 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the Mandalay Bay, everybody in Las Vegas. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with David Floyer. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of VMworld 2018. We've got two sets here in the VM Village. 94 guests this week, it's a record for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. I've been in this business as long as Pat Gelsinger, and ever since I've been in this business, people have said, oh, infrastructure's dying, and you know what? Storage is the gift that keeps on giving, and I just, we love the conversations. Guys from Infinidat are here. Jacob Breudo is the Chief Product Officer, and Neville Yates is the Senior Director of Data Protection Solutions at Infinidat. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Happy VMworld 2018. All right, Jacob, I'm going to start with you. So, we have seen Infinidat come in. You're basically competing with all-flash arrays. Faster than flash, and that's your sort of tagline. So you have this system designed for primary storage, and then all of a sudden, last summer, around last summer, maybe it was the fall, we see you guys entering the data protection market with essentially the same architecture. How is it that you can take a system that's designed for primary storage, faster than flash, and then point it at data protection? Help us understand. That's a great question. So, it all starts with the fact that we designed our system to work with mixed workloads, and primary storage being our first key point, but the design and the architecture is supposed to work with any type of workload. And what we started seeing in the field is that our customers first displaced a lot of incumbents primary storage on us, and then we started seeing them putting backup workloads as well, and data protection workloads on our systems as well, and coming back and saying that this works amazingly, let's do more of that. This basically led us to the point of expending on that strategy and introducing additional products and services. The key point for us in this was that it was remarkably easy for us to introduce additional capabilities because of the solid technical and architectural foundation. We're very fast. Our financial model enables us to do and go after the data protection market efficiently, and we're seeing this in the field. So, Neville, help us paint a picture for us. You've got a long history in the data protection market. You were involved in disrupting tape. You've been a consultant in this space, working with customers. What's the sort of market look like, the sort of available market for you guys? So, when Jacob refers to the expansion into data protection, we took this technology, as Jacob describes in the box. We didn't just expand in one direction. We expanded in two directions, multi-direction with the introduction of infinity sync, which is a means by which critical applications can enable a recovery point of zero. Jacob will go into more details in that. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we deliver and deploying Infinigard. Based on the same technology that Jacob described as the core, we're now able to be the target of battery-oriented, the typical grandfather, father, son, every 24 hours you do a backup, you do an incremental. And with deduplication as a front end to the core storage, now we've got a coverage across a data protection spectrum that nobody else can match. Recovery point of zero, leveraging replication technologies that Jacob will expand upon in a minute, snap technology internal to Infinibogs, integrated with backup applications, such as the dashboard management is all consistent. And then further down the spectrum, the Infinigard itself, dealing with the traditional kind of data protection schemes. A complete spectrum coverage nobody else can deliver it, built on that technology core to the Infinibogs storage itself. So you have the full pyramid covered with the same fundamental architecture. But Jacob, you can't just throw the box at data protection. You have to bring in other features. You got to be best of breed. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, double click on some of those. Sure. So it all starts with kind of base foundation for our data protection, and that is Infinisnaps. It's our snapshot core engine, which from day one, we designed to work at multi-parabyte scale and for us, what that means is that, you need to support 100,000 of snapshots and up to multiple millions. That's by design, how we design the system. But not only that, you have to have zero impact on performance. If you look at our systems in the field, our customers are doing thousands of snapshots per day. Some are doing tens of thousands and more per day with no performance impact. That's not even measurable on any of their performance graphs. This is the foundation on technology on which we've built our forward-looking additional data protection technologies. So if we took a look upper in the pyramid of overall solution for data protection, after that we introduced our asynchronous replication, which is based on that snapshot technology for us. The reason we had such an efficient and groundbreaking snapshot technology enables us to do the lowest RPO protection for asynchronous replication when comparing to any storage product in the market. We're talking about four seconds RPO and this is something that no other vendor was able to do because snapshots break at that pace. It's very hard to create and delete snapshots at scale at such a short interval. Without the performance technology. Exactly, exactly. We were able to do this and this is kind of one example of how our early days architectural planning and investment in our product architecture pays off year over year with every new feature. That's why it seems easy for now when we release features quickly because we have such a solid technical foundation. One of the things that I was really fascinated by was your purchase of Exxana. And how have you been able to use that to get this RTO zero that you're claiming on that? I mean, if you look at the marketplace at the moment it seems to be that the storage vendors in general are owning this whole space of RPO, RTO, lower RTOs, et cetera. That's a great question but before we get into details about that I want to make it to cover kind of foundational technology for that that enable has to do this. And that is our synchronous replication within Infinibox array which is also built on top of our async which in turn built on top of our snapshot. With our synchronous replication within Infinibox we're delivering the lowest possible latency for synch replication today. Just to give you an example of how low and how efficient that is systems that are running synchronous replication on top of Infinibox are having lower latency than a single all slash array writing local. Just imagine what it means. We're able to do the round trip right to another array and complete the whole work faster and you'll have a typical all-flash array view. Now that foundation on technology also is a key part of our infinising implementation because what we did, we took a great product which comes from Aksana which is the hardened black box capable with standing any type of disaster, fire, floods, earthquake, whatever and we essentially integrated it very closely with Infinibox sync replication where we're writing this very efficient low latency sync operations to our infinising compliance and essentially enabling RPO zero over any distance. So if you look at it from the heart things perspective which is the data path we had existing capability which is our sync replication within the array. We just had to integrate it with another great product Aksana and that essentially was more than anything an integration work rather than from scratch development because again, this is part of our philosophy we plan ahead as far as our product roadmap and strategy and when you lay out the foundation early on you get to the point where some things look easy because they were pre-made and pre-appared early on. This is- So that's the tip of the pyramid. For those mission critical applications where you need RPO zero you've now enabled customers to do that for much lower cost and let's say for instance a three site data center. What about the sort of fat middle level of data protection? I think you guys call it Infinigard, right? That's kind of your solution there. And so Infinigard simply is Infinibox storage with all of its resiliency and performance and algorithms that outperform typical arrays and in front of that we've integrated deduplication engines and these deduplication engines present themselves as targets to the traditional backup ecosystem, receive data, deduplicate it and use the resources of Infinibox storage integrated into the Infinigard. And it's being received well because its ability to deliver aggressive recovery time objectives because of its performance in terms of resource speeds. The traditional systems that have been designed 10 or 15 years ago were okay at doing backups. They were purposely built for backup processes. They suffer greatly as a byproduct of the process of deduplication and the IO profile that that generates. Infinigard breaks through that because of its performance in the underlying storage in order to drive RTOs for the recovery of those files that are under the 24-hour sort of data protection cycle. And the customers are receiving it well. They are amazed at the performance, the reliability and the simplicity within which that fits into the existing ecosystem. So it completes. So Infinigard with Infinibox at the core. And so you partner with the backup software vendors. Obviously you're not writing your own backup software, right? So integration, Vee, the convols, the veritas, OSTs, et cetera. A little further integration when it comes to Infinibox snap technology that is integrated into backup applications such as convolts or Vee. Specifically you can use their dashboard and their scheduling scheme to trigger the snap that then is taken care of in Infinibox. So it's quite a comprehensive deliverable against the whole data protection paradigm. And have you made a cloud of that now with your new service? Not yet, but as Jacob said, there's the vision we are always building strategically slightly ahead of the curve. So you can imagine that that's not lost on the radar screen. So I see this as a return on asset play. In other words, I've got the architecture. I've got my processes and procedures in place. I don't have to go out and buy a purpose-built appliance for data protection now. I can use the asset that's on my floor that people are trained on. I mean, we're thoughts. Absolutely. It seems to me that you have simplified tremendously all of those previous steps that took one to another to another to another. And put them all in the same box and use the same technologies to achieve much better end-to-end results. I think it's excellent. Absolutely correct. And it's deliverable in a timely fashion because the foundation is so strong. Absolutely. The investment that we made from day one to make sure that that storage architecture was able to deliver the storage services at the right cost point, at the right resiliency, at the right performance levels is the means by which we're able to accomplish that. No one else can do it. And there's another arc to this story is that we're constantly, we continue investing into that foundation. Every, our customers, the one unique thing that they experience with us is that their systems get better every time, every release that we have, every month they get better, not only on performance, which is obvious and our systems are improving all the time. As opposed to the normal expectation is that as you fill it up, it gets worse. Yeah. We are actually delivering the opposite. Our customers that are buying system today know that the ones that they experienced in Finnebox know that it will become better over time. And that spans the whole spectrum. Its performance, its reliability, but also features it. All of the things that we discussed here were delivered as free of charge through a software upgrade to our existing Finnebox customers. And without disclosing something specific looking forward there are many more things in that area coming up pretty soon from us. Very innovative. You guys always solve problems differently, cutting against the conventional wisdom. You see VMworld, a lot of glam, a lot of big marketing. You guys, I was at your customer dinner the other night, a lot of happy customers, very intimate events, and a lot of good belly-to-belly conversations. So congratulations. Final thoughts from each of you on VMworld 2018, kind of the future of Infinidad, anything you want to share with us? Neville, start. Good show. The clients, the prospects that I've spoken to here, they get to open their minds in terms of our solution offering, and it's generated a lot of interest and it's going to be a good remainder of the year and a good 2019. Great, Jacob, final words from you. I agree as well, and I'm seeing customers that are actually reaching out to new prospects for us and telling the story of Infinidad and that's catching on, and it's great to see that. Jacob Neville, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Bringing you all the action from VMworld 2018, I'm Dave Vellante for David Floyer. You're watching theCUBE and we'll be right back after this short break.