>> Live 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
and 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 INFINIDAT.
Hey Brian, good to see you.
>> Hey guys, how are ya?
>> And we also have from US Signal,
Marc Creviere, principal systems engineer,
one of your customers.
Marc, 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 25,000?
>> I think it's a little over 21, 22 maybe, yeah.
>> More than last year.
Brian, would love to get your take on VMworld,
but let's start with the business overview.
What's new at INFINIDAT?
>> Oh, things are going great.
So this past summer, or this summer,
we surpassed four exobytes of customer deployments.
>> Congratulations.
>> Yeah, 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 F6212.
It's our highest capacity, 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
from multi petabyte per rack requirements
and it's all being driven by demand
in the analytic space and also in
the cloud and service provider spaces.
>> What are 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 unit cost,
the unit economics of storage, go down every quarter.
The product has to get cheaper every quarter.
The second is maintaining reliability levels,
so all of our systems come with
a seven nines SLAs with less than
three seconds of down time per system per year.
In 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 nonlinear, insatiable growth
for increases in capacity.
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.
If there's one thing that doesn't change
from year to year, is that there's always
an awesome vibe at VMware, and that
demand for storing huge massive amounts
of information only increases every year.
>> 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.
Marc, let's 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.
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 route 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.
We've had explosive growth in all these areas.
That's one of the ways that INFINIDAT's really helped.
We used to work in the challenges of
managing hundreds of terabytes an hour
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.
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 is the big
growth drivers in your business?
>> A lot of the drivers for us
specifically is reduction of scope
of PCI compliance and HIPPA compliance.
Our entire offering is actually
HIPPA and PCI compliant, so that's a big driver.
We got a lot of traction in
the financial and healthcare verticals.
In organizations, you know,
they've got initiative to get to the cloud.
We're a very concierge level service.
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.
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 Lisa, over the years
I've had an opportunity to visit facilities
of cloud service providers and I'd notice
years ago, maybe it's even still this way
in a lot of places, they had one of everything.
They had a lot of diversity,
a really heterogeneous environment,
very hard to manage, a lot of stove pipes
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'd 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.
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 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.
>> Very cloud-like sort of model
in terms of your customer's consumption.
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.
The relationship with INFINIDAT,
I mean, we work with 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 their product pipeline and really,
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 it a common theme that you hear amongst customers?
How have you taken the US Signal input?
Maybe you can give us some perspective on that.
>> 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.
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.
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.
>> That's why we're all here, right?
We hear that at every event, and you do too,
it's all about customers, giving them choice.
At the end of the day though,
you have to be able to, sounds like, Brian,
what you guys have at INFINIDAT,
is the symbiotic relationship with your customers
who are helping to significantly influence
the product development because
that's who, it's the US Signals of the world
who need to be using this technology
so you're not creating it in a vacuum.
Sounds like a very highly collaborative
environment that is allowing you,
it 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 ahead of the curve,
and that's where the art of
the product management comes into play.
>> Marc, 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 it from the customer. >> Sounds like trouble.
>> Think about INFINIDAT.
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
with software I can roll back to serial number 001.
Every system is able to take advantage of that.
All true, has that been your experience?
>> Absolutely, yeah, delivers on
every one of those. >> Any deviation from
those things, I mean come on, tell us the truth.
>> No, no, we beat em up.
One thing that's interesting about
the service provider space is we don't
necessarily know or control what the workload is.
We know just anecdotally that we've got SQL,
we know anecdotally that 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.
As an example, 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.
>> These guys, you go on the floor here,
there's a lot of buzz, there's a lot of hype.
These guys aren't a hype company.
I've talked to dozens of your customers
and have very similar stories,
so I kind of already knew what the answer was.
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 the mindset,
like they knew what they wanted
before the project started, right?
Just rigorous testing and vetting
and looking at the pedigree of Moshe,
the founder of the company.
There was a lot of trust put in
what he's been able to do and 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, guy who invented the modern
storage business, I guess that helps, alright, good.
>> Well Brian, you can't have anything
more validating than the voice of a successful customer,
so Marc, thanks so much for sharing
what you're doing with INFINIDAT.
Brian, thanks for stopping by and giving us an update.
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 guys, thank you. >> Bye.
>> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE.
I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante,
we are at VMworld 2018, day three, stick around.
We'll be back after a break.
(upbeat music)