 Hello and welcome to the Cube and this Cube conversation focused on Infinidat's latest announcements about the Infinibox and the SSA platform. I'm Rob Streche, Managing Analyst with the Cube Research and today I'm very excited to be joined by long-term friend and real big friend of the Cube, probably a prolific amount of times you've been on over the years. I have Eric Herzog is on who's the CMO of Infinidat. Thanks for coming on. Rob, well, thank you very much. We love being on the Cube and you guys do a great job of informing the industry and informing the end users and the channel partners of what's going on. So you guys have an incredibly valuable service that you delivered everybody. Well, I appreciate that. I think let's jump into it because I really love what you guys announced just a month back here with the SSA platform, what you're doing with Infinibox, all of that. So what was announced? So we did sort of a three-part announcement. The first was our SSA Express software. So we have both an all-flash array that's very large and we have an all-hybrid array which has both flash in it, DRAM cache, and mostly hard drives of course. So we've done develop a software technology that allows you to assign certain workloads and applications to only come out of our flash layer. So all of our hybrids have flash in them, but they have mostly hard drives. So you could take three, four, five applications. This Oracle workload, this SAP, this Mongo, and you could tell it on a hybrid array, make sure those workloads either come out of our DRAM cache, which is our neural cache, which is what gives us our incredible speed, whether it be in the all-flash or in the hybrid. So it either comes out of the DRAM cache or it will only come out of the flash. So it behaves, although it's a hybrid array, those five, six workloads that are assigned into the SSA Express layer perform exactly like our high-end all-flash array, which is 35 mics of latency or better, 95% or better coming out of the DRAM cache, so it behaves like it's an all-flash array. Think of it as akin to having up to 320 terabyte all-flash array embedded inside of a hybrid. I mean, it makes sense that this would give you a really great price performance because I think when you start to look at it, not every application needs that kind of performance, but people like it to have that performance, so you can go and embed that in there and pin some applications that really do truly need that, and that would make sense, especially with the new applications that are being built, microservice-based applications that need that kind of low latency. Well, the advantage, a couple advantages, first of all, the software is free, so we don't charge for it. Secondly, it works with 95% of our installed base. Now, with some of the installed base, you might need to buy a flash upgrade kit because the older models didn't have as much flash as the newer hybrid models do, so you might have to buy some, but that's it, and obviously all the newer models last couple of years, you don't have to buy anything, and by the way, even on the older models, you may not have to, so think about this. I've got a three-year-old Infinibox, and I created a 320 terabyte all-flash array inside of it for free. Now, why would I care? Well, aside from the actual performance angle is, as many analysts have noted, with a lot of the other array technology, we don't slow down. There's one other vendor that doesn't slow down, but usually as you fill an all-flash array, you slow it down. So for the highest-performing workloads, you get a small all-flash array, and you put one or two, or one or two, or one or two, and the next time you see, when you look at your data center, you have small all-flash array proliferation. You've got them everywhere, and they're only running one or two workloads. So in this case, you get rid of that, which saves you on watts, slots, power, floor space, give you a greener IT configuration. And guess what? You're not managing six little arrays, you're managing one big array. And whether our autonomous automation, as you've seen from our public references, they talk about how they run themselves for three or four years, they never have to touch it. So you get that advantage versus having this all-flash array sprawl. Now, by the way, when you really need it, we have our all-flash array SSA2, which was the second angle of our launch of what we did in that platform as well. Yeah, and I think this is where, again, scale and being able to scale is really important to a lot of people. As they consolidate down, they want to be able to scale out as they can spend more. I mean, we've seen, again, with IT spending being what it is, people want to be able to reuse their investment. So A, the free software and getting an all-flash array for free with an OS upgrade is pretty impressive. I think that really is one of the things that can lead people down this path. But then you're talking about the scale aspect of it, too. What was that second part? So what we also did is, in our all-flash array platform, our Infinibox SSA2, which is our second generation, we have doubled the capacity. Now, we did the same thing last year on our hybrid array, the regular Infinibox. So this year, we doubled the capacity on our all-flash array, which means you're up to 6.6 petabytes of effective. So why do you care? First of all, because we don't slow down, you can load the thing up with 80 apps, 90 apps, 100 apps, because we don't slow down because we derive most of it out of our multi-panded neural cache, which runs out, of course, the DRAM. So you can fill that array to four petabytes or five petabytes. Benchmark it against when the array has literally 100 terabytes. And it's the same exact performance, 35 mics of latency or better. So that consolidation allows you to, A, get a greener data center. B, it allows you to dramatically cut capex and op-ex. It allows you to, essentially, free up that money to spend it on AI or other things. Remember, I've been doing storage for a long time. I'm almost 70 years old. And trust me, I have never met a CIO who used to be a storage admin. Maybe there are one or two. But I've never met one, and I've met with at least 1,000 CIOs. I've been doing this so long. So CIOs know they need storage, but quite honestly, they hate it. So if you can give them a path to dramatically improve the environmentals to cut capex and op-ex and basically take budget that they were going to spend on storage and move it to the hottest thing, which right now would be AI or cybersecurity, you're like a fricking hero, and we can do that now by doubling the capacity. We have, for example, a real customer in the Fortune 50. And they bought the All Flash a couple of years ago. And we had basically half the capacity. And they've got 35 of them. Well, if we had the bigger model, which we do today, guess what? They'd have half of that. So they'd have 18 because they got 35. Well, think of all the watt slots, power, floor space, and operational management. You are saving if you go from 35 arrays down to 18 or 40 to 20 or 50 to 25. And we did that just because of the bigger capacity. We're not even talking consolidation of other arrays. We have one customer. They consolidated 24 arrays from three different vendors onto four infinite boxes. So talk about how much easier that is to manage. And then quite honestly, think about the long-term ecological effect. So as you know, all compute devices are filled with toxins, all of us. And it is what it is, right? We all want to have our iPhone. We all want to have our mainframe. We all want to have our enterprise storage. We all want to have our networking. So all of that gets recycled. And it's expensive because of the toxins. It's not like recycling your newspaper or recycling your cans. So the problem is, if you've got 24 of them, you go to four. You still have to recycle the 24. But on the next pass, when you go to the Infinibox SSA fourth generation for sake of argument, you're only recycling four arrays. So A, that's more ecological, but it's also more economical. I call it E squared. Ecology and economy at the same time. E squared, that's what we deliver. And that double capacity helps you do that. Yeah, I like that. I think, again, it's part of it. How do you do more with less, right? Less power, less cooling, less space. All of that makes a lot of sense, especially. It also helps with administration. I mean, again, I think more consolidation that you can have. And to your point, people are looking at Gen AI and other AI and ML and bringing so much more data and data growth. And I think being able to manage it all in one place and not having it spread out all over the different multiple arrays becomes a really huge advantage for those customers. Absolutely. Now, the second part of the all flash is we introduced a scale up architecture. So historically, you had to buy an array fully populated. So now what you've done is come up with a strategy we can scale up. So instead of being 100% populated, you could get 60 or 80. And then as you need more, you buy more. And we do it in 20% increments. So if I have a 60, so let's say Wikibon, Silicon Angle theCUBE, your three companies decides we're getting an Infinibox SSA2. But we only need 60% of the capacity. So you buy 60%. Now, you guys do so much work and all the video and all the stuff you guys do. Maybe you say, okay, six months from now, you say Zoggin store, we need more. Okay, guess what? We sell it to you six months from now or a year from now. We don't sell it to you upfront. So now we have a 60% populated that can scale up and 80% populated to scale up. And you can still buy the 100% populated if that's what you need. But that scale up architecture gives you flexibility in how you manage your budget. You still can consolidate. It still has, of course, our cyber resiliency with our award-winning Infinisafe technology to help you recover from a cyber attack. Well, I was gonna get at that because it is Cyber Security Month. So I mean, they don't have to go and re-license that or anything like that. That comes with it as part of it. So part of what we've always done at the company is the software, which is really our magic fairy dust. We don't do any custom hardware unlike, and I came from IBM and EMC as a senior exec. There's all kinds of custom stuff they do in hardware. We don't do anything. We use off-the-shelf servers to run as array controllers. We don't even have array controllers. You just run our operating system in regular servers. We get J-bods and J-boffs to have the shelving and that's it. So our magic is all in the software. So that's our InfuseOS operating system. We have a cloud edition now, which allows you to have hybrid cloud technology, move data back and forth. But that InfuseOS architecture, whether it be our AIOps product, InfinOps, Infiniverse, which monitors the arrays and does proactive, by the way, tech support for us. We have public references that say, they called me and told me they had a problem with the power supply before everyone knew there was a problem with the power supply. But that's our AIOps technology, our Infiniverse. At our Infinisafe, the cyber technology also comes included at no charge. And by the way, we guarantee the cyber. We guarantee A, the snapshot is in fact truly immutable. We will guarantee that in writing. We also guarantee the recovery time. And we do that on both our Infinibox platforms, both the hybrid and also the SSA all flash, but also our Infiniguard purpose built back up, which by the way, has an embedded Infinibox inside of it. So the same operating system runs on everything. The cyber is guaranteed on everything. And the recovery times are incredible. So for example, we did an end user demand generation. And because I'm crazy as all of the guys at Wikibon, Silicon Angle theCUBE, now I'm a crazy guy, we don't prerecord anything. Now, after the fact, yes, but not during. So we have done six, probably eight, actually cyber resilience webinars. And we do recoveries live, live. So we recovered 20 on our Infiniguard, 20 petabytes, 20 petabytes, not gigabytes, not terabytes, 20 petabytes, a Veeam backup repository in 11 minutes and 55 seconds. The Veeam guys can't believe it. It's like, what? And so the Veeam CTO actually had me on a webinar last week with him talking about their stuff and our stuff working together. On the Infinibox platforms, whether it be the hybrid or the all flash, we guarantee recovery in under one minute. And we started doing that last year. Coincidentally, one of my former employers, which I'll leave nameless, they actually just announced it three weeks ago, a year after it fitted and announced it. And only two companies have a guarantee of RTO, basically, on primary storage, us and this other vendor. And of course they copied us basically 14 months after we already had announced it. So during that demo. Well, it takes a while for hardware. So during that demo, we did, of course, the backup first with Veeam, but that could have been Commvault or Veritas, IBM Protect doesn't matter. Okay, any backup vendor, we work with everybody. And then we did it on primary. We recovered 175,000 video files, 200 terabytes in four seconds. I kid you not, four seconds. So we, and we guarantee all that in writing. So under a minute on primary storage, whether it be the Infinibox or the Infinibox SSA, under a minute guaranteed. And in the secondary storage backup, if you will, on the InfiniGuard under 20 minutes. However, when you talk to the backup guys, someone with 10 or 20, they can't get anywhere. I mean, they're talking recovery times on their side, like days, and we are doing it in 11 minutes and, you know, under 20. So 11 minutes, 55 seconds. We've done the demo a bunch of times. The worst case in the live demo was 12 minutes and 50 seconds. So between 11, 55 and 12, and we've done it like eight times. And it always comes out to be the same. And it doesn't matter whether it's an Infinibox, InfiniGuard, by the way, a lot of people use the Infinibox for a secondary backup repository as well. So the InfiniGuard gives you that data reduction technology, but the Infinibox hybrid is often used because they want to use the data reduction that comes from the backup software vendor. And we don't care. It's not as fast and it's not as efficient as when we do it on our side. But some people just say, no, no, no, I've got an Infinibox, let me just buy one another one, or let me take buy a new one and take the old one and turn it into a backup target device because it's older and slower than the newer ones. And we'll let them do that as well. So a lot of different ways to skin the cat with Infinidad, but it's all built around application workloads and use cases. And yes, we can talk bits and bytes about latency, IOPS and bandwidth and ice guzzy this and Q-depth that. And you know what? While the storage admin really cares about that, we can certainly talk storage geek and nerd with them. I can even talk to them about TPI and BPI, which most people don't even know what that means anymore. That's true. And that's great, but when you start getting to the VPs, even if they're infrastructure-centric and absolutely the CIO or the CISO, they don't care about any of that stuff. They want to know what's the SLA. They're looking for the SLA, they're looking for what applications, how can they guarantee that that application is going to be performant for that, especially as those applications scale and as they grow and a lot of times, especially with these cloud-native applications, they don't even understand how the performance is going to go over time. And I would assume that the software that you package in there with the AI IOPS, type the InfiniOPS, helps them understand what are the workloads of all these different applications as well. Right, and we do a performance guarantee on the two InfiniBoxes. Now on the InfiniBox hybrid, if you run the same workload and then you do it on the SSA, the SSA is going to have a better performance guarantee. So we do that, so we have performance guarantees on primary storage. We have 100% availability guarantees on primary storage and we have, if you will, the two cyber ones, one on resiliency, AKA immutability and the other on recoverability in how fast we'll recover. And we put all that stuff in writing. As we publicly announced, we do 25% of the Fortune 50 use our stuff and we're way smaller than my former employers or the other people, but we're scrappy, we're tough and we've got the largest enterprises in the world buying our technology. Yeah, why do you think that is? Is it because of the guarantees? Is it the fact that it just performs and it's easier to manage? What do you think is the... So in addition to those which are pretty straightforward, right? We do have more SLAs than most of the other vendors. They're better. I mean, clearly all the cyber stuff is way better than everybody's. Most people, only one or two other vendors will guarantee 100% availability. They've got seven or eight nines, but if you want 100% availability, one of them in particular, you can get a guarantee but you have to buy some extra software to do it and some consulting services. So for us, it's just embedded. You just get it. But I do think one of the key things to our magic fairy dust is also our incredible support and service infrastructure, our white glove. We include a technical advisor who's not tech support. So we have regular tech support. First of all, we provide level three. There is no level one and level two tech support. You go right to level three because they're large global enterprises, they're cloud service writers, they're Telco, they're financial institutions, they're major university hospitals. That's who we sell to. So there is no level one or level two. Let me go through that thing. Like if you are, I call Microsoft, not that I don't love Microsoft because I do, I use all Microsoft apps, but we get level one, then level two, then level three. That's standard, right? We don't do that. Right to level three. So that's our tech support. Technical advisor's job is to optimize for application workload and use case. That's what they do. So if there's a tech support problem, do they know about it? Yes, but that's not their job. We had got a whole tech support team to do that. So that white glove support and service, and again, the autonomous automation, the fact that we have multiple public references, probably 50, let's say we haven't touched the thing for two years or three years. There's one that was done through another analyst firm and there's, literally says we haven't touched the thing for eight years. And they happen to be a Fortune 100 account saying that. So that matters a lot to other end users, but that white glove support and service goes along with what I'll call the base technology that offers a solution. And then the white glove support and service is something, and by some of the other companies do offer technical advisors, but they charge for it. We do not. So ours are just embedded in the cost. It's just easy. We don't charge for all the software stuff. Do we have support maintenance? Yes, but when you, having worked at two of the other largest storage companies in the world, I can tell you a typical invoice on a non-complex deal was three to five pages of row after row after row. When you get an invoice or our partners, because obviously we sell a lot of our stuff through the channel partner community globally, it's four to five line items on the invoice versus 50, and I've actually seen some at my old companies, like 200 line items. So we just do everything to make it easy, not just the technology, but doing business is what we do. It's a business, think of it as a business strategy, not just a technology strategy. I was gonna say that must really endear you to those channel partners. And what has their reaction been since the announcement of this? So it's been exceedingly positive, obviously for the installed base, they wanna go out there and in some cases they will sell a little flash, but not a lot. The main thing is they don't, you know, they get complaints about the small array flash sprawl. So they sell, we don't have a small all flash raise, so they'll sell one from a competitor, then they gotta sell another another, and then the guys are complaining, say wait, now we gotta manage all this stuff, and by the way, it's taking up rack space and we have to power and cool it, well wait. And now they, so they can go that. And then on the SSA too, it's all about how can they deliver better financial value by going to the end user and saying, oh, you've got 42 arrays? Well, guess what, what if I could take that to eight? Okay, and deliver you 35 mics of latency, which is faster than anybody else in the industry, and compared to a couple of the guys that are way bigger than us, almost five times faster. Not to mention the real world performance, because to me, there's lies, damn lies and benchmarks. And so I'm, we actually encourage our end users to time it with a stopwatch, literally run an Oracle workload, turn on the stopwatch, and then run it on same version of Oracle, same servers, all you do is swap the storage. And in fact, we have a public reference, which I just reviewed today, cloud service provider in the U.S. And in it, their CIO said we saw a 15 times performance increase in real world. Now remember, they're doing backup as a service, storage as a service, and infrastructure as a service. So for them, every time they got that, they're billing somebody. So for them, it translates directly into revenue for them. If I'm a global enterprise, what it translates into is an SAP workload that takes five hours, taking 20 minutes. And that has real value when you look at it from an application workload perspective, if I'm in a global enterprise in the CSP space, it's directly translated into immediate revenue because of how they charge, right? Yeah, keep the factory busy. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So where can people go to find out more about this? What should they do? Where should they go out? First of all, your favorite reseller, if you'd like to do that, www.infiniteact.com. We of course are very active on Twitter. I can't say X yet. I know I'm supposed to, but I'll say Twitter slash X slash Twitter and on LinkedIn. And of course, you can always follow ZogginStore. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. No longer ZogginStash, much to Dave's dismay. So Dave Vellante, the founder, when I grew my mustache back, literally tweeted and put on LinkedIn the ZogginStash is back. But I did shave that off, so. Well, you can tell I like the facial hair. I did too most of my life, but the wife was complaining, so I had to shave it off. I get it the opposite if I shave it off, she complains, so. Hey, it's been great having you on. I really thank you for coming on and sharing this and really keeping us up to date with what's going on and it's into that. It's always good. Always good. Well, thank you very much. And again, theCUBE is one of the most valuable resources in the industry. And I don't say that just from the vendor side. End users say they look at your stuff all the time. And that's what matters most. What do the end users do? And what do the channel partners do who take care of those end users? And they both commented multiple times on the value theCUBE delivers to them to really understanding technology, not just in storage, but in all the other areas. Because you guys cover the entire gamut. Well, we thank you for that. We appreciate it. And we thank you for watching and really appreciate you watching this. And remember, for all things data and storage, feel free to visit silkenangle.com as well. And thank you for watching this episode with Infinidat and keep watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech news and analysis. Thanks and stay tuned.