 And we just covered some of the critical aspects from the Infinidats recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Herzog is back and joining us is Stan Rosaki, who's president of Mark III System Stand. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, pleasure to be here. Tell us about Mark III Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says on your website, I'd love to hear more about your business. Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There have been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of the largest enterprise customers in the Southeast with server stores, networking, virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create a full stack message and a full stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers and DevOps, MLOps, and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI, ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them under adoption of open source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment, and Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective, Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? Yeah, that's great. Kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage. And that's both an internal customer and your end user customers on how they want to engage, how they want to consume and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world. So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven. You need to adopt AI platforms. You need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop, right? So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hackers getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward. And we're proud to partner with Infinidat and leveraging Infiniguard and Infinisave to really protect our customers' data. Great, Eric, in thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How is it going to help the end customers? Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the Fortune Survey of CEOs in 2021, the number one concern of CEOs of the Fortune 500 was cybersecurity, and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes the importance of the digital data that all companies generate of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do is make sure that your storage estate fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with Infiniguard, or Infinisave technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world can make sure that the data is safe, protected, and can help them for a malware or ransomware attack against that valuable data set. Well, I wonder if you guys could comment. I mean, we talked to CEOs and they've told us that they're, in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategy has changed no longer. They're just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to different areas. Obviously endpoint, cloud security is a big deal, identity access management, but ransomware is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure now, the weak links, whether you're working from home or, Stan, you mentioned greater sophistication of hackers. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? Well, I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that's gone up in any year, right? So with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like 27 different security products. And imagine, you know, Asiso and his team who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage InfiniGuard and InfiniSafe and to be able to provide, you know the immutable snapshots, the logical air gas, the physical airbags and offense network for recovery, that's all extremely easy to manage. I mean, I talked to my customers and on why they have chosen InfiniGuard, you know, through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is, how easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right? You think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers but my most technical customers really appreciate this because of the way InfiniGuard manages itself and provides the tools saying, I mean, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it so they trust it so that they can focus on the more important tasks rather than the care and feeding of their storage environment. Yeah, thank you. And you know, when you talk to CISO's, you ask them what's the number one problem they'll tell you, lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day. You're getting, you know, billion dollar, you know VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about specifically InfiniGuard, how it fits into your stack like where and how you're applying it. Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. Oh yeah, definitely. You know, we have customers in pretty much every vertical that we're supporting their storage environments and InfiniGuard plays in all of those verticals with all of our customers. You know, one in particular, a healthcare account. One of our very first InfiniGuard customers and over the years has become the de facto standard storage platform that they have. And they also now have InfiniGuard as the back of target for Commvault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer that really demands excellence, right? So they love the, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller setup. They love the availability and the resiliency. But then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. Excellent, so Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap, what is that, you know, the logical air gap, if you will, and then the physical air gap. What patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? Well, first of all, obviously, we with the InfiniGuard as a purpose-built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup is one of the first things to be sophisticated ransomware or malware entity is going to attack, right? Otherwise, the CIO will just call up, say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, aka their backup estate, is exactly the first thing they're going to target and they do it certitiously, of course. So one of the key things we do is we allow them to take those backup data sets, Commvault, for example, in Stan's example, or Veeam or Veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle Armand, and allow them to create immutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can't alter them. And then we airgap them locally from the management framework. So in an InfiniGuard, we have a technology known as our data Ddupe engines, our DDE's. Those are really the management schema for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical airgap where those DDE's cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they cannot lengthen them. In short, we take that management schema away and create this separation. We also allow them to replicate those backup data sets to a remote InfiniGuard box. You would set up the exact same parameters I want to make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours, and then you've got the duplicate. Remember, the average length from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know till they ask you for the ransom, it could be going on for 50 days, 100 days, 150 days. And it's all done, if you will, on the download hidden. So if, by the way, you happen to have a data center fire or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one InfiniGuard. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public, it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CAPEX there. And then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the data set. Some of the cyber resilience technology we'll see out there, including on primary storage only recovers the data set. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So the second that Veeam or Veritas or IBM spectrum protector, Commvault backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins could immediately restore it's ready to go. And we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice. Eric was just sharing the local air gap and then the secondary. Is that really in the case of a disaster or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing is the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is split between two sites and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site just for that fact. We're down in Texas. Hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles inland and then there's hurricane Harvey with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third site. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And the whole thing about it is right. Having an environment like this means the CISO and his team can focus on preventing attacks while they're very confident that their infrastructure team can handle anything that slips by them. Okay, great, thank you. We're about out of time but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers. Where's that value, that business case for them? I wonder if you could just tie that knot for us. Sure, well, we want to make sure that we tie everything back, not only technical value, as Stan very, very eloquently did with several different customers but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our InfiniGuard customers is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they were able to increase the number of daily backups from 30,000 to 90,000. So they get better data protection but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA in the European area, they had 14 purpose built backup appliances, seven in one data center and seven in a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one in the other. They of course do the local backups right then and there and then they replicate from one data center to the other data center as both data centers are both active data centers but DR for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CAPEX, 14 physical boxes down to two and of course the associated management of both the manpower side what I love to call the Watts slots power and floor. All of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically because there's only two systems now to power, to cool, et cetera, et cetera, floor space, rack space from 14. So wow, did they save money? So I think it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology but doing it in a cost effective way and a standpoint it out in a highly automated way that cuts back on the manpower that they need to manage these systems because they're overworked and they need to focus on a standpoint it out. Their AI infrastructure, what they're doing for AI applications don't have time to do with it. So the more we automate the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end user perspective as well as up and through their entire IT chain of command. Okay, if you want more information you can go to infinite.com or it's markiiisys.com You can check it out, learn about their full stack solution, a little bit about AI gentlemen. Thanks so much for the conversation today. Great to have you. Thank you, Dave.