 High-profile cyber attacks like the Solar Winds hack, the JBS Meet and the Florida Municipality Breach have heightened awareness of how exposed critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4J vulnerability. That's yet another example of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now, data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault, if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt in an effort to hold companies hostage in a ransomware attack. Now, in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, theCUBE is hosting the special presentation Infinigard Cyber Resilience, new cyber crime solutions. We're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the chief marketing officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wasaki, who is the president of Mark III Systems, who's either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to theCUBE. Hello, Eric. Great, Dave, thank you very much. Always loved talking to you and theCUBE about leading edge technology solutions for end users. Let's do it. So first, we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat, new CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing, obviously. Phil Bollinger has really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat. You just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us and give us the business update? Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. We had a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68% and over 25% of the Fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our Infinibox, our Infinibox SSA, all flash array or our Infinigard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today on February 9th. Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th and why it's important. Well, what we've done is we've got a high-end enterprise purpose-built back-of-appliance, the Infinigard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our Infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup data set could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know, backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster for a traditional backup workload. So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe and specifically, Eric, I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions. Don't make me a liar. Like I said, you guys always try to take non-conventional approaches. So tell us a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? Sure, well, Infinisafe incorporates, as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots cannot be deleted. They cannot be altered. You cannot accelerate the rate. You can set the rate of immutable staff. Do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously, if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data deduple appliance and that data deduple engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology to that backup data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE's can access it, giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE and of course, the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology. So you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose. And then of course, you'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So if the cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fenced network in which to perform that forensic analysis to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single Infinibox. Some of our competitors right on their website say you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances to do cyber resilience, meaning twice the CAPEX and twice the OPEX, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then last thing is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their convolve, their VM, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, whatever their backup software is to do recovery from the Infiniguard box back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original data set with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at whether it be purpose-built backup competitors or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery. And the one or two that do talk about recovering the data set, we recover the entire environment. We are ready to go. And the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, VMware, Veritas, they could immediately start the backup as soon as we did our recovery, which again takes between 15 and 30 minutes independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes. It could be a petabyte. It could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course the backup admin can restore from that backup data set. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. Well, the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like at the bank vault because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus. That's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good, but there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improve the performance of the purpose built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour. Now we're at 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than double the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the data set took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half, or even faster. So that of course minimized the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers and primary storage. So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion, the impact that Infinigar, this announcement that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEx compared to the previous vendor that they had. And they used to be able to do 30,000 backup a day. Now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of Infinigar, not the version we just announced on the ninth. One of our other customers, which is in Amia and they happen to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from another vendor and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one and seven in data center two. Within Infinigar, they've got one in data center, one and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now. They've had zero recovery failures whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that publicly talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again, were able to take those two systems out and use one Infinigar solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure to going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one Infinigar versus two of the other guys products. So those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space and one a global fortune 500 financial services coming. Just some real world examples. And all those, by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of Infinigar on February 9th. So Eric, I'm just kind of sketching out the business case. You know, putting my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs because you're consolidating. So that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I can do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time. So that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere. Recovery is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery. All this lowers my risk and I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss and then what that means to my business. Am I getting it right? Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether that be your manufacturing system. Every time you turn on that backup to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify, but you are taking the impact of backup and basically reducing it. If you will shrinking the backup window. So their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup. Well, they're still trying to run that SAP better Oracle that SQL workload. And you're not a backup software vendor. So I can, I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular apps. Absolutely. So Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned as we were talking about the end users, they use two different backup packages, two of them. So two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So we're very flexible. The user picks what they want from a backup software perspective and we can work with anything. So whatever they want to use is fine with us. We integrate with all of them. We have integration, for example, also with VMware for VVols and other aspects and container integration. So, you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, Infinigard, or what we do with the Infinibox, we always make sure we integrate with a surrounding environment because storage is not an island. Storage needs to exist in your data center or your hybrid cloud data center or what you're doing for containers. So you make sure we have integration with our Infinibox, our Infinibox SSA All Flash, and of course the product we're enhancing today, the Infinigard. Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions. They're busy, they don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay, Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. Great, thank you very much, Dave. Always love talking to theCUBE. Okay, in a moment, Stan Wasaki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's gonna join us for a drill down on how Infinigard is impacting customers. You're watching theCUBE, your global leader in enterprise tech coverage. At Infinidat, we believe in better storage choices with no trade-offs. Our storage delivers blazingly fast performance and guarantees 100% availability. Plus, it's built for tremendous scale, from hundreds of terabytes to multiple petabytes. It's all about giving IT the best option for storing data. It means you can tick all the important boxes on your enterprise storage requirements, performance, availability, scalability, and enjoy a lower TCO and faster ROI than competing solutions. It's why our customers become repeat customers. It's what inspires our channel partners, and it's what motivates our employees. It's why we got into the storage business. And we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat's recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Herzog is back and joining us is Stan Wasaki, who's president of Mark III Systems, Stan. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, pleasure to be here. Tell us about Mark III Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website, I'd love to hear more about your business. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There have been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of the largest enterprise customers in the Southeast with server stores, networking, virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create a full stack message and a full stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers and DevOps, MLOps, and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them under adoption of open source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment, and then Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective, Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? Yeah, that's great. So it kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage and that's both an internal customer and your end user customers on how they want to engage, how they want to consume, and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world. So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop. So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hackers getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward. And we're proud to partner with Infinidat and leveraging Infinigard and Infinisave to really protect our customer's data. Great, Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How is it going to help the end customers? Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the Fortune Survey of CEOs in 2021, the number one concern of CEOs of the Fortune 500 was cybersecurity, and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes the importance of the digital data that all companies generate of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do is make sure that your storage estate fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with Infinigard or Infinisave technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world can make sure that the data is safe, protected, and can help them for a malware or ransomware attack against that valuable data set. Well, I wonder if you guys could comment. I mean, we talked to CISOs and they've told us that they're, in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategy has changed no longer. They're just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to different areas. Obviously endpoint, cloud security is a big deal. Identity access management, but ransomware is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home or, Stan, you mentioned greater sophistication of hackers. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? Well, I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that's gone up in any year, right? So with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like 27 different security products. And imagine, you know, Asiso and his team who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage Infinity Guard and Infinity Safe and to be able to provide, you know, the immutable snapshots, the logical air gash, the physical airbags and offense network for recovery, that's all extremely easy to manage. I mean, I talked to my customers and on why they have chosen Infinity, you know, through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is, how easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right? You think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers, but my most technical customers really appreciate this because of the way Infinidap manages itself and provides the tools saying, I mean, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks rather than the care and feeding of their storage environment. Yeah, thank you. You know, when you talk to CISOs, you ask them what's the number one problem they'll tell you. Lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day. You're getting, you know, billion dollar, you know, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So, Stan, I wonder if you could talk about specifically Infinigard, how it fits into your stack, like where and how you're applying it. Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, we have customers in pretty much every vertical that we're supporting their storage environments and Infinidat plays in all of those verticals with all of our customers. You know, one in particular, a healthcare account. One of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years has become the de facto standard storage platform that they have. And they also now have Infinigard as the backup target for Commvault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer that really demands excellence, right? So they love the, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller setup. They love the availability and the resiliency. But then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. Excellent. So, Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap. What is that, you know, the logical air gap, if you will, and then the physical labor. What do you, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? Well, first of all, obviously we, with the Infinigard as a purpose-built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup is one of the first things, the sophisticated ransomware or malware entity is going to attack, right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up, say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AKA their backup estate is exactly the first thing they're gonna target. And they do it certitiously, of course. So one of the key things we do is we allow them to take those backup data sets, Commvault, for example, and in Stan's example, or Veeam or Veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle RMAN, and allow them to create immutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can't alter them. And then we air gap them locally from the management framework. So in an Infinigard, we have a technology known as our data dedupe engines, our DDE's. Those are really the management schema for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap where those DDE's cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they cannot lengthen them. In short, we take that management schema away and create this separation. We also allow them to replicate those backup data sets to a remote Infinigard box. You would set up the exact same parameters I wanna make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours, and then you've got the duplicate. Remember, the average length from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom. It could be going on for 50 days, 100 days, 150 days, and it's all done, if you will, on the download, hidden. So if, by the way, you happen to have a data centerfire or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one Infinigard. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public, it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CAPEX there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the data set. Some of the cyber resilience technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the data set. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So the second that beam or Veritas or IBM Spectrum Tech or Commvault backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins can immediately restore it's ready to go and we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice. Eric was just sharing the local air gap and then the secondary. Is that really in the case of a disaster or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing is the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is split between two sites and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we're down in Texas. Hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles inland and then there's hurricane Harvey with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third site. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know, the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CISO and his team can focus on preventing attacks while they're very confident that their infrastructure team can handle anything that slips by them. Okay, great, thank you. We're about out of time, but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers. Where's that value, that business case for them? I wonder if you could just tie that knot for us. Sure, well, we want to make sure that we tie everything back, not only technical value, as Stan very, very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our InfiniGuard customers is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they were able to increase the number of daily backups from 30,000 to 90,000, so they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA in the European area, they had 14 purpose built backup appliances, seven in one data center and seven in a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one in the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there, and then they replicate from one data center to the other data center as both data centers are both active data centers, but DR for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CAPEX, 14 physical boxes down to two, and of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the Watts slots power and floor, all of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically because there's only two systems now to power, to cool, et cetera, et cetera, floor space, rack space from 14. So wow, did they save money? So I think it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way and a standpoint it out in a highly automated way that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems because they're overworked and they need to focus on a standpoint it out. Their AI infrastructure, what they're doing for AI applications don't have time to do with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end user perspective as well as up and through their entire IT chain of command. Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinite.com or it's markiiisys.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution, a little bit about AI gentlemen. Thanks so much for the conversation today. Great to have you. Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. Hi, I'm Ken Steinhart. I'm the field CTO for the Americas and what gets me excited to get up in the morning is when I have a performance to give, whether it's a musical performance or even a session recording here in my studio or if it has to do with infinite ad, it's probably something like a customer presentation or maybe even running an internal training session or even writing an article. But what it all comes down to is those things really are all the same. It's about telling a story and engaging your audience and hopefully doing something that's valuable for them. It was really more a set of random haphazard events I think than a path. I started in software development and systems analysis, then became a sales rep for a very large computer company and then got into sales training, sales management, marketing management, competitive management, managed large SE organizations, I managed field sales support, managed business development, competitive analysis and then eventually I became the vice president and CTO for all of global products at EMC, but then I retired, which was an interesting part of the path and went back to my roots as a professional rock musician. Came out of that after a few years to do product marketing and competitive work for Pure Storage and then have found my way from there to Infinidad. It's all about supporting the field. It's all about integrating what the field needs with what headquarters needs and ultimately both of those serve the customer. Everything is all about satisfying your customer, understanding their needs and ultimately hopefully providing them with things that make them successful and make them happy. That's what it's all about. So thank you for letting me share some of this with you and share your stories. What are you doing? As we enter the new reality of hybrid work, the exposures that companies have faced as a result of the pandemic and their consequent shift in technology strategies and spending, it demand new ways to protect data. Now we heard today from Infinidad and one of its key partners, Mark III Systems, how these two companies are coming together to help customers respond to new threats. Now key factors that customers should consider are how to back up data as quickly as possible and at the same time, isolate critical data in the case where hackers are attempting to hold your data hostage. In that instance, it's critical to have an isolated save copy of the data because as the saying goes, backup is one thing but fast recovery, that's everything. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Thanks for watching.