 Tomorrow's competitive advantage will be determined by how well industry leaders innovate today. Having the right infrastructure will make all the difference in enabling them to deliver. Hey everyone, welcome to this event. Data-driven starts with intelligent infrastructure. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This segment is called Managing the Cost and Complexity of Hybrid Cloud Data Infrastructure. It's gonna focus on exploring the challenges customers are facing around data infrastructure and how they're solving them with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome my guest, Dan McConnell, SVP Product Management and Enablement for Digital Infrastructure at Hitachi Vantara. Dan, great to have you on the program. Great to be here, thank you much, Lisa. So customers, Dan, across every industry are facing so many challenges that go well beyond just managing the growth of data right out in the field. I'd love to know some of the things that you're hearing from customers about what they are expecting and their data infrastructure to deliver. Absolutely, yeah. As you pointed out, data growth continues. No surprise there, pick your alarming stat of the week, but data growth just in volume continues to grow. But it's not only the amount of that data, it's also the importance of that data, not just the ones in the zeros, but what's actually in the data? Is it a social security number that can't be copied outside this region? Is it the personal iPhone picks? That probably don't need to be backed up and triplicate. In the same vein, increasing regulatory and compliance regulations surrounding that data, as well as new requirements such as sustainability, how do I store the increasing amounts of data all while trying to drive a zero carbon footprint initiative? And all of this in an increasingly more complex environment, with the introduction of edge and hybrid and multi-cloud, those are driving a much more distributed environment of data. And on top of all of this, to help solve all of these mounting challenges, they're faced with skill set shortages. They need an infrastructure that is automated and flexible with the agility of the cloud models, capable of managing cost and complexity of increasingly distributed hybrid environments, also one that is able to scale to meet growth demands while understanding the actual information that resides in that data. So some great opportunities with respect to data, also some pretty significant challenges that you articulated. Let's kind of look into that. And one of the things that we know, Dan has taught you Ventura, well known for enterprise storage across every industry. I happen to notice that nine of the 10 banks are using Hitachi solutions, for example. So with customers needing this modernized data infrastructure and you talked about hybrid, edge, core, cloud, we know Hitachi is talking way more about selling boxes. So talk about how you're working and partnering together with customers to solve the challenges that they have that you were talking about. Absolutely. To your point, our solutions are trusted. You mentioned nine out of 10 banks, it's nine out of 10 of the largest media, it's nine out of 10 of the largest telecom. There's a good reason for being trusted and trust is earned for many, many years. We've had infrastructure running the world's most mission critical workloads in the industry's toughest environments. We will continue to innovate and drive leadership in our core storage products. But there are other strategic pillars as well that we are focused on that are shaping our offerings. The first one, driving ease of use through analytics and automation. This is leveraging the telemetry, analytics, and automation across the stack to reduce the complexity with what we'll call self-driving infrastructure. Also, we are accelerating the transition to software defined and hybrid enabled. Transitioning our trusted traditional stacks into software defined stacks to enable flexibility and agility, as well as the ability to run them in the cloud to create a seamless data plane across both on-prem and off-prem. And lastly, delivering on as a service. This is both from a flexible consumption pay-as-you-go model, but also from a service level and manageability perspective. One of the things that caught my ear that you mentioned, Dan, is trust is earned. That is trust is currency that is so incredibly important to Hitachi Ventura. I know to your customers as well. You talked about ease of use. You talked about reducing complexity, accelerating transition to software defined. So let's double click a little bit here. Walk me through some of those really tangible, concrete innovations that Hitachi Ventura is delivering to its customers. We'll do, much appreciated. You know, a full core portfolio of refresh across mid-range and enterprise. Now that's, you know, it's core to our business, but one particular innovating aspect here is that this includes a true scale out software defined version based on a common code base. So this is a software defined storage based on our industry proven traditional code stack that enables common management common data services across mid-range enterprise and software defined wherever you run it either on-premise or cloud hosted. So another one we recently released cloud connect. It's a near cloud solution that enables the advantages of enterprise class storage but direct connect to major cloud service providers for use cases like compute scaling or backup in DR. Another one, we recently launched cybersecurity capabilities that enables immutable copies as well as a cyber resiliency air gap solution on our VSP product line. Also, in general, a broader mindset shift where we are treating our storage as much more of a continuous platform. The offering we call modern storage assurance but basically enables our platforms obviously our platform scale as you grow from two controllers to four controllers to 12 controllers. So from a performance capability they scale with you but also across generations as well with full data in place upgrades and no downtime. So your storage stays as a long-term platform as you scale in performance or as you grow over generations much more of a consistent platform view of the storage. In addition, we released a cloud managed storage as a service solution as a part of our EverFlex portfolio with it's got a standardized rate card integrated billing system or billing system integration as well as automated provisioning for the on-premise storage. So quite a list of recent launches. So no doubt we've been busy but you'll see we continue to be busy moving forward. That's a good thing you mentioned CloudConnect cybersecurity capabilities is so important in today's cyber landscape. You also mentioned no downtime which is probably music to everyone's ears. Cloud managed storage as a service. So let's finish up, let's take it home Dan by talking about some of the nuggets, the proof in the pudding, the voice of the customer. I always think there's no better validation than what your customers are saying about their outcomes. So share with us a customer example or two that you think really articulates the value of what Hitachi is delivering. Absolutely. I'll share a few, one Hitachi has the pleasure of being a key strategic partner for BMW providing their enterprise cloud storage and data management. We deliver this as a service from Hitachi Ventara. This enables BMW with simple, agile, flexible solution that's pays you go to help them fuel their innovation without managing the underlying infrastructure leaving that to people who are focused on managing the infrastructure. Another great example is Robobank. This is a Netherlands based financial services company over 8 million customers across 39 countries managing over 590 billion euros. The top priority for its IT teams is to build a reliable infrastructure that safeguards business continuity. Their private cloud grew quickly from 2000 VMs to over 21,000 VMs. They handled that kind of scale through implementing an automated private cloud approach with the help of Hitachi Ventara and our converged solutions. They leveraged our built-in automation capabilities that drove both a 40% increase in performance but also notable improved operational efficiency and time to value. In fact, they handled what was over that 10x scale without adding a single additional person to manage it. So they went from 2000 VMs to 21,000 VMs all with the same IT staff. Great example of how analytics, automation, converged solutions can greatly increase operational efficiency. And I'm gonna guess that we are just scratching the surface. You mentioned two great customer examples. I'm sure there are so many more. Unfortunately, we're out of time. But Dan, thank you for joining me on the program today talking about what customers in every industry are expecting from their data infrastructure, the challenges that are there but also how Hitachi is helping customers to eliminate those challenges one by one. We so appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having me. All right, my pleasure. This is Lisa Martin on behalf of theCUBE and Hitachi Ventura. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more.