 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, the Cube 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 the Cube. Hello, Eric. Great, Dave. Thank you very much. I love talking to you and the Cube about leading edge technology solutions for end users. All right, 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 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, the 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 Infinigard, 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 DDEs 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 Infinigard in data center A to a different Infinigard 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 Infinigard 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 Infinigard 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, VM, or 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 doubled 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 minimizes 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 Infinigard, 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 Infinigard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure to going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one Infinigard 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 Infinigard on February 9th. So Eric, I'm just kind of sketching out the business case. 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 then 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, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it 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, 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 while 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, Infiniguard, 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 Infiniguard. Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions. They're busy. They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plug in stuff together. So, okay, Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. Great, thank you very much, Dave.