th uh sorry june 21st at the sinclair which is right in harvard square so it's live band karaoke right i've seen some of the we're gonna share a little a little a little clip there and so it's a call to action to all you you rock and roll technology gods out there you know we showed you the the five folks plus chris who were doing it um and so we're dying to to see you up there again you must be really excited about it i am i am i'm going to be much better than last time okay well so just on that note we'll close with a little taste of what's in store for june 21st we'll see you there [Music] midnight midnight midnight midnight six midnight midnight six things that you don't understand in yourself [Music] you

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