 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and Dave and I are at VMworld. This is day three for us. Two sets, Dave, 94 interviews over Monday, Tuesday, today. Excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Brian Carmody, CTO of Infinite. Hey, Brian, good to see you. Hey guys, how are you? And we also have you from US Signal, Mark Crevier, Principal Systems Engineer, one of your customers. Mark, nice to have you on theCUBE. Thanks, great to be here. So day three, everyone has their voices. That's impressive. Lots of news, lots of buzz. I've heard that this is the biggest VMworld so far. I think we've heard upwards of 25,000s. I think it's a little over 21, 22 maybe, yeah. More than last year, Brian would love to get your take on VMworld. Let's start with the business overview. What's new at Infinidats? Oh, things are going great. So this past summer, or this summer, we surpassed four exabytes of customer deployments. So we just- Congratulations. Our customers just have an enormous amount of capacity deployed globally. In March, we launched our portfolio. So we announced four new products, including our flagship F-6212. It's our highest capacity, and our fastest Infinibox ever. It's on track to be the fastest selling model. And it's specifically designed to handle the explosive growth that we're seeing for multi-pedabyte per rack requirements. And it's all being driven by demand in the analytics space, and also in the cloud and service provider spaces. There's some of the things that you're hearing here at VMworld, your customers' responses to some of the huge momentum that you just described. Right, I mean, what customers ask for is number one, they want us to kind of double down on the fundamentals, which is make the cost, the unit cost, the unit economics of storage go down every quarter. So the product has to get cheaper every quarter. The second is maintaining reliability levels. So all of our systems come with a seven-nines SLA, so it's less than three seconds of downtime per system per year. And at service provider environments, that's incredibly important because their customers are entrusting them with their operations. But the biggest change that we're seeing over time is this non-linear insatiable growth for increases in capacity. So when we brought Infinibox to market in 2013, our largest configuration was a petabyte of capacity per rack. We now have configurations with 10 petabytes of effective capacity per rack, and we have customers that are screaming at us, asking us to double and triple that density. So if there's one thing that doesn't change from year to year, is that there's always an awesome vibe at VMware, and the demand for storing huge massive amounts of information only increases every year. And it's a place for practitioners to gather, right? The great thing about VMworld is this event has been hardcore practitioners, IT folks, and they haven't lost that. So, Marcus, turn it to you. I mean, US Signal, what are you guys all about? What's your role there? And I really want to get into how you're using Infinidat technology. Absolutely, I'm a Principal Systems Engineer in our Cloud Engineering Department, and US Signal is an IT services provider based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We've got a whole stack. We're network, co-location, data protection, infrastructure as a service, and disaster recovery. All as managed services. One thing that we're able to do, we actually have a fiber optic network that's about 14,000 miles throughout the Midwest. So we're able to deliver a door to data center design that's everything. As soon as that data leaves the customer premises, it never leaves our assets, which is a great thing we're able to deliver, and we layer on top of that our data protection suites, and we've had explosive growth in all these areas. That's one of the ways that Infinidat's really helped. We've had, we used to work in challenges of managing hundreds of terabytes. Now we're on multi-petabyte scale. Our infrastructure footprint has actually been doubling year over year. So it's matching what you're seeing as far as demand. I think we're matching that demand in our environment. So, and it's not just data on an array. This is our customer's business. So we're really intensely focused on protecting that and delivering solutions, and Infinidat's really helped us along that journey. We're going to get into that, but the data center business is on fire. What do you see as the big growth drivers in your business? A lot of the drivers for us specifically is reduction of scope of PCI compliance and HIPAA compliance. Our entire offering is actually HIPAA and PCI compliant. So that's a big driver. We got a lot of traction in the financial and healthcare verticals in organizations. They've got an initiative to get to the cloud and we're a very concierge level service, right? We help people get there, whether it's into our cloud ideally, or we even help people get to a hybrid approach, leveraging other partnerships as well. But yeah, that's a big driver. And data protection, we're experts in disaster recovery and helping people not only have it in place, but executing on the plan, testing the plan, because until you've tested it, you don't have a DR plan. You know, these over the years, I've had an opportunity to visit facilities of cloud service providers. And I'd noticed years ago, and maybe it's even still the way this way in a lot of places, they had one of everything. I mean, they had a lot of diversity, a really heterogeneous environment, very hard to manage, a lot of stovepipes. And so I'm interested in what led you to Infinidat. You got big platform, we just heard earlier that it can both do primary storage and data protection with the same fundamental architecture. So what was it about Infinidat that attracted you, give us the before and after, if you would. Yeah, we've made a pretty significant investment in another vendor's technology. And part of our role is determining cost and lead time as customer projects come in. And we had a couple initiatives, one, reduce cost, of course. Two, reduce the wait time between when that request comes in and figuring how much is it going to cost, how long is it going to take to get in. One of the strongest areas that Infinidat was able to solve for us in that is that it's a known cost, the capacity's there. It's gone from a lot of variables on that to we'll have an order come in and they'll ask when can this be provisioned? And I'll shoot an email back saying it's there, send the bill. So very cloud-like sort of model in terms of your customer's consumption. So what has that meant for your business? It's allowed us to be a lot more agile, it's allowed us to be more competitive as far as executing on time frames and cost, as I just said. And the relationship with Infinidat, I mean, we worked a lot of vendors that tell us, here's the product, here's how to use it. Whereas Infinidat, we really have a good dialogue of here's how we'd like to use it. Can we make that work and being involved in that their product pipeline and really having not only being able to provide input but getting feedback on that input and in many cases seeing it turn into actual product features. Is there a common theme that you hear amongst customers? How have you taken the US signal input? Maybe you could give us some perspectives on that. So I mean, I think one of the ways that a lot of the incumbents whose businesses are evaporating and are being disrupted, a lot of places where they got in trouble is they thought, okay, we're the 800 pound gorillas so we're now going to kind of decide what's happening in the market and how things should be and dictated that kind of ivory tower model of product management down into their customers. And it turns out that if you're paying attention, your customers are way smarter than anybody in your business because they're closer to where the rubber meets the road. So we have what I think is a very successful program. We call it social product management where guys like US signal get involved very early in the product development process. We come to them with ideas. Hey, this is something we're thinking about building or this is a way we're thinking about modifying our API and we bring prototypes and we have the kind of relationship where we can iterate on things, starting with ideas all the way through to general availability. And the end result is we end up being able to leapfrog the incumbents who have those kind of traditional waterfall ivory tower models of innovation and they end up with these impedance mismatches where you're not really building the things that customers need for their next big challenge. And that's why we're all here, right? We hear that at every event guys, and you do too, right? It's all about customers giving them a choice. At the end of the day though, you have to be able to, sounds like Brian, what you guys have an infinite amount is this symbiotic relationship with your customers who are helping to significantly influence the product development because that's who, you know, it's the US signals of the world who need to be using this technology so you're not creating it in a vacuum. It sounds like a very highly collaborative environment that is allowing you, sounds like, to leapfrog your competition. It is, it's highly collaborative and it's really hard, I'm not going to lie because if you go and you ask 50 different customers how we should do something, you're going to get 50 different answers and that's why you need a really strong product management team to kind of be able to tease out what customers want versus what customers need and oftentimes what they need, they don't know yet because it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit ahead of the curve and that's where the art of the product management comes at the time. So Mark, Mark, I've known Brian for a while. You've briefed me many times, we've done a lot of interviews together. I want to test something that Brian has convinced me of but I want to hear from the customer. Sounds like trouble. So think about Infinidet. I hear all the time, simplicity. Cost effective, but yet faster than flash and a variety of use cases with the same architecture. I can use the system for both primary and secondary storage and then the innovations that come along through its software, I can roll back to serial number 001, you know, every system is able to take advantage of that. All true? Is that in your experience? Absolutely, yeah. Any deviation from those things? I mean, come on, you could tell us the truth. No, we beat them up. I mean, one thing that's interesting about the service provider space is we don't necessarily know or control what the workload is, right? We know just anecdotally that we've got SQL, we know anecdotally we've got Oracle and SAP in our environment and the system stands up to all of it. I mean, it outperforms the platform that we came from by multitudes of degree. The, as an example, you know, we've got previous platform, multi-day preparation for an upgrade, we do 40 minutes a piece and we're done, we're off the phone. It's amazingly simple as compared to other platforms we've worked with. And so these guys aren't, you know, you go on the floor here, there's a lot of buzz, there's a lot of hype, you know, these guys aren't a hype company. I mean, I've talked to dozens of your customers that have very similar stories, so I kind of already knew what the answer was. And kind of boring, but consistent. But were you nervous about working with a supplier that probably a lot of folks in your organization hadn't heard of? How'd you get through that? That was definitely a challenge early on. We had some people in the department that were very set in a mindset, like they knew what they wanted before the project started, right? And just rigorous testing and vetting and, you know, looking at the pedigree of Moshe, the founder of the company, you know, there was a lot of trust put in what he's been able to do in seeing those progressions. And yeah, it was a little bit of a leap of faith and we're absolutely glad we did it because it's been nothing but huge payoff. Yeah, I mean, the guy who invented the modern storage business, I guess that helps. All right, good. Well, Brian, you can't have anything more validating than the voice of a successful customer. So, Mark, thanks so much for sharing what you're doing with Infinite App. Brian, thanks for stopping by and giving us an update. And it sounds like we're going to be hearing some more great things coming from both of you guys in the near future. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks you guys, thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are at VLMworld 2018 Day 3. Stick around, we'll be back after a break.