 Hello and welcome to this power panel where we go deep with three storage industry vets, two from Infinidat and an analyst view to find out what's happening in the high-end storage business and what's new with Infinidat, which has recently added significant depth to its executive ranks. And we're going to review the progress on Infinidat's Infinibux SSA, a low-latency all-solid-state system designed for the most intensive enterprise workloads. To do that, we're joined by Phil Bollinger, who's the chief executive officer of Infinidat. Ken Steinhart as field CTO at Infinidat. And we bring in the analyst view with Eric Bergener, who's the vice president of research, infrastructure, systems, platforms, and technologies group at IDC. All three CUBE alums. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thanks very much, Dave. Good to be here. Thanks, Dave. As always a pleasure. Phil, let me start with you. As I mentioned up top, you've been top grading your team. We covered the Herzog news, beefing up your marketing and also upping your game and Amiya and APJ go to market recently. Give us the business update on the company since you became CEO earlier this year. Yeah, Dave, I'd be happy to. You know, I joined the company in January and it's been a fast 11 months. Exciting, exciting times at Infinidat. As you know, really beginning last fall, the company has gone through quite a renaissance, a change in the executive leadership team. It was really excited to join the company. We brought on new CFO, new chief human resources officer, new chief legal officer, operations head of operations. And most recently, as has been widely reported, we brought in Eric to head up our marketing organization as a CMO. And then last week, Richard Bradbury in London to head up international sales. So very excited about the team we brought together. It's resulted in or it's been the culmination of a lot of work this year to accelerate the growth of Infinidat. And that's exactly what we've done. It's the company has posted quarter after quarter of significant revenue growth. We've been accelerating our rate and pace of adding a large new Fortune 500 global 2000 accounts. And the results show it, definitely. One of the most exciting things I think this year has been Infinidat has pretty rapidly evolved from a single product line company around the Infinibox architecture, which is what made us unique at the start and still makes us very unique as a company. And we've really expanded out from there on that same common software defined architecture to the SSA, the solid state array, which we're gonna talk about in some depth today. And then our backup appliance, our data protection appliance as well, all running the same software. And what we see now in the field, many customers are expanding quickly beyond the traditional Infinibox business to the other parts of our portfolio. And our sales teams in turn are expanding their selling motion from kind of an Infinibox approach to a portfolio approach. And it's really helping accelerate the growth of the company. Yeah, that's great to hear. You've really got a deep bench. And of course, you know a lot of people in the industry, so you tap a lot of your colleagues. Okay, let's get into the market. I want to bring in the analyst perspective. Eric, can you give us some context? When we talk about things like ultra low latency storage, what's the market look like to you? Help us understand the profile of the customer, the workloads, the market segment, if you would. You bet. So I'll start off with a macro trend, which is clearly there's more real time data being captured every year. In fact, by 2024, 24% of all of the data captured and stored will be real time. And that puts very different performance requirements on the storage infrastructure than what we've seen in years past. A lot of this is driven by digital transformation. We've seen new workload types come in, big data analytics, real time big data analytics. And obviously we've got legacy workloads that need to be handled as well. One other trend I'll mention that is really pointing up this need for low latency, consistent low latency is workload consolidation. We're seeing a lot of enterprises look to move to fewer storage platforms, consolidate more storage workloads onto fewer systems. And to do that, they really need low latency, consistent low latency platforms to be able to achieve that and continue to meet their service level agreements. Great, thank you for that. All right, Ken, let's bring you into the conversation. Stiney, what are the business impacts of latency? I want you to help us understand when and why is high latency a problem? What are the positive impacts of having a consistent low latency opportunity or option? And what kind of workloads and customers need that? Right, the world has really changed. I mean, when dinosaurs like me started in this industry, the only people that really knew about performance were the people in the data center. And then as things moved into online computing over the years, then people within your own organization would care about performance if things weren't going well. And it was really the ERP revolution in the 1990s that sort of opened people's eyes to the need for performance, particularly for storage performance, where now it's not just your internal users, but your suppliers are now seeing what your systems look like. Fast forward to today, in a web-based internet world, everyone can see with customer-facing applications, whether you're delivering what they want or not. And to answer your question, it really comes down to competitive differentiation for the users that can deliver a better user-customer experience. And I'm sure everybody can relate. If you go online and try to place an order, especially with the holiday season coming up, if there's one particular site that is able to give you instantaneous response, you're more likely to do business there than somebody where you're gonna be waiting. And it literally is that simple. It used to be that we cared about bandwidth and we used to care about IOs per second. And the third attribute latency really has become the only one that really matters going forward. We've found that most customers tell us that these days almost anyone can meet their requirements for bandwidth and IOs per second with very few outlying cases where that's not true. But the ever unachievable zero latency, instantaneous response, that's always going to be able to give people competitive differentiation in everything that they do. And whoever can provide that is going to be in a very good position to help them serve their customers better. Yeah, Eric, that stat you threw out of 24% real time and that sort of underscores the need. But Phil, I wonder if you could talk about how that fits into your TAM expansion strategy. I think that's the job of every CEO is to think about the expanding the TAM. It seems like, a lot of people might say it's not necessarily the largest market, but it's strategic and maybe opens up some downstream opportunities. Is that how you're thinking about it or based on what Ken just said, you expect this to grow over time? Oh, we definitely expect it to grow, Dave. The history of Infinitad has been around Infinibox product targeting the primary storage market at the higher end of that market. We've enjoyed operating in a $8, $9, $10 billion TAM through the years and that it continues to grow and we continue to outpace market growth within that TAM, which is exciting. What the SSA really does is it opens up a tier of workload performance that we see more and more emerging in the primary data center. The Infinibox, classic Infinibox architecture we have very, very fast. As we say, it typically outperforms most of our all flash array competitors, but clearly there are a tier of workloads that are growing in the data center that require very, very tight tail latencies. And that segment is certainly growing. It's where some of the most demanding workloads are at. The Infinibox SSA was really built to expand our participation in those segments of the market. And as I mentioned up front, at the same time also taking that software architecture and moving it into the data protection space as well, which is a whole other market space that we're opening up for the company. So we really see our TAM this year with more of this portfolio approach expanding quite a bit. Eric, how do you see it? Well, those real time applications that you talked about that require that consistent ultra low latency grow kind of in parallel with that real time curve, will they become a bigger part of that, the overall storage TAM and the workload mix? How does IDC see it? Yeah, so they actually are going to be growing over time. And a lot of that's driven by the fact of the expectations that Steinhard mentioned a little bit earlier just on the part of customers, right? What they expect when they interact with your IT infrastructure. So we see that absolutely growing going forward. I will make a quick comment about, you know, when all flash arrays first hit back in 2012, in the 10 years since they started shipping, they now generate over 80% of the primary revenues out there in the primary storage arena. So clearly they've taken over an interesting aspect of what's going on here is that a lot of companies now write RFPs specifically requiring an all flash array. And what's going to be interesting for Infinidad is despite the fact that they could deliver better performance than many of those systems in the past, they couldn't really go after the business where that RFP was written for an AFA spec. Well, now they'll certainly have the opportunity to do that. In my estimation, that's going to give them access to about an additional 5 billion in TAM by 2025. So this is big for them as a company. Yeah, that's a 50% increase in TAM. So, okay, well, Eric, you just set up my followup question to you, Ken, was going to be the tougher questions, which you and I have had some healthy debates about this, but I know you'll have answers. So for years, you've argued that your cashed architecture and magic sauce algorithms, if I can call it that, could outperform all flash arrays using spinning disks. So Eric talked about the sort of check off item, but are there other reasons for the change of heart? And why does the world need another AFA? Doesn't this cut against your petabyte scale messaging? I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. Sure, a great question. And the good news is Infinibox still does typically outperform all flash arrays, but usually that's for average of latency performance. And we're attending to get, because we're a caching architecture, not a tiered architecture, and we're caching to DRAM, which is an order of magnitude faster than flash or even storage class memory technologies, it's our software magic. And that software defined storage approach that we've had that now effectively is extended to solid state arrays. And some customers told us that, you know, we love your performance. It's incredible. But if you could let us effectively be confident that we're seeing, you know, sub millisecond, sub half millisecond performance, consistently for every single IO, you're going to give us competitive differentiation. And this is one of the reasons why we chose to call the product a solid state array, as opposed to merely an all flash array, the more common ubiquitous term. And it's because we're not dependent on a specific technology. We're using DRAM. We can use virtually any technology on the backend. And in this case, we've chosen to use flash, but it's the software that is able to provide that caching to the front end DRAM that makes things different. So that's one aspect is it's the software that really makes the difference. It's been the software all along and still on this architecture as Phil mentions, and you're going to cross the multiple products, it's still the software. It's also that in that class of ultra high performance, architecturally, because it is based on the Infinibox architecture, we're able to deliver 100% availability, which is another aspect that the market has evolved to come to expect. And it's not rocket science or magic how we do it. The godfather of computer science, John Von Neumann, all the way back in the 1950s, theorized all the way back then that the right way to do ultra high availability and integrity and IT systems of any type is in threes, triple redundancy. And in our case, amazingly, we're the only architecture that uses triple redundant active active components for every single mission critical component on the system. And that gives a level of confidence to people from an availability perspective to go with that performance that is just unmatched in the market. And then bring all of that together with a set it and forget it mentality for ease of use and simplicity of management. And as Phil mentioned, being able to have a single architecture that can address now, not only the ultra high performance, but across the entire swath of, as Eric mentioned, consolidation, which is a key aspect as well driving this in addition to those real-time applications that he mentioned and even being able to take it down into our our Infinity Guard data protection device, but all with the same common base of software, common interface, common user experience and unmatched availability. And we've got something that we really think people are going to like and they've certainly been proving that of late. Well, I was going to ask you, you know, what makes the Infinibox SSA different? But I think you just laid it out, but your contention is this is totally unique in the marketplace. Is that right, Ken? Yes, indeed. This is a unique architecture. And I literally as a computer scientist myself truly am genuinely surprised that no other vendor in the market has taken the wisdom of the Godfather of computer science, John Von Neumann and put it into practice except in the storage world for this particular architecture, which transcends our entire realm all the way from the performance down to the data protection. Phil, I mean, you have a very wide observation space in this industry and the good strong historical perspective. Do you think the expectations for performance and this notion of ultra low latencies, you know, becoming more demanding, is there a parallel? So first of all, why is that? We've talked about it a little bit, but is there a parallel to the way availability? Remember, you could have escalated over the years because it was such a problem and now it's really become table stakes and that last mile is so hard, but what are your thoughts on that? I think absolutely, Dave. You know, the hallmark of Infinidat is this white glove, conchairs level customer experience that we deliver and it's affirmed year after year in unsolicited enterprise customer feedback above every other competitor in our space. Infinidat sets itself apart for this and I think that's a big part of what continues to drive and fuel the growth and success of the company. I just want to touch on a couple of things that Ken and Eric mentioned. The SSA absolutely opens up our TAN because we get a lot more at bats now, but I think a lot of the industry looks at Infinidat as well, those guys are hard drive zealots, right? They're architectures all based on rotating disk, that's what they believe in and it's a hybrid versus AFA world out there and they were increasingly not on the right bus and that's just absolutely not true and that our neural cache and what Ken talked about, what made us unique at the start, I think actually only increasingly differentiates as going forward in terms of the set it and forget it, the intelligence of our architecture, the ability of that DRAM based cache to adapt so dynamically without any knobs and configuration changes to massive changes in workload scale and user scale and it does it with no drama. In fact, most of our customers, the most common feedback we get is that your platform just kind of disappears into our data infrastructure. We don't think about it, we don't worry about it. When we install an Infinidat rack, our intentions are never to come back. We're not there showing up with trays of disk under our arms trying to upgrade a mission critical platform, that's just not our model. What the SSA does is it gives our customers choice. It's not about Infinidat saying that used to be the shiny object. Now this is our new shiny object, please everybody now go by that. What we're where we position our SSA is, it's a TCO latency SLA choice that they can make between exactly identical customer experiences. So instead of an old hybrid and a new AFA, we've got that same software architecture set it and forget it, the neural cache. And customers can choose what back end persistent store they want based on the TCO and the SLA that they want to deliver to a given set of applications. So probably the most significant thing that I've seen happen in the last six months at Infinidat is a lot of our largest customers, the Fortune 15s, the Fortune 50s, the Fortune 100s, who have been longstanding Infinidat customers are now on almost every sort of retronch or tranche of purchase orders into us. We're now seeing a mix. We're seeing a mix of some SSA and some classic Infinibox because they're mixing and matching in a given data center down a given row. These applications need this SLA, these applications need this SLA and we're able to give them that choice. And frankly, we don't intentionally try to steer them one direction or the other. They're smart, they do the math, they can pick and choose what experience they want. Knowing that irrespective of what front door they go through into the Infinidat portfolio, they're going to get that same experience. So I'm hearing it's not just an RFP check-off item, it's more than that. The market is heading that direction, Eric's data on real time, and we're certainly seeing that, the data-driven applications, the injection of AI and systems making decisions in real time. And I'm also hearing, Phil, that you're building on your core principles. I'm hearing the white glove service, the media agnostic, the set it and forget it, sort of principles that you guys were founded on, is you're carrying that through to this, this up. We absolutely are, and the reason, and you asked a good question before, and I want to more completely answer it. I think availability and customer experience are incredibly important today, more so than ever, because data center economics and data center efficiency are more important than ever before is, as customers evaluate what workloads belong in the public cloud, what workloads do I want on-prem? Irrespective of those decisions, they're trying to optimize their operational expenses, their CAPEX expenses. And so, one thing that Infinidad has always excelled at is consolidation, bringing multiple users, multiple workloads into the same common platform in the data center. It saves floor space and Watson and storage administration resources. But to do consolidation well, you've got to be incredibly reliable and incredibly predictable without a lot of fuss and drama associated with it. And so I think the thing that has made Infinidad really strong through the years with being a very good consolidation platform is more important now than ever before and in the enterprise storage space, because it is really about data center efficiency and administration efficiency associated with that. Yeah, thank you for that, Phil. Now, actually, Ken, let me come back to you. I want to ask you a question about consolidation. You and I and Doc, our business friend, Restis Sol, have had some great conversations about this over time, but as you consolidate, people are sometimes worried about the blast radius. Can you address that concern? Sure, well, Phil alluded to software and it is the cornerstone of everything we bring to the table and it's not just that deep learning that transcends all the intelligence Phil talked about in terms of that full wide range of product. It's also protection of data across multiple sites and in multiple ways. So we were very fortunate in that when we started to create this product, since it is a modern product, we got to start with a clean sheet of paper and basically look at everything that had been done before and even with some of the very people who created some of the original software for replication in the market, we're able to then say, if I could do it again, how would I do it today and how would it be better? So we started with local replication and snapshot technology, which is the foundation for being able to do full active, active replication across two sites today where you can have true zero RPO, no data loss even in the face of any kind of failure of a site, of a server, of a network, of a storage device, of a connection as well as zero RTO, immediate consistent operation with no human intervention and we can extend from that out to remote sites literally anywhere in the world in multiples where you can have additional copies of information and at any of them you can be using not only for protection against natural disasters and floods and things like that but from a cybersecurity perspective, immutable snapshots being able to provide data that you know the bad actors can't compromise in multiple locations. So we can protect today against virtually any kind of failure scenario across the swath of Infinibox or Infinibox SSA. You can even connect Infiniboxes and Infinibox SSAs because they are the same architecture. Exactly as Phil said, what we're seeing is people deploying mostly Infinibox because it addresses the wide swath from a consolidation perspective and usually just Infinibox SSA for those ultra high performance environments but the beauty of it is it looks, feels, runs and operates as that one single simple environment that's said it and forget it and just let it run. Okay, so you can consolidate with confidence. Let's end with the independent analyst perspective, Eric. You know, how do you see this offering? What do you think it means for the market? Is this a new category? Is it an extension to an existing space? How do you look at that? So I don't see it as a new category. I mean, it clearly falls into the current definition of AFAs. I think it's more important from the point of view of the customer base that likes this architecture, likes the availability, the functionality, the flexibility that it brings to the table and they can leverage it with tier zero workloads which was something that in the past they didn't have that latency consistency to do that. You know, I'll just make one final comment on the software side as well. So the reason software is eating the world, Mark Andreessen is basically because of the flexibility, the ease of use and the economics. And if you take a look at how this particular vendor Infinidat designed their product with a software-based definition, they were able to swap out underneath and create a different set of characteristics with this new platform because of the flexibility in the software design. And that's critical. One, if you think about how software is dominating. So today for 2021, 68% of the revenue in the external storage market, that's the size of the software defined storage market. That's going to be going to almost 80% by 2024. So clearly things are moving in the direction of systems that are defined in a software defined manner. Yeah, and data is eating software which is why you're going to need ultra low latency. Okay, we got a wrap. But Eric, you've just published a piece this summer called enterprise storage vendor, Infinidat experience total available market opportunities with all flash system introduction. I'm sure they can get that on your website. Here's a little graphic that shows you how to get that. But so guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on the progress and we'll be watching. Thanks, Dave. Thanks very much, Dave. Thank you, as always a pleasure. Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. Everybody, this is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.