>> Announcer: Live from Gillette Stadium
in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE,
covering #VTUG's New England Winner Warmer 2017.
Now, your host, Stu Miniman.
>> And we're back, with SiliconANGLE Media's
presentation of theCUBE, we're the worldwide leader
in enterprise tech coverage, happy to welcome back
to the program, Steve Pao, who's the CMO
of Igneous Systems, Steve flew out from Seattle here to,
welcome to the home of the New England Patriots.
>> Oh my gosh.
Number 12, number 12!
>> The 12 man representing here,
you've got, I have to say, I almost canceled
my season tickets when Pete Carroll was our coach,
so, luckily he's worked out better for you
than he did for us.
My wife's a Brown fan, she says the same thing
about Bill Belichick.
So, it's the coaching fraternity
is kind of like the tech world, it's a small group,
you all kind of get to know each other and move around, so,
thanks for joining us.
>> Yes, well thanks for having me!
>> Alright, so Steve, we've been talking to you guys
since you were coming out of Stealth,
why don't you give our audience, what's the update
on Igneous? >> Okay, well for those
of you who don't know us, what Igneous really does
is we offer an onsite private cloud storage service,
and that's our first offering,
it's part of our greater mission
of providing true cloud for local data,
and what we basically offer today
is an unstructured data store that's completely
delivered as a service, we take our own equipment,
we install it, we monitor it, we manage it,
we even refresh it when necessary,
and all the customer has to do
is really subscribe, and that's it.
It's all pay-as-you-go, and it's all zero touch
for the customer.
We launched back in October, as you recall,
and one of the things that I think
that it's been really great since launching
is that we've really started to see
how customers that didn't know us
are actually really evaluating,
really, I think, the convergence of two trends,
one is there's this data growth, data trend that goes on,
and pretty much everybody we talk to,
citing data growth rates on the order
of doubling every three years,
where IT budgets are growing less than 5% a year,
so there's this mismatch where,
basically everybody's hitting this juncture
that what they used to do can't work
because the data's growing faster than the budget.
And at the same time, there's this data growth
that's actually happening, and the data growth
is not from relational databases and structured data,
but rather, a lot of new applications
that are logging sensor data that are supporting
machine learning, AI, really, it's machine-generated data
being analyzed by machines, with humans
really just training the AI and the machine learning.
>> Yes, Steve, I want to unpack that a little bit,
let's talk it, because many of us that watch storage,
it's been like, well the storage industry,
it needs to change, it's not about selling boxes,
it's not about capacity, and even on unstructured data,
it was kind of like, okay well, what's creating data
and what's actually valuable?
How much is it just, do I stick it on a cheap tier,
what do I actually do with it,
what's interesting you guys do,
some of those use cases, throughout machine learning,
machine data, things like sensors,
every time I hear that word, that IoT buzzword
kind of pops into our head, but maybe you could talk
to some of those, what's bringing customers,
what's that driving challenge that they have,
that you're helping to solve, that's different from
the way storage has been done for many years?
>> Yeah, I think, that's a great question,
and I think that there's just been a real transition,
and I think the transition has been largely created
by the kinds of data that we want to manage
and that we want to curate, and as we're seeing
these sort of large unstructured data sets,
it starts with the data, so as an example,
you take equipment that used to exist in the past,
like let's say in scientific computing.
You used to have flow cytometers,
which were just time-series data,
and then what's now happened is
is associate with ever flow cytometers,
now a real-time video feed.
When you look at the old world of microscopy,
what you used to do is you used to flash freeze a sample,
and basically take a picture of it,
and now what you can do with lattice light-sheet microscopy
is you can actually look at cells in vivo,
while they're alive, and you can,
I've personally gotten to watch
a T cell move through a collagen matrix,
and that's all microscopy, but generating
orders of magnitude more data.
That is, we're looking at these very, very different
data sets, we're looking at very, very different
kinds of computing, and what that requires
is very, very different kind of infrastructure.
And so, the infrastructure has just had
to get a lot more intelligent,
and the architecture has had to get a lot different,
and what we've noticed is is that,
that a lot of the patterns that are actually
being built in the public cloud
as they've taken kind of a fresh look
at the computing models, have really become appropriate
for this new kind of computing,
and we don't see that on the premises,
and that's really what we set out to go do.
>> Yeah, it's interesting, it's probably the wrong term,
but it sounds like we're describing kind of
object storage 2.0.
1.0, I remember this healthcare use cases,
everybody, when I was doing radiology,
when you're doing certain healthcare and sciences,
I need metadata, I need to understand that,
but now there's just orders of magnitude more data,
and technologies are making, it's denser,
prices have come down, so the idea has been around
for a little bit while, but it sounds like
the technology's matured to allow kind of an explosion--
>> Well, and it's just a computing model,
it's like one of these things where we're really,
because of the emergence of microservices,
one of the things that we've seen is applications want
a restful interaction with the storage layer,
and so, so it turns out that that tends to be
very, very perfect for a cloud-like implementation
where you can actually implement
high volume, unstructured data really, really well
via a restful API, where in the old world
of POSIX semantics and that kind of
transactional model, you just lost scalability.
Either you had a lot of proprietary hardware,
with that VRAM, you had proprietary interconnects data
with things like InfiniBand, and nowadays,
being able to loosely couple distributed systems
is really the name of the game,
and that's ultimately what we aim to build at Igneous,
and that's all the technology,
in terms of our commercial offering,
the customer doesn't care what's behind it,
but fundamentally, what you're looking for
is the scalability and resilience
that the cloud offers by doing that on premises.
>> Yeah, so Steve, we had a really interesting crowd chat
about a month or so ago talking about hybrid cloud,
and the thing I've been saying for the last, probably year,
is, as customers try to figure out what goes where
in the cloud environment, you know, I've got SaaS,
I've got public out of, I've got my private cloud,
it's follow the data and follow the applications.
In the cloud, things like mobile
and even some video streaming,
I think we understand how to do that,
but why does on-premises make sense
for your customers, your workloads, and your solution?
>> Yeah, absolutely, and so, first,
a little bit on hybrid cloud, there are kind of
two different definitions of hybrid cloud,
one is kind of the AWS VMWare scheme
where what you're really looking to do
is run your old stuff that you were running on-prem,
in the public cloud, and you call that hybrid.
But there's another way to look at it,
which is to say, hey, let's take a look
at the computing patterns that are being run
in the public cloud, how do I bring that down
to the premises?
And the reason that you might want to do that is,
it's really twofold, one is the gravity of the data,
so it might just be that the datasets
are too big to move back and forth
over very thin internet pipes,
and so you want to actually keep the data close to its source.
The other is something that we've seen,
which is really more of a preference,
which is that while I think that cloud technologies
actually have a lot of capability for security,
there are a lot more hoops for folks to run through
to ensure that they're compliant
with their own internal policies,
and where they've already set out
a set of policies for how they run the stuff
behind the firewall, sometimes it's just simpler
for them to actually keep all of the data on the premises,
and not actually have to worry about some of the issues
in tracking, and compliance issues associated
with how you move the data around.
>> Yeah.
One of the things we've heard from users is
when they use public cloud, one of the things
they really like is, sometimes the CFO's
not fully onboard, but buying things as a service, so,
they want to understand predictability,
but they want to buy it as a service, understand,
how does your solution fit into that kind of paradigm?
>> That's great, I think our solution fits into both trends
really, really well, because what we're really offering,
we talked a little bit about technology,
but really fundamentally, we're offering a service,
and so when Igneous goes to a customer,
our interaction is as a service.
Customers interact with our service via APIs,
and they get a bill for a subscription,
and so it's an as-a-service model,
you don't buy hardware, you don't install software,
you don't have systems to manage.
At the same time, there is a predictability
that's a little bit of the downside of the public cloud,
because there's a fee, generally,
to access your data at a storage,
and often, when people don't actually understand
their data access and their data movement patterns,
the costs of running applications in public cloud
become quite unpredictable, and you actually
don't run into that unpredictability
with a solution like Igneous, because our data
is on your local area network,
and we don't charge you to access
the data that's on your own network.
>> So, I've come to an event like this,
if I'm thinking about my storage today,
the conversation in the marketplace has been,
well, the new choices out there is, there's,
the HCI, the hyper-convergence infrastructure,
and there's flash, the AFA devices out there.
And of course, even the lines between those are blurring,
because I can have an all-flash configuration
of hyper-converged, and some of the all-flasher a things
are getting converged and put into more things,
how do you help customers as the,
what's the bullet point as to,
well, this is for this kind of application,
this is for this solution, and hey,
there's this whole new category
that you need to be thinking about.
>> Yeah, I think that's perfect,
and I think the real trick here is
is that there's a difference between your hot tier
and your flash tier, and your capacity tier,
and fundamentally, the flash tier is really good
when Time To First Byte is very important,
so that might be for your relational database applications
and things of that sort, where there tends to be
a lot of searching through an index,
and so you've got a lot of low-latency requirements.
And then on the other hand, what you have
is a capacity tier, they may be your video surveillance,
they may be your large, unstructured documents,
they may be your censor data, and in those contexts,
you don't necessarily need the Time To First Byte,
what you really need is capacity throughput,
and so the overhead of setting up, for example,
a restful connection is not significant
when compared to the amount of data
that actually needs to go through the system,
and that's actually where restful semantics
actually gets superior to positive semantics,
when you have very, very large, unstructured data sets.
Hyper-converge is actually a little bit
of a different world, and I think that
while hyper-converge has worked out pretty well, I think,
for virtualization workloads, we've really found
that when it comes to these very, very large
unstructured data sets, hyper-converge
isn't necessarily always the way to go,
you tend to find a utilization issue
between your compute and your storage layers,
where you have to actually think about
how you're balancing all this stuff,
and so, really, the world that we've really seen emerge
as new applications come forward,
is there's really a trend to write microservices
that are stateless, and to have them talk
to a stateful layer, that's why in the public cloud,
there's a pattern of having things
like elastic container services talking to an S3,
and we definitely see on premises
that same type of things that's going to emerge.
There's going to be some time to get there,
admittedly, as I was mentioning
kind of at the beginning, we've seen
this really interesting set of interest patterns,
one is from the folks who are developing
these new applications that are utilizing unstructured data,
there's a lot of interest we're getting right now
from IT folks that are just getting started
with object storage to do secondary workloads,
to do backups, to do archives,
and it's been interesting that we've been getting
a lot of interest in our service as a new way
to approach some of these data protection workflows.
>> Alright, so Steve, last question I've got for you,
came out of Stealth Q4 last year,
what do we look for in 2017 from Igneous?
>> Yeah, so I think that you'll see it
on both of those fronts, I think that
one thing that's going to be seen in 2017
is a lot more development on our side
around building up a tool chain for folks to use
for a data protection tier, and so,
we've got a new offering coming online,
we're calling it Igneous Insights,
which provides information about
what's currently on your primary storage tiers,
we've got a whole set of replication services,
they're coming up to do backup, archive,
things like replication to the cloud,
but what we're also really moving forward with
is a lot of what's needed in the tool chain
to really support hybrid and multi-clouds,
so how you facilitate the data movement
in and out of the cloud, as well
how you do the auditing and management of the data,
no matter where it lives.
>> Alright, Steve Pao, really appreciate you catching up,
and if you want to find out more about this category,
check out cube365.net/trueprivatecloud,
that's C-U-B-E, number 365.net/trueprivatecloud,
which has resources from the whole industry,
including from Igneous, including from Wikibon
and theCUBE, as to what's happening
kind of this true private cloud, hybrid cloud environment.
We'll be back with lots more coverage here,
thanks for watching theCUBE.
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