 Lately, Infinidat has been on a bit of a super cycle of product announcements, adding features, capabilities, and innovations to its core platform that are applied across its growing install base. CEO Phil Bollinger has brought in new management and really emphasized a strong and consistent cadence of product releases, a hallmark of successful storage companies. And one of those new executives is a CMO with a proven product chops who seems to bring an energy and an acceleration of product output wherever he lands. Eric Herzog joins us on theCUBE. Hey man, great to see you. Awesome to have you again. Dave, thank you. And of course, for theCUBE, of course, I had to put on a Hawaiian shirt as always. They're back. All right, I love it. Watch out for those Hawaiian shirt police, Eric. All right, I want to have you start by, maybe you can make some comments on the portfolio over the past year. You heard my intro, you know, Infinibax, Infinibox is the core. You know, the Infinibox SSA, which announced last year. Infiniguard, you made some substantial updates in February of this year. Real focus on cyber resilience, which we're going to talk about with Infinisave. Give us the overview. Sure. Well, what we've got is it started really 11 years ago with the Infinibox. High end enterprise solution, hybrid oriented, really incredible magic fairy dust around the software and all the software technology. So for example, the neural cache technology, which has multiple patents on it, allowed the original Infinibox to outperform probably 85% of the all flash arrays in the industry. And it still does that today. We also of course had our real, real incredible ease of use. The whole point of the way it was configured and set it from the beginning, which we continued to make sure we do, is if you will, a set it and forget it model. For example, when you install, you don't create lones and raid groups and volumes. It automatically and autonomously configures. And when you add new solutions, AKA additional applications or additional servers and pointed at the Infinibox, it automatically again and autonomously adjust to those new applications, learning what it needs to configure everything. So you're not setting cache size and queue depth or stripe size, anything you would performance, so you don't have to do any of that. So that entire set of softwares on the Infinibox, the Infinibox SSA2, which we're of course launching today. And then inside of the Infinigard platform, there's actually an Infinibox. So the common alley of snapshots, replication, ease of use, all of that is identical across the platform of all flash array, hybrid array and purpose-built backup secondary storage. And no other vendor has that breadth of product that has the same exact software. Some make a similar GUI, but we're talking literally the same exact softwares. Once you learn it, you know all three platforms. Even if you don't have them, you could easily buy one of the other platforms that you don't have yet. And once you've got it, you already know how to use it because you've had one platform to start as an example. So really easy to use from a customer perspective. So ever since I've been following the storage business, which has been a long time now, three things that customers want. They want something that is rock solid, you know, dirt cheap and super fast. So performance is something that you guys have always emphasized. I've had some really interesting discussions over the years with Infinidet folks. How do you get performance? If you're using this kind of architecture and it's been quite amazing. But how does this launch extend or affect performance? Why the focus on performance from your standpoint? Well, we've done a number of different things to bolster the performance. We've already been industry leading performance. Again, the regular Infinibox outperforms 80, 85% of the all flash arrays. Then when the announcement of the Infinibox SSA, our first all flash a year ago, we took that now to the highest demanding workloads and applications in the industry. So whether that's the super high-end Oracle app or SAP or some custom app that someone's created with Mongo or Cassandra, we can absolutely meet the performance between either the Infinibox or the Infinibox all flash with the Infinibox SSA. However, we've decided to extend the performance even farther. So we've added a whole bunch of new CPU cores into our tripart configuration. So we don't have two array controllers like many companies do. We actually have three. Everything's in threes, which gives us the capability of having our 100% availability guarantee. So we've extended that now. We've optimized, you put additional Infiniband interconnects between the controllers. We've added the CPU core. We've taken, if you will, the Infinibox operating system, neural cache and everything else we've had. And what we have done is we have optimized that to take advantage of all those additional cores. This has led us to increase performance in all aspects, IOPS, bandwidth. And in fact, in latency, in latency, we now are at 35 mics of latency, real world, not hero number, but real world on an array. And when you look end to end, if I'm Mr. Oracle or SAP sitting in the server and I'll look across that bridge, of course, the sand and over to the other building, the storage building, that entire traversing can be as fast as 100 microseconds of latency across the entire configuration, not just the storage. Yeah, I think that's best in class for an external array. So what's the spectrum you can now hit with the performance ranges? Can you hit all the aspects of the market with the two Infiniboxes, your original and then the SSA? Yes, even with the original SSA, in fact, we've had one of our end users who's been first an Infinibox customer, then Infinibox SSA actually has been running for the last two months, a beta version of the SSA too. So they've had a beta version and this customer is running high-end Oracle Rack configurations. So they decided, you know what? We're not going to run storage benchmarks, we're going to run only Oracle benchmarks. And in every benchmark, IOPS, latency and bandwidth oriented, we outperformed the next nearest competition. So for example, 57% faster in IOPS, 58% faster in bandwidth. And on the latency side, using real world Oracle apps, we were three times as better performance on the latency aspect, which of course for a high-end, high performance workload that's heavily transactional, latency is the most important. But when you look across all three of those aspects, dramatically outperforming, and by the way, that was a beta unit that didn't of course have final code on it yet. So incredible performance angle with the Infinibox SSA2. So Eric, I mean, you earlier, we were talking about the ease of use, you don't have the provisioned LUNs and all that sort of nonsense. And you've always emphasized ease of use. Can you double click on that a little bit? How do you think about that capability? And I'm really interested in why you think it's different from other vendors. Well, we make sure that, for example, when you install, you don't have to do anything. You have to rack and stack, yes, and cable, and of course point the servers at the storage. But the storage just basically comes up. In fact, we have a customer, and it's a public reference that bought a couple of units many years ago, and they said they were up and going in about two hours. So how many high-end enterprise storage arrays can be up and going in two hours? Almost, I mean, basically nobody but us. So we wanted to make sure that we've maintained that. When we have customers, one of our big plays, particularly helping with CapEx and OpEx, is because we are so performant, we can consolidate. We have a large customer in Europe that took 57 arrays from one of our competitors and consolidated to five of the original Infinibox, 57 to five. They saved about $25 million in capital expense, and they're saving about a million and a half a year in operational expense. But the whole point was as they kept adding more and more servers that were connected to those competitive arrays and pointing them at the Infinibox, there's no performance tuning. Again, that's all ease of use, not only saving on operational expense, but obviously, as we know, the head count for storage admins is way down from its peak, which was probably in 2007. Yet every admin is managing what, 25 to 50 times the amount of storage between 2007 and 2022. So the reality is the easier it is to use, not only does, of course, the CIO love it because both the two of us together probably been doing storage now for close to 80 years would be my guess. I've been doing it for 40. You're a little younger, so maybe we're at 75 to 78. Have you ever met a CIO who used to be a storage admin? Ever? No. And I can't think of one either. So guess what? The easier it is to use, the CIOs know that they need storage. They don't like it. They're all, these days are all software guys. There used to be some mainframe guys in the old days, but they're long gone too. It's all about software. So when you say, not only can we help reduce your CAPEX and OPEX, but the operational manpower to run the storage, we can dramatically reduce that because of our ease of use that they get. And ease of use has been a theme on the software side ever since the Mac came out. I mean, Windows used to be a dog. Now it's easy to use. And every time the Linux distribution comes out, someone's got something that's easier and easier to use. So the fact that the storage is easy to use, you can turn that directly into, we can help you save on operational manpower and OPEX. And CIOs, again, none of which I've ever met are storage guys. They love that message. Of course, the admins do too, because they're managing 25 to 50 times more storage than they had to manage back in 2007. So the easier it is for them at the tactical level, the storage admin, the storage manager, it's a huge deal. And we've made sure we've maintained that as you've added the SSA, as we brought out the Infinigard, as we've continued to push new feature function, we always make it easy to use. Yeah, kind of a follow-up on that. Just focus on software. I mean, I think every storage company today, every modern storage company, is going to have more software engineers than hardware engineers. And I think Infinigard obviously is no different. You got a strong set of software, it's across the portfolio, it's all included kind of thing. I wonder if you could talk about your software approach and how that is different from your competitors. Sure, so we started out 11 years ago when Infinigard first got started, that was all about commodity hardware. So while some people will use custom this and custom that, and having worked at two of the biggest storage companies in the world before I came here, yes, I know it's heavily software, but our percentage of hardware engineers' softwares is even less hardware engineering than our competitors have. So we've had that model, which is why this whole, what we call the set it and forget it mantra of ease of use is critical. We make sure that we've expanded that, for example, what we're announcing today are InfiniOps focus. And InfiniOps all software allows us to do AIOps both inside of our storage system with our Infiniverse and Infinimetrics packages. They're easy to use, they come pre-installed and they manage capacity performance. We also now have heavy integration with what I'll call data center AIOps vendors, Bertana, ServiceNow, VMware and others. And in that case, we make sure that we expose all of our information out to those AIOps data center apps that they can report on the storage level. So we've made sure we do that. We have incredible support for the Ansible framework, again, which is not only a software statement, but an ease of use statement as well. So for the Ansible framework, which is trying to allow an even simpler methodology for infrastructure deployment in companies, we support that extensively and we added some new features, if you will, what I'll say are more scripts, but they're not really scripts that Ansible hides all that. And we added more of that, whether that be configuration, installations that a DevOps guide, which of course just had all the storage guys listening to this video have a heart attack, but the DevOps guide could actually configure storage. And I guess for my storage buddies, they can do it without messing up your storage. And that's what Ansible delivers. So between our AIOps focus and what we're doing with InfiniOps, that extends of course, this ease of use model that we've had and includes that. And again, all this again, including we already talked about a little bit cyber resilience day within Infinisap, all this is included when you buy it. So we don't piecemeal, which is you get this and then we try to upcharge you for that. I mean, we have this incredible pricing that delivers this cat-back as an OpEx, not just for the array, but for the associated software that goes with it, whether that be neural cache, the ease of use, the InfiniOps, Infinisap, you get all of that package together in the way we deploy from a business now perspective, ease of doing business. You don't cut POs for all kinds of pieces. You cut APO and you just get all the pieces on the one PO when we deliver it. I was talking yesterday to a VC and we were chatting about AI and of course, you know, everybody's chasing AI. It's a lot of investments go in there, but the reality is AI is like containers. It's just getting absorbed into virtually everything. And of course, last year, you guys made a pretty robust splash into AI Ops. And then with this launch, you're extending that pretty substantially. Tell us a little bit more about the InfiniOps announcement news. So the InfiniOps includes our existing in the box framework, Infiniverse and what we do there. By the way, Infiniverse has the capability with the telemetry feed. That's how we could able to demo at our demo today and also at our demo for our channel partner pre-releafing. Again, 100, 100 mics of latency across the entire configuration, not just 100 mics of latency on storage, which by the way, several of our competitors talk about 100 mics of latency as their quote hero number. We're talking about 100 mics of latency from the application through the server, through the sand and out to the storage. Now that is incredible. But the monitoring for that is part of the InfiniOps packaging. We support again with DevOps with all the integration that we do to make it easy for the DevOps team, such as with Ansible, make it sure for the data center people with our integration with things like VMware and ServiceNow, the data center people who are obviously often not the storage centric person can also be managing the entire data center. And whether that is conversing with the storage admin on, we need this or that, or whether they're doing it themselves. Again, all that is part of our InfiniOps framework and we include things like the Ansible supporters as part of that. So InfiniOps is sort of an overarching theme and then an overarching thing extends to Aops inside of the storage system, Aops across the data center and even integration with, I'll say something that's not even considered an infrastructure play, but something like Ansible, which is clearly a red hat, software oriented framework that incorporates storage systems and servers or networks in the capability of having DevOps people manage them and quite honestly, have the DevOps people manage them without screwing them up or losing data or losing configuration, which of course the server guys, the network guys and the storage guys hate when the DevOps guys play with it, but that integration with Ansible is part of our InfiniOps strategy. Now I'll shift gears a little bit, talk about cybercrime admin. It's a topic that we've been on for a long time. I've personally been writing about it now for the last few years. I mean, periodically with my colleagues from ETR, we hit that pretty hard. It's top of mind. And now the house just approved what's called the Better Cybercrime Metrics Act. It was a bipartisan push. I mean, the vote was like 377 to 48 and the Senate approved this bill last year. Once President Biden signs it, the law is going to be put into effect and you and many others have been active in this space. Infinidat, you announced cyber resilience on your purpose built backup appliance and secondary storage solution Infinigard with the launch of Infinisafe. What are you doing for primary storage from Infinibox around cyber resilience? So the goal between the Infinigard on secondary storage and the Infinibox and the Infinibox SSH2, we're launching it now, but the Infinisafe for Infinibox will work on the original Infinibox. It's a software only thing. So there's no extra hardware needed. So it's a software only play. So if you have an Infinibox today, when you upgrade to the latest software, you can have the Infinisafe reference architecture available to you. And the idea is to support the four key legs of the cybersecurity table from a storage perspective. When you look at it from a storage perspective, there's really four key things that the CISO and the CIO look for. First is a mutable snapshot technology. Unarmful, can't be deleted, right? You can schedule it, you can do all kinds of different things, but the point is you can't get rid of it. Second thing, of course, is an air gap. And there's two types of air gap, logical air gap, which is what we provide and physical. The main physical air gaping would be either to tape or to, of course, what's left of the optical storage market. But we've got a nice logical air gap and we can even do that logical air gapping remotely. Since most customers often buy for disaster recovery purposes, multiple arrays, we can then put that air gap, not just locally, but we can put the air gap, of course, remotely, which is a critical differentiator for the Infinibox that it's a remote logical air gap. Many other players have logical local, but we're going remote. And then, of course, the third aspect is a fenced forensic environment. That fenced forensic environment needs to be easily set up so you can determine a known good copy to a restoration app you've had, a cyber incident. And then lastly is rapid recovery. And we really pride ourselves on this. When you go to our most recent launch in February of the Infinigard with Infinisave, we were able to demo live a recovery, taking 12 minutes and 12 seconds of 1.5 petabytes of backup data from Veeam. Now that could have been any backup data, Commvault, IBM, Spectrum, Tech, Veritas. We happen to show it with Veeam, but in 12 minutes and 12 seconds. Now on the primary storage side, depending on whether you're gonna try to recover locally or do it from a remote, but if it's local, we're looking at something that's gonna be one to two minutes recovery because the way we do our snapshot technology, how we just need to rebuild the metadata tree and boom, you can recover. So that's a real differentiator, but those are four things that a CISO and a CIO look for from a storage vendor. Is this immutable snapshot capability, the air gapping capability, the fenced environment capability, and of course, this near instantaneous recovery which we have proven out well with the Infinigard. And now with the Infinibox SSA2 and our Infinibox platform, we can make that recovery on primary storage even faster than what we have been able to show customers with the Infinigard on the secondary data sets and backup data sets. Yeah, I love the four layer cake. I just want to clarify something on the air gap if I could. So you got a local air gap. You can do a remote air gap with your physical storage. And then you're saying there's a, I think, I'm not sure I directly heard that, but then the next layer is going to be tape with the CTAM, the Chevy Truck Access Method, right? So while we don't actively support tape and go to that, there's basically two air gap solutions out there that people talk about either physical, which goes to taper optical or logical. We do logical air gapping. We don't do air gapping to tape because we don't sell tape. So we make sure that it's a remote logical air gap going to a secondary DR site. Now, obviously in today's world, no one has a true DR data center anymore, right? All data centers are both active in DR for another site. And because we're so heavily concentrated in the global fortune 2000, almost all the Infiniboxes in the field already are set up as in a disaster recovery configuration. So using a remote logical air gap would be easy for us to do with our Infinibox SSA2 and the whole Infinibox family. And I get you guys don't do tape, but when you say remote, so you've got a local air gap, right? But then you also, you call a remote logical, but you've got physical, you've got a physical air gap, right? Yeah, so that's- Yeah, they would be physically separated, but when you're not going to tape because it's fully removable or optical, then the security analysts consider that type of air gap a logical air gap, even though it's physically at a remote site. I understand. You've spent a lot of time with the channel as well, I know. And they must be all over this. They must be really be glomming on to the whole cyber resiliency. You know, what are you saying? I mean, are they, did they set up, a lot of the guys do and manage services as well? I'm just curious. Are there separate processes for the air gap piece than there are for the mainstream production environment? Or is it sort of blended together? How are they approaching that? So on the Infinigard product line, it's blended together, okay? On the Infinibox with our Infinisafe reference architecture, you do need to have an extra server where you create an ice-scuzzy private VLAN. And with that private VLAN, you set up your fenced forensic environment. So it's slightly more complicated. The Infinigard, it's 100% automated. On the Infinibox, we will be pushing that in the future and we will continue to have releases on Infinisafe and making more and more automated. But the air gapping and the fenced forensic network are as a reference architecture configuration, not with, you know, click on a GUI. In the Infinigard case, our original Infinisafe, all you do is click on some windows and it just goes and does. And we're not there yet, but we will be there in the future. But it's such a top of mind topic. As you probably see, last year, Fortune did a survey of the Fortune 500 CEOs. And the number one cited threat at 66%, by the way, was cybersecurity. So one of the key things storage vendors do, not just us, but all storage vendors, is need to convince the CISO that storage is a critical component of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. And by having these four things, the rapid recovery, the fenced forensic environment, the air gapping technology, and the immutable snapshots, you've got all of the checkbox items that a CISO needs to see to make sure. That said, many CISOs still, even today, still don't realize to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. And that's something that the storage industry in general needs to work on with the security community. From a partner perspective, the value is they can sell a full package. So they can go to their end user and say, look, here's what we have for edge protection. Here's we've got to track the bad guy down once something's happened, or to alert you that something's happened by having tools like IBM's Q-Radar and competitive tools to that product line that can traverse the servers and the software infrastructure and try to locate malware ransomware. Again, to the way all of us have Norton or something like Norton on our laptop that is trolling constantly for viruses. So that's sort of software. And then of course, storage. And those are the elements that you really need to have an overall cybersecurity strategy. Right now, many companies have not realized that storage is critical. When you think about it, when you talk to people in the security industry, and I know you do, from original insertion intrusion to solution is 287 days. Well, guess what? If the data sets thereafter, whether it be secondary, InfiniGuard or primary within InfiniBox, they're going to trap those things and they're going to take it. They might have trapped those few data sets at day 50, even though you don't even launch the attack until day 200. So it's a big deal of why storage is so critical and why CISOs and CIOs need to make sure they include it day one. It's where the data lives. Okay, Eric, wow, a lot of topics we discovered. I love the agile sort of cadence. I presume you're not done for the year. Look forward to having you back and thanks so much for coming on today. Great, thank you, Dave. We of course love being on theCUBE. Thanks again and thanks for all the nice things about InfiniGuard. You've been saying thank you. Okay, and thank you for watching this CUBE Conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.