 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have the pleasure of welcoming back our most prolific guest on theCUBE in its history, the CMO of Infinitet, Eric Herzog. Eric, it's great to see you, welcome back. Lisa, it's great to be here. Love being on theCUBE. I think this might be a number 55 or 56, been doing them a long time with theCUBE. You guys are great. You have, and we always recognize you lately with the Hawaiian shirts. It's your brand, and that's the Eric Herzog brand. We love it, but I like the pin, the Infinitet pin, on brand. Yeah, oh, got to be on brand. Exactly. So talk about the current IT landscape, so much change we've seen in the last couple of years specifically. What are some of the big challenges that you're talking with enterprise customers and cloud service providers about? What are some of those major things on their minds? So there's a couple of things. First of all is obviously with the rock economy, and even before COVID, just for storage in particular, CIOs hate storage. I've been doing this now since 1986. I have never, ever, ever met a CIO at any company I've been with, and I've been with four of the biggest storage companies on this planet. Never met a CIO, used to be a storage guy. So you know they need it, but boy, they really don't like it. So the storage admins have to manage more and more storage, exabytes, exabytes. It's just ballooning for what a storage admin has to do. Then you then have the COVID, and is it recession? No, is it a growth? And then clearly what's happened in the last year with what's going on in Europe, and is it a recession, the inflation? So they're always looking to how do we cut money on storage yet still get what we need for applications, workloads, and use cases. So that's definitely the biggest, the first topic. So never met a CIO that was a storage admin or as a fan, but as you point out, they need it. And we've seen needs changing in customer landscapes, especially as the threat landscape has changed so dramatically the last couple of years. Ransomware, you've said it before, I say it too. It's no longer if, it's when, it's how often it's the frequency, we've got to be able to recover. Backups are being targeted. Talk to me about some of, in that landscape, some of the evolutions of customer challenges and maybe those CIOs going, we've got to make sure that our storage data is protected. So it's starting to change. However, historically with the CIO and then when they started hiring CISOs or security directors, whatever they had depending on the company size, it was very much about protecting the edge. Okay, if you will, the moat and the wall of the castle. Then it was the network in between, so keep the streets inside the castle clean. Then it was tracking down the bad guy. So if they did get over, the issue is, if I remember correctly, the chef of Nottingham never really caught Robin Hood. So the problem is the dwell time where the ransomware malware is hidden on storage could be as much as 200 days. So I think they're starting to realize at the security level, now forget the guys on the storage side, the security guys, the CISO, the CIO are starting to realize that if you're going to have a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy you must include storage and that is new. That's promising then, that's new. I mean, obviously promising given the challenges and the circumstances. So then from a storage perspective, customers that are in this multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, you talked about the edge cloud on-prem. What are some of the key things from a storage perspective that customers have to achieve these days to be secure as data volumes continue to grow and spread? So we've done is implement on both primary storage and secondary storage technology called Infinisafe. So Infinisafe has the four legs of the storage cybersecurity stool. So first of all is creating an air gap. In this case a logical air gap can be local or remote. We create an immutable snapshot which means it can't be changed, it can't be altered so you can't change it. We have a fenced forensic environment to check out the storage because you don't want to recover. Again, malware and ransomware is hidden. So you could be making immutable snapshots of actually malware, ransomware, I never know you're doing it. So you have to check it out. Then you need to do a rapid recovery. The most important thing if you have an attack is how fast can you be up and going with recovery? So we have actually instituted now a number of cyber storage security guarantees. We will guarantee the SLAs on A, the snapshot is absolutely immutable. So they know that what they're getting is what they were supposed to be getting. And then also we are guaranteeing recovery times. On primary storage we're guaranteeing recovery of under one minute. We'll make the snapshot available under one minute. And on secondary storage under 20 minutes. So those are things you got to look for from a security perspective. Then the other thing you got to practice. In my world ransomware, malware, cyber tech is basically a disaster. So yes, you got the hurricane. Yes, you got the flood. Yes, you got the earthquake. Yes, you got the fire in the building. Yes, you got whatever it may be. But if you don't practice malware, ransomware, recoveries and protection, then it might as well be a hurricane or earthquake. It will take your data. It will take your data. And the numbers of customers that pay ransom is pretty high, isn't it? And not necessarily able to recover their data. So it's a huge risk. So if you think about it, the government documented that last year, roughly $6 trillion was spent either protecting against ransomware and malware or paying ransomware attacks. And there's been several famous ones. There was one in Korea, $72 million ransom. It was one of Korea's largest companies. So, and those are only the ones that make the news. Most of them don't make the news. Right. So talk to me then. Speaking of making the news, nobody wants to do that. We know every industry is vulnerable to this. Some of the ones that might be more vulnerable, healthcare, government, public sector, education. I think the Los Angeles Unified School District was just hit as well in September. They were. What, talk to me about how InfiniiNet is helping customers really dial down the risk when the threat actors are becoming more and more sophisticated. Well, there's a couple things. First of all, our InfiniiSafe software comes free on our main products. So we have a product called InfiniiGuard for secondary storage, and it comes for free on that. And then our primary storage products called the InfiniiBox, it also comes for free. So they don't have to use it, but we embed it. And then we have reference architectures that we give them, our SES, our solutions architects, and our technical advisors all up to speed on why they should do it, how they should do it. We have a number of customers doing it. Yeah, we're heavily concentrated at Global Fortune 2000. For example, we publicly announced that 26% of the Fortune 50 use our technology, even though we're a small company. So we go to extra lengths to A, B, educated on our own front, our own teams, and then B, make sure they portray that to the end users and our channel partners. But the end users don't pay a dime for the software that does what I just described. It's free, it's included when you get your InfiniiBox or your InfiniiGuard, it's included at no charge. That's pretty differentiating from a competitive standpoint, I might, I would guess. It is and also the guarantees. So for example, on primary storage, okay, where you'd put your Oracle or put your SAP or your Mongo or your SQL, or your highly transactional workloads, right? Your finance workload, all your business critical stuff. We are the first and only storage company that offers a primary guarantee on cyber storage resilience. And we offer two of them on primary storage. No other vendor offers a guarantee which we do on primary storage. We're the first and right now, as of here we are sitting in the middle of October, we are still the only vendor that offers anything on primary storage from a guaranteed SLA on primary storage for cyber storage resilience. Let's talk about those guarantees. Walk me through what you just announced. There's been a very, a lot of productivity at InfiniiDAT in 2022, a lot of things that you've announced but uncrack some of the things that you're announcing. Talk to me specifically about those guarantees. And what's in it for me as a customer? It sounds pretty obvious, but I'd love to hear it from you. We've done really three different types of guarantees. The first one is we have 100% availability guarantee on a primary storage. And we've actually had that for the last since 2019. So it's 100% availability. We guarantee no downtime, 100% availability, which for our customer base being heavily concentrated the Global Fortune 2000, large government enterprises, big universities, and even smaller companies. We do a lot of business with CSPs and MSPs. In fact, at the Flash Memory Summit our InfiniiBox SSA all Flash was named the best product for hyperscaler deployment. Hyperscaler basically means cloud servers provider. So they need 100% availability. So we have a guarantee on that. Second guarantee we have is a performance guarantee. We'll do an analysis, we look at all their workloads and then we will guarantee in writing what the performance should be based on which of our products they want to buy. Our InfiniiBox, our InfiniiBox SSA, which is all Flash. Then we have the third one is all about cyber resilience. So we have two on our InfiniiBox, our InfiniiBox SSA for primary storage, which is a one, the immutability of the snapshot and it means you can't erase the data, right? Can't tamper with it. Second one is on the recovery time, which is under a minute. We just announced in the middle of October that we are doing a similar cyber storage resilience guarantee on our InfiniiGuard secondary product which is designed for backup recovery, et cetera. We will also offer the immutability of snapshot guarantee and also one on the recoverability of that data in under 20 minutes. In fact, we just did a demo at our live launch earlier this week and we demoed 20 petabytes of Veeam backup data recovered in 12 minutes. 12 minutes, 20 petabytes in 12 minutes. That's massive, that's massively differentiating but that's essential for customers because in terms of backups and protecting the data it's all about recovery. And once they've had the attack, it's how fast do you get back online? That's what happens. If they can't stop the attack, can't stop the threat and it happens, they need to get that back as fast as they can. So we have the speed of recovery on primary storage, the first in the industry and we have speed on the backup software and we'll do the same thing for a backup dataset recovery as well. Talk to me about the what's in it for me for the cloud service providers. They're obviously the ones that you work with are competing with the hyperscalers. How does the guarantees and the differentiators that Infinidot is bringing to market? How do you help those cloud SPs dial up their competitiveness against the big cheeses? Well, what we do is we provide that underlying infrastructure. First of all, we only sell things that are petabyte in scale. That's like all we sell. So for example, on our Infinidog product, the raw capacity is over four petabytes and the effective capacity because you do data reduction is over 85 petabytes on our newest announced product. On our primary storage product, we now can do up to 17 petabytes of effective capacity in a single rack. So the value to the service rider is they can save on what slots, power and floor, a greener data center, right? Which by the way is not just about environmentals but guess what? It also translate into operational expense. Exactly. Capaxophics. With a lot of these very large systems that we offer you can consolidate multiple products from our competitors. So for example, with one of the competitors we had a deal that we did last quarter, 18 competitive arrays into one of ours. So talk about saving not just on all of the operational expense including operational manpower but actually dramatically on the Capax. In fact, one of our Fortune 500 customers in the telco space over the last five years had told us on Capax alone, we've saved them $104 million on Capax by consolidating smaller technology into our larger systems. And one of the key things we do is everything is automated. So we call it autonomous automation, use AI based technology. So once you install it, we've got several public references who said, I haven't touched this thing in three or four years. It automatically configures itself, it automatically adjusts to changes in performance and new apps when I put in pointing new app at it, automatically. So in the old days, the storage admin would optimize performance for a new application. We don't do that. We automatically do it and autonomously. The admin doesn't even click a button. We just sense there's new applications and we automate ourselves and configure ourselves without the admin having to do anything. So that's about saving operational expense as well as operational manpower. Absolutely, one of the things that was ringing in my ear was workforce productivity and obviously those storage admins being able to focus on more strategic projects. Can't believe the CIOs aren't coming around yet but you said there's a change, there's a wave coming. But if we think about the what's in it for me as a customer, the positive business outcomes that I'm hearing, lower TCO, your greener IT, which is key, so many customers that we talk to are so focused on sustainability and becoming greener, especially with an on-prem footprint. Workforce productivity, talk about some of the other key business outcomes that you're helping customers achieve and how it helps them to be more competitive. Sure, so we've got a couple of different things. First of all, storage can't go down. When the storage goes down, everyone gets blamed. When an app goes down, no one really thinks about it. It's always the storage guy's fault. So you want to be 100% available and that's today's businesses, and I'd actually argue it's been this way for 20 years, are 24 by seven by 365. So that's one thing that we deliver. Second thing is performance. So we have public references talking about their SAP workload that used to take two hours, now takes 20 minutes. We have another customer that was doing SAP queries. They improve their performance three times, not 3%, not 3% three times. So 300% better performance just by using our storage. They didn't touch the SAP, they didn't touch the servers. All they do is to put our storage in there. So performance relates basically to applications, workloads and use cases and productivity beyond IT. So think the productivity of supply chain guys, logistics guys, the shipping guys, the finance guys, all these applications that run today's enterprises. So we can automate all that. And then clearly the cyber threat. That is a huge issue. And every CIO is concerned about the cyber threat. And in fact, it was interesting, Fortune magazine did a survey of CEOs, and this was last May, the number one concern, 66% in that May survey was cybersecurity, number one concern. So this is not just a CIO thing, this is a CEO thing and a board level thing. I was going to say it's at the board level that the cybersecurity threats are so real, they're so common. No one wants to be the next headline like the colonial pipeline or the school districts or whatnot. And everybody is at risk. So then what you're enabling with what you've just announced, all the guarantees on the SLAs, the massively fast recovery times, which is critical in cyber recovery, obviously. Resilience is key there. Modern data protection it sounds like to me. How do you define that? And what are customers looking for with respect to modern cyber resilience versus data protection? Yeah, so we've got normal data protection because we work with all the backup vendors. Our Infinigard is what's known as a purpose built backup appliance. So that allows you to backup at a much faster rate and we work all the big backup vendors, IBM Spectrum Protect, we work with Veritas, Veeam, Commvault, Oracle ARM, anybody who does backup. So that's more about the regular side, the traditional backup. But the other part of modern data protection is infusing that with the cyber resilience because cyber resilience is a new thing. Yes. From a storage guy perspective, it hasn't been around a long time. Many of our competitors have almost nothing. One or two of our competitors have a pretty robust but they don't guarantee it the way we guarantee it. So they're pretty good at it but the fact that we're willing to put our money where our mouth is, we think says we probably stand above. And then most of the other guys in the storage industry are just starting to get on the bandwagon of having cyber resilience. So that changes what you do from data protection, what I call modern data protection is a combination of traditional backup recovery, et cetera, now with this influence and this infusion of cyber security, cyber resilience into a storage environment. And then of course we've also happened to add it on primary storage as well. So whether it's primary storage or backup and archive storage, we make sure you have that right cyber resilience to make it, if you will, modern data protection. And different from what it, the old backup of your grandfather, son backup and tape or however you used to do it, we're well beyond that now with adding the cyber resilience aspect. Well, from a cyber resilience perspective, ransomware, malware, cyber attacks, that's a disaster, right? But traditional disaster recovery tools aren't really built to be able to pull back that data as quickly as it sounds like Infinidat is able to facilitate. Yeah, so one of the things we do is in our reference architectures and written documentation as well as when we do the training, we'd sell the customers, you need to practice. If you practice when there's a fire, a flood, a hurricane, an earthquake or whatever is the natural disaster, if you're practicing that, you need to practice malware and ransomware. And because our recovery is so rapid, and the case where Infinigard, our fenced environment to do the testing is actually embedded in it. Several of our competitors, if you want the fenced environment, you have to buy a second product. With us, it's all embedded in the one item. So A, that makes it more effective from a capex and op-ex perspective, but it also makes it easier. We recommend that they do the practice recoveries monthly. Now, whether they do it or not, separate issue, but at least that's what we're recommending and say you should be doing this on a monthly basis, just like you would practice a disaster, like a hurricane or fire or a flood or an earthquake, need to be practicing. And I think people are starting to hear it, but they don't still think more about, you know, the flood or about the earthquake. Yeah, that's what they think about. They're not yet thinking about cybersecurity as really a disaster model, and it is. Absolutely it is. The theme of cyber resilience, as you said, this is a new concept. A lot of folks are talking about it, applying it differently. Is that going to help dial up those folks just really being much more prepared for that type of cyber disaster? Well, we've made it so it's automated. Once you set up the immutable snapshots, it just does its thing. You don't have to do anything. We create the logical airbag once you do it, same thing, set it and forget it. The fenced forensic environment, easy to deploy, you do have to just configure it once. And then obviously the recovery is almost instantaneous. It's under a minute guaranteed on primary storage and under 20 minutes. Like I told you when we did our launch this week, we did 20 petabytes of beam backup data in 12 minutes. So that's pretty incredible. That's a lot of data to have recovered in 12 minutes. So the more automated we make it, which is what our real forte is, is this autonomous automation and automating as much as possible to make it easy to configure when you do have to configure. That's what differentiates what we do from our perspective. But overall in the storage industry, it's the recognition finally by the CISOs and the CIOs, that wait a second, maybe storage might be an essential part of my corporate cybersecurity strategy, which it has not been historically. But you're seeing that change. Yes, we're starting to see that change. Excellent. So talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the go-to market. When can folks get their hands on the updates to InfiniGuard, InfiniSafe, InfiniBox? So all these are available right now. They're available now either through our teams or through our channel partners globally. We do about 80% of our business globally through the channel. So whether you talk to us or talk to our channel partners, we're there to help. And again, we put our money where our mouth is with those guarantees. Make sure we stand behind our products. That's awesome. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the program. Congratulations on the launch. The year of productivity just continues for InfiniGuard. It's basically what I'm hearing, but you're really going in the extra mile for customers to help them ensure that the inevitable cyber attacks that their complete storage environment on-prem will be protected. And more importantly, recoverable very quickly. We appreciate your insights and your input. Great, absolutely love being on theCUBE. Thank you very much for having us. Of course, it's great to have you back. We appreciate it. For Eric Herzog, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE conversation live from Palo Alto.