from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this special presentation we're gonna introduce you to a new kind of company first you might recall we've been reporting extensively on multi cloud and the need to create consistent experiences across cloud at high performance now a key to that outcome is the ability to leave data in place where it belongs not moving it around and bringing a cloud like experience to that data we've talked about kubernetes as a multi cloud enabler but it's an insufficient condition for success latency matters in fact it's critical and the ability to access data at high speeds wherever that data lives well we believe be a fundamental tenet of multi cloud now today I want to introduce you to a company called vicinity V CIN ity the simplest way to think of this company is they turn wide area networks into a global land and with me is Craig Hobart to talk about this he's the VP at vicinity Craig good to see you again thanks a lot thanks Howie middays good to be back so when I first heard about this company I said wow no it can't that breaking the law of physics so first of all tell me a little bit background about the company sure yeah absolutely so about two decades ago this company was formerly known as Bay Microsystems they were they were asked to come up with a solution specific for the United States military and there was a couple of people involved in that that tender fortunately for us Bay Microsystems prevailed and they've had their solution in place with the US military for well over a decade approach in two decades so that is the foundation that is the infrastructure of where we originated so did I get it right it kind of come through what you do can you add some color to that yeah yeah as much as I can right so based on who the the main consumer is so we do some very creative things where we we take the benefits of tcp/ip which is the retransmit the ability to ensure the data arrives there in one piece but we take away all the bad things with it things like dropping packets typically ones are lossy networks and and most people are accustomed to two fiber channel networks which of course which are lossless right and so what we've done is take the beauty of tcp/ip but remove the hindrances to it and that's how we get it to function at the same speeds as Al and overall one so but there's got to be more to it than that I mean it just sounds like magic right so you're able to leave data in place and access it at very low latency very high speeds so you know what's the secret sauce behind that is it is it you know architecture patents I mean yeah absolutely so we have over 30 unique patents that contribute to that we're not just doing those things that I just thought about before is a lot more we're actually shortly in the typical OSI stack the the moving through those layers and using our DMA so a lot of companies users today obviously infinite out uses in between the nodes Dell uses at HP is it's a very ubiquitous technology but typically it has a very short span it's designed for low latency as a 21-foot limitation there's certain things you can do to get around that now so what we did in our earlier iterations is extend that so you could go across the world but utilizing that inside a proprietary sort of l2 a tunneling protocol allows you to reinstate those calls that happened on the local side and bring them up on the other side of the world so presumably that sets up for Rocky it does yeah and rocky to you absolutely so we use that we use it converged Ethernet we can do some magical things where we can go in InfiniBand and potentially come out rocky at the other end there's a lot of really good things that we do obviously if it uh bans expensive converged Ethernet it's a lot more feasible and a lot easier to adapt when we can make sure I understand this so you think InfiniBand you're thinking you know in a data center you know proximate and shocking synchronous distances are you saying that you can extend that we can but extended not extending finna band but you're saying you can you translate it into Ethernet yeah yeah we we translate into we have some proprietary mechanisms obviously that that all the patents on but in essence that's exactly what we're doing yeah we take in the earlier years InfiniBand and extend that to wherever it needed to be over any distance and and now we do it with conversion and infinite in like speeds yeah yeah so obviously you've got that we can't get around physics oh I mean it for instance between our Maryland office and our San Jose office it's a 60 millisecond r/t team we can't get beyond that we can't achieve physics but what we can do is deliver us sometimes a 20x payload inside that same RTT so in essence you could argue that would be due to the speed of light by delivering a higher payload is what's the trade-off I mean there's got to be something here yeah so it's today it's not it's not ideal for every single situation if you were to do a transactional LTP a database at one side of the world to the other it would that would not be great for that something files yeah so so what we actually do I mean some some great examples we have is seismic data we have some companies that are doing seismic exploration and it used to take a lot of time to bring that data back to shore copied to a disk array and then you know copied to multiple disk arrays across the world so people can analyze it in that particularly use case we bring that data back we can even access it via satellite directly from the boats that are doing the the surveys and then we can have multiple people around the world looking at that sample live when we do a demonstration for our customers that shows that so that's one great example of time to market and getting ahead of your competition what's the file system underneath so we have a choice of different file system is a parallel file system we chose spectrum Connect it's a very ubiquitous file system it's well known it has there is no other file system that has the the hours of runtime that that has we off you skate the complexities from the customers we do all of the tuning so it's a custom solution and so they don't see it but we do have some of the hyper scales that want to use lustre and cluster and be GFS and things that we can accommodate those so you have a choice but the preferred is gpfs is a custom one we have you absolutely if somebody wants to use another one we have done that and can certainly have dialogues around it could talk about how this is different from competitors I think of like guys like doing Wayne acceleration sure sure yeah so what acceleration regardless of who you are today with it's predicated upon caching substantial caching and some of the problems with that are obviously once you turn on encryption that compression and those deduplication or data reduction technologies are hampered in that caching based on who our primary customer was we're handed encrypted data from them we encrypted as well so we have double layers of encrypted data and that does not affect our performance so massive underlying technological differences that allow you to adapt to the modern world with encrypted data so we've been talking about I said in the intro a lot about multi cloud can you tell us sooner where do you fit in but first of all how do you see that evolving sure and where do you guys fit in Joe so I actually read to assess very certain dividends I read your article before we had a dialogue last week and there was a good article talking about the complexities around multi cloud and I think you know you look at Google it's got some refactoring involved in it they're all great approaches we think the best way to deal with multi cloud today is to hold your data yourself and bring those services that you want to it and before we came along you couldn't do that so think now a movie studio we have a company in California that needs people working on video editing across the world and typically they would proliferate multiple copies out to storage in India and China and Australia and not only is that costly but it's incredibly time consuming and in one of those instances it opens up security holes and the movies were getting hacked and stolen and of course that's billions of dollars worth of damage to to any movie company so by having one set of security tenants in your in your physical place you can now bring anybody you want to consume that day to bring them all together bid GCP AWS as you for the compute and you maintain your data and that segues well into things like gdpr and things like that where the data isn't moving so you're not affected by those rules and regulations the data stays in one place it's we think it's a huge advantage so has that helped you get some business I mean the fact that you have to move data and you can keep it in you can give us an example yeah it absolutely doesn't mean if you think of companies like pharmaceutical companies that have a lot of data to process whether it's electron microscopy data nano tissue samples they need heavy iron to do that we're talking craze so we can facilitate the ability to rent out supercomputers and the security company of the farmers is happy to do that because it's not leaving the four walls present the data and run it live because we're getting land speeds right we're giving you land speed performance over the wine so it's it's possible we've actually done it for them to do that craze make money by renting the farmers are happy because they can't afford craze it's a great way to accelerate time to marketing in that case they're making drug specific for your genome specific for your body tissue so the efficacy of the drugs is greatly improved as well well as you have been we know the storage business primary storage right now is I've said it's a knife fight yeah and it's a cloud is eating away at it flash was injected and gave people a lot of head rooms and they're not buying spindles for performance anymore but but data protection and backup and and data management is really taking off do you guys fit in there is are there use cases for you you there when you think of companies like cookie City and rubric and and many others that are the cloud seems to be a tailwind for them is it a tailwind for you I think so and I think he just brought up a great point if you look at and again another one of your articles I'm giving you some thanks Rick you know saying I won't forget it is the article you wrote I thought was excellent about how data is changed it's not so much about the primary data now it's about the backup data and what rubric and cohesive tea especially have done is bring value to that data and they've elevated it up the stack for analytics and AI and made available to DevOps and that's brilliant but today that can find it too within the four walls of that company what vicinity can do for those companies has come along and make that data available anywhere in the world at anytime so if they've got different countries that they're trying to sell into that may have diff back up types or different data they can access this and model the data and see how it's relevant to their specific industry right as we say our zeros and ones are different than your zeros and ones so it's a massive expansion it take that richness that they've created and extrapolate that globally and that's what facility brings to the table you know within the days of big data we used to look at high performance computing as an example going more into commercial notes that's clearly happened but mainstream is still VMware is there a VMware play for you guys or opportunity great question great question in q1 of this year so so January end of January 2020 typically in the intro we talked about how we were born on a6 which is incredibly expensive and limited you get one go ahead and then we move to FPGAs we actually wrote a lot of libraries that took the FPGAs into a VMware instance and so what we're doing now with our customers is when we go in and present they say there's no way you can do this and we show them the demo when we actually leave they can log-in download to VMware instances put one in in these case one the west coast or with one of my customers we have now one on the east coast one in London download the VM and see the improvement that we can get over their dedicated lines or even the Internet by using the VM fact we did that in a test with AWS last week and got a 90 percent improvement just using the VM so when you are talking to customers what's the you know what's the the situation that you're looking for the the problem that comes up that you say bone that's vicinity maybe you could show not you do slash call in there so I think a lot of that is people looking to use multi cloud right that aren't sure which way they want to go how they want to do it and for other companies that can't move the data there's a lot of companies that either went to the cloud and came back or cannot go to the cloud because of the sensitivity of the data so and also things like the the seismic exploration right there is no cloud solution that makes that expedient enough to consume it as it's been developed and so anybody that needs movie editing large file transfer dr you know if you're moving a lot of files from one location to another we can't get involved in storage replication but if it's a file share we can do that and one of the great things we do is if you have cysts or NFS shares today we can consume those shares with the with the spectrum scale the gpfs under the cover and make that appear anywhere else in the world and we do that through our proprietary technology of course so now remote offices can collapse a lot of the infrastructure they have and consume the resources from the main data center because we can reach right back here at land space they just become an extension of the land no different than me plug in the laptop into an Ethernet you pay a penalty on first byte we do but it's almost transparent because of the way tcp/ip works very chatty yeah it is so we drop all that and that that's a great question an analogy we use in house is you turn on a garden house and it takes a few seconds for that garden hose to fill but with us that water stream is constant and it's constantly output in water with tcp/ip a bit stop start stop start stop start and if you have to start doing retransmit which is a regular occurrence of tcp/ip and that entire capacity of that garden hose will be dropped and then refilled and this is where our advantage is the ability to keep that full and keep serving data in that what you just described makes people really think twice about multi clouds essentially they want to put the right workload in the right place and kind of leave it there and essentially it's like the old mini computer days they're creating you know silos you're helping sort of bridge those we are that and that is the plot and so you know we have B to B we are B to C I mean if you sit and think about the possibilities I mean it could end up on every one of these right this software you know do we tackle every Wireless point this is this is some of the things that we can do you're an app or do we put vicinity on that to take the the regular tcp/ip and send the communication you know through through our proprietary Network around proprietary configuration so there's a lot of things that we can do we can we can affect everybody and that is that is the goal so divide by hardware from you or software or both that's another great question so if you are in a data center in the analogy I just gave before about being a a big data center you would use a piece of hardware that's got accelerants in it and then the remote office could use a smaller piece of hardware or just the VM with the movie company example I gave you earlier India and Australia is edit in live files on the west coast of the United States of America just using the VM so it depends what we come in as we look at your needs and we don't oversell you we try and sell you the correct solution and that typically is a combination of some hardware in the main data center and some software at the others so I've said you know multi-cloud in many ways creates more problems today than it solves you guys are really in there attacking that multi-cloud is a reality it's it's happening you know I said historically it's been a symptom of multi-vendor but now it's becoming increasingly a strategy and I think frankly I think companies like yours are critical in the ecosystem to really you know drive that transformation for organizations so congratulations thank you thank you we hope so and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of you in the future excellent well thanks for coming in Craig and we'll talk to you soon thank you for watching everybody this is Dave latte for the cube and we'll see you next time