 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to bright and sunny San Francisco. Gorgeous day here in the city on the Bay. Dave Vellante, John Wall, so continue our coverage here on theCUBE, VMworld 2019 with Dr. Rico from Infodont, CMO. Doc, good to see you again, sir. It fitted that. Oh, it fitted. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Good to see you. I missed my opportunity, but thanks, Dave. Thanks, good to be back. You bet, Mark Trivier, who is a Principal Systems Engineer at US Signal. Good to see you again, Mark. You were here just last year, right? Yeah, I'm an alumni now. We'll touch base on that in just a little bit. Doc, first off, let's just talk about the show from your perspective of what you're doing here, to explain to our viewers at home, what it's all about and what you find, the vibe that's going on this year. What kind of sense do you get? The vibe is fantastic. The sense is great. Coming back to San Francisco, I'm not sure what we were really expecting, but it's a really good tempo. A lot of great people. A lot of great feedback on our recent launch. A lot of people looking at what are we doing, especially with VMware and availability, lots of new use cases for snapshot technologies, which is fantastic. The 100% availability, it's just great getting people to come up to you and say, hey, this is incredible. You guys actually put some teeth behind your guarantees. You're not just promising some future discounts or something. And in a VM world environment where I've got my VMs that I need that kind of guarantee, I need that support. I need to know that my systems are going to be there when I need them, because that's my business. It's just an incredible vibe. And you had your party last night? We had our party last night. Very cool venue. I guess it was there. I did stop by. It was a very cool venue, the San Francisco Mint, which was kind of awesome. Yeah, it was a great environment. It was great having people like Dave there and some of the other industry luminaries to talk to our customers. I didn't get the tour of the vault. But I'll get you a picture. So Mark, I mentioned in the intro we had you on last year. So let's look back at the last 12 months for you, US Signal. And what's been going on with you? And then what are you seeing here and kind of feeling here in terms of the business? Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been another great year at US Signal. We are planning on opening a new data center in the Detroit metro area, coming up online Q1 of 2020. So that's exciting for us. Purpose built, wholly owned and operated by us. So that's great. It's going to add to our capabilities in that region. We've had a heavy focus on DR technologies, DR as a service technologies in the past year. Seeing a lot of success, a lot of really good conversations with customers in developing their plans and bringing on new capabilities to be able to service those needs. So tell us more about the DR as a service. I mean, that's obviously one of the early sort of cloud use cases. Add some color. What is it all about? How does it relate to some of the other DR solutions that are out there and what role do these guys play? Yeah, we conducted a survey of a little over 100 of companies in our region had a little over 100 respondents and three out of four respondents told us that their biggest concerns were either distributed denial of service or ransomware. So you got these bad actors out there. It doesn't necessarily have to be a bad actor. It could be something, you know, force of nature, you know, making data unavailable, right? Doesn't matter how great the equipment is if either a bad actor or nature takes it out for you. So having that protection, we're able to have replication technologies. We actually have three separate technologies that we use now. We enhanced our Zerto-based offering to include multi-cloud. So we can now have customers replicate to either multiple cloud destinations, us being one of them, or they can replicate to one of their sites and us as a tertiary site. So that's new. They're able to bring their existing licensing. One thing that's exciting to me, near and dear to my heart, is DRAZ for VMware based on the vCloud availability platform. So we're a big VM, a vCloud shop, you know, big consumer of VMware technologies. That's why we're out here. And that's really exciting to me because it uses built-in VMware replication technologies. There's not a lot of learning curve. There's not a lot of extra components. Super simple to get up and running and get RPOs as low as five minutes. And it's easy and it's relatively cheap and on an OPEX type of platform where you're paying for storage and per VM. And that's it. And then we've also spun up a replication for VM, cloud replication for VM based on that ecosystem. So we've got a lot of entry points, a lot of different ways that we can protect that data and bring it into, you know, get a copy in our data center so that in the event it becomes unavailable at the source, it's either managed or customer managed. We can get it up and running in a short timeframe on our infrastructure. And Infinidad is the primary storage underneath all this? Yeah, yeah. So explain more about, so Doc, you and I have had these conversations, you know, the state of the art, whatever, 15 years ago was three site data centers, very complex, extremely expensive. I'm interested in how we're attacking that problem today. You are obviously with multi-cloud, it's multi-site, but how are we attacking the cost problem, the complexity problem, the I can't test because I can fail over, but I'm afraid to fail back problem? Well, you know, there's so many different ways to cover all of these. We're talking just about ransomware. You know, ransomware are immutable snaps become an important play. And we have snap rotator, which will allow you to build a certain number of snaps and have them just rotate through. So you're not creating an infinite number. You're not wasting time and space. And by the way, time and space, you know, our snapshots are zero overhead. There's zero performance penalty unless you want to crash consistent copy. And there's really zero data overhead because it's only the incremental data that you write. So by creating this, you can do every couple of seconds and then create some immutable copies of that, make them time out so they can't be modified, you know, 30 days, 60 days, whatever you decide administratively. So that's great. If you're looking for the DRAS, the DR as a service type capabilities, you know, whether it's single site or multi site, going to cloud service providers makes a lot of sense. Because now, even if it's on premises to a cloud service provider, now you're not having to worry about that second set of infrastructure. You're not having to worry about the management of it. You're not having to worry about the system's integration of it. Or even go CSP to CSP, right? Go from, you know, one data center within your favorite cloud service provider, hopefully US signal to another, you know, or any one of our other great partners would be super too. And then of course, in finishing, you know, where if you really want to, we want that longer distance capability, why bother with a bunker site? Why bother with all that complexity and on that cost and overhead? Put an infinite sync appliance in with a VM and you've got the recoverability. You can go asynchronous distances and have a zero RPO. For way, way less cost. Oh, fraction of the cost. So it'll cost you less for the infinite sync appliance than it'll cost you for the telecoms equipment that you need for a bunker site. Better build another data center and, yeah, yeah. Me, go ahead. Well, I'm curious about, I mean, I heard a number yesterday in one of the interviews we had about ransomware. And then the number kind of blew me away and I thought about one out of every three companies will be a victim of, or at least an ransomware attack within the next two years, which means everyone over the next six, you know, if you extrapolate that out, does that sound about right from what you're seeing that the intrusions are reaching that kind of frequency and, you know, with that? I'm surprised it's that low, but I'll let you know. We've done some events where we actually demo how easy it is, like through a phishing attack, to get that in there. So, you know, it's not just about having those protections in place, it's a user training, that's, you know, a huge area that, you know, training those users what to look for in those emails to avoid that sort of thing, but it's not perfect, you know, people are imperfect and, you know, you got to have both the protection on the front end, the training for the people, and those recovery options in the event it does get in. In our survey, the average monetary damage was over $150,000 per incident. And that means that some people got off a little lighter and some people paid a lot more if that was the average. Average, right. But did you pay the ransom? Not if you've got a good plan in place that you've tested. Right, but it is, I mean. That was a reasonable question, right? Huge quandary, right? Some are, some aren't, right? Atlanta says, no, we're going to pay a boatload to protect against it, but we're not going to pay that, what was it, $55,000 whenever it was, yeah. Let's negotiate. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think I said last time I was here that, you know, until you've tested your plan you don't really have one. You know, it's just rings just for today. What's your business worth? I mean, it's a great question, really, right? I mean, what is your business worth to you? Your business has probably worked a lot more and they probably throw these numbers out there thinking, well, then becomes a no-brainer for you to pay. And that's the whole point, right? Because what is ransomware? It's malware that's recoverable, maybe, right? You're not even sure of that. Is it usually, is it operator error? Is it human error that allows that to work more often than not, or is it a mixture of technical chops, or just? It's a mixture. You've got to know what vulnerabilities are out there on your infrastructure. You've got to make sure you're staying up to date on patching those vulnerabilities, paying attention to any compliance practices. You know, if you're a compliant organization, you know, HIPAA, PCI, our entire infrastructure footprint is actually HIPAA and PCI compliant at the levels that we control. So it's a heavy lift and you've got to stick with it. But just to kind of bring it full circle to the comment about the ransom and paying it, you know, Marx says something really important. Have a good plan. I would argue, have a good partner. If you don't have a CISO, a CISO who's got the chops to be dealing with these types of problems, that's when you need a partner like US Signal to really step in and take you through what's involved in a realistic plan. Something that's not going to break the bank. Something that's really going to protect your business going forward, because these things are very real. One of the concerns I have in this topic is that things happen really fast these days. And so if there are problems, they replicate very, very quickly. How do you address that problem? Is it architecture, analytics, I'm sure process, but maybe you could add some color to that. All of the above. Having those controls in place, those segregations, I mean, we've got obviously a clear segregation between our management and customer data planes and each of our customer data planes are separate from each other. You know, it's secure multi-tenancy, not just multi-tenancy. So yeah, it's important to keep those delineations. You know, user access, making sure that people only have access to what they need. And a lot of that, again, is covered by those compliance practices and paying close attention to what they have. I mean, there are reasons they have these guidelines and these rules and these audits. It's to help in large part to protect against that. You mentioned before Mark, your heavy VMware user, Infinidat, it's kind of the new kid in the block. People said, oh, they'll never be. Not for us. What's that? It's not for us. Not for you, right, but for the storage industry. Doc and I have been in the storage industry a while, so, but I'm curious as to what you want from a supplier like Infinidat, why you chose Infinidat, how they're doing with regard to VMware, Affinity. Yeah. You know, all those things that people tend to talk about as important. Right, well. I think it's important. Well, in the Infinidat experience, like the company experience, the support experience, it is the benchmark by which we judge all other vendors now. It's that good. And working with us whenever we need equipment, obviously, they've got the price per terabyte is hard to beat with the way they ever leveraged that technology. Responsiveness, if we've needed something in a hurry, they've been able to get it to us in a hurry. And it ties in extremely well with our infrastructure because we scale so quickly, right? We, trends are very hard with us because there's all these hockey sticks, right? It's going, going, going, we get a big order and it goes up really fast. I think the theme right now is scale to win. So that resonates with us because by having that in place and having that scale ready to go, we're able to, we don't even need to anticipate those hockey sticks because it's already there. Right. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. Doc can fit it at, you know. Thank you very much. It's great to see you both again. Look forward to seeing 2020, right? I'll be back. Yeah, it's become an annual thing. Michael said we'll be, we'll be celebrating the our 20th year. So I'm looking forward to seeing you guys. And this is our 10th year here. So anniversary's all across the board. Congratulations. Congratulations. Have a good rest of the show. We appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Thank you gentlemen. Back with more VMworld 2019. We continue our coverage live here on theCUBE or at Moscone Center North in San Francisco.