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Revolutionizing Enterprise Storage: Infinidat's Breakthrough AI and Cloud Solutions for 2025

• Evan Kirstel

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Unlock the future of enterprise storage with Eric, the CMO of Infinidat, as he reveals cutting-edge strategies and technologies reshaping the landscape. Imagine a world where seamless data recovery is not just ideal but essential amidst ever-growing cyber threats. Discover Infinidat's breakthrough RAG solution, tailored to supercharge AI models by optimizing vector databases, and explore how this innovation is transforming the way Fortune 2000 companies approach data protection and storage.

Navigate the complexities of the hybrid multi-cloud universe with us, where large enterprises strategize to balance performance, security, and cost. Learn how toolsets like InfuseOS Cloud Edition are making seamless data movement across multiple cloud vendors a reality. As we address pressing sustainability challenges, British Telecom stands as a beacon of success, achieving significant cost reductions and environmental benefits through thoughtful storage consolidation and green IT practices. This conversation promises insights into the economic and ecological advantages of modernizing IT infrastructure.

As we set our sights on 2025, the conversation turns to advancements poised to support next-gen AI workloads. Eric shares his vision of modernizing data environments with innovative storage systems like the G4 InfiniBox and InfiniBox AllFlash, crucial for handling complex AI tasks and reducing technical debt. This episode is a treasure trove of strategies for overcoming legacy data challenges and the growing IT skills gap, showcasing how automation and efficient infrastructure can empower IT teams. Connect with Eric on social media for continued insights and engage with us as we explore the future of enterprise success.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody. I am thrilled today as I have my favorite Hawaiian shirt-wearing tech CMO here, eric from Infinidad. How are you Doing? Great, evan, gearing 2024 and looking at 2025. The enterprise landscape is changing, to say the least, and you guys are ahead of the curve. Maybe start with introductions to yourself, of course, and your very storied history in storage and beyond, and also for those few people who may not know Infinidat, how do you describe yourself these days?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So from an Infinidat perspective, we're a high-end enterprise storage solution. We don't do any entry or mid-range. We focus on the global Fortune 2000,. Although we do have some smaller customers, particularly in the service provider space. 28% of the Fortune 50 leverage our technology for their solutions. Myself, I've been the CMO at Infinidat now for a little over two years, before that the CMO and vice president of global channels for the IBM storage division and prior to that the senior VP of product management and product marketing at EMC. No, I can't call it Dell. I was there when it was EMC and a bunch of us EMC alumni still love to call it EMC, where I carried the P&L for the VMAX business now called PowerMax and the VNX now called PowerStore. So that's me in a nutshell and quite honestly, since I got out of college I've done nothing but storage, storage, storage and wow, is storage cool and bitchin', as we say in California and in Hawaii.

Speaker 1:

It is indeed and the most exciting time in our careers, and let's dive into why it's so fundamentally important. Let's start with AI Gen, ai RAG. You know the modern enterprise is really leaning on storage for a lot of key reasons. In particular, it's AI models and talk about the unique value you bring to big data and data, particularly data for AI use cases.

Speaker 2:

Well. So when you look at it first of all, of course everyone is getting into the game from leveraging AI technology at the end user level. Of course they need to be sensitive to there's a number of political issues and other social issues around it, but most of the big global enterprises we deal with have AI committees. Okay, say, look at what we're trying to do. What's the area of the company? Obviously, there is a concern about keeping things private, which is what we help leverage. As many of you know, if you use public chatbots, anything related to your company if you use it ends up becoming public, which is why the big global enterprises are very sensitive to how they leverage the tools and provide those tools.

Speaker 2:

Our assumption is, most of our customers will be leveraging something that is either their private cloud or maybe a hybrid multi-cloud solution for Gen AI. So we provide a RAG solution. It will support anything. That's NFS. So, whether that be files, whether, as you know, many of the databases today support the NFS protocol and in fact, it would include data out in the cloud. That's NFS. We do have a version of our software, the InfuseOS Cloud Edition, which essentially provides one of our solutions, an InfiniBox out in the cloud. So if you do the right security around that, that's basically, if you will, a hybrid cloud extension, but still private, so you're not using a public AI bot. And lastly, anything NFS. So many of our customers are large and global. They don't just have InfiniDAT storage. Of course we wish they did, but they don't. So anything that's NFS, they can leverage that.

Speaker 2:

So the RAG solution is an architecture we put together. We will install it with our customers and partners at no charge and the idea here is, by using retrieval, augmented generation, you optimize and improve the performance of the vector databases which are available from a number of customers. So, from our perspective, the customer chooses what of the vector database they're going to use the LLM or the SLM right? Some are, depending on their workloads, and then what we do is they get together with us and we help them optimize that solution to improve the performance of what they need.

Speaker 2:

And remember, ai is really is in real time Right. It's supposed to be like your human brain. So when you read something, when you see something right, when you're learning something, if a car cuts in front of you when you're driving, your brain automatically reacts. So AI is trying to mimic that. Hopefully it won't be Skynet or Vicky in the future, but right now it's not. So we make sure that we can augment that and provide the right type of performance they can lead so that decisions, just the way your brain does if a car cuts in front of you are making decisions in real time, whether that be for your supply chain, your accounts payable, your accounts receivable whether that be customer service and support, all the various workloads that people are trying from an AI perspective Fantastic insight.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about the data protection. World 2024 has been a year of fear, uncertainty and doubt, to say the least, around your data protection strategies. Out there, you have a philosophy and approach. That's recovery first. Talk about that. The threats that are just overwhelming, to be frank. And what do you envision as the next milestone in next-gen data protection?

Speaker 2:

Well, the way we look at the world, it's not if you'll be attacked, it's when and how often at the world. It's not if you'll be attacked, it's when and how often. For example, several of the analyst firms that cover security not storage or server guys, but security guys estimate that in 2024, the impact not just the ransom, but the overall impact thwarting it, what they needed to do, what companies do for enterprises was over 9.5 trillion. And, of course, for any of you listeners who are publicly traded, whether here or in Europe, you know that there are now rules that if you do are attacked, you have to legally and publicly report it. So not only are you fighting it, but now everybody knows you've been attacked. And, in fact, the big two that those in the US would probably recognize both that were public was, of course, the original one when the law first went into effect in October of 2023 was MGM Resorts $128 million impact and, of course, in Q1, the giant impact of $2.9 billion US dollars to UHG, which is one of the top largest companies on the entire planet. And this is all now public. So we see that data protection is wrapped around cyber.

Speaker 2:

And think about it If I'm the cyber mafioso. What am I going to do? I don't break your legs, like you see in the old movies. I attack you with the most sophisticated and technically astute computer guys I've got. And what am I doing? Well, I'm trying to hold you for ransom or I'm trying to destroy your data If, for example, I'm a government trying to attack another government, right. So what you've got to do then is control all of your data. They understand the flow, which is your snaps, your replicas and all of your backups, your data protection, all three of those. They're going to get them, because otherwise the CIO could turn to the storage device spread and say, well, why don't you just recover last night's backup? Or why don't you just go to the snapshot? How often are we taking snapshots? Oh, we took one four hours ago. Great, let's go recover that. And the cyber mafia is very aware of that.

Speaker 2:

So what you need to do is leverage next generation data protection. So, first with data protection, then it went to modern data protection. In the industry, we would now argue it's next generation. So you need to back up your workloads, you need to replicate them, you need to snapshot, you do all the things you need to do, but now you need to wrap around that a level of cyber resilience technology to help you find malware, ransomware within those what I'll call secondary storage data sets. We have a capability of doing it. Our InfiniSafe cyber detection capability will do that.

Speaker 2:

You also want to make sure that enterprise storage is integrated with a global cybersecurity strategy, so we announced in May our automated cyber protection, and automated cyber protection actually takes its lead at executing malware or ransomware assistance based on data center wide cybersecurity packages Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, ibm Qradar thing. Instead of someone picking up the phone or emailing the storage admins through API integration when they send something, we can automatically take immutable snapshots. We can automatically start scanning things. You decide what you want to do. If things change over time, you can change it, but the whole point is to bring a real level of automation and optimization so that you can recover. Then we bolster all that with our guaranteed recovery service level agreements.

Speaker 2:

We guarantee recovery on primary storage of one minute or less, no matter how big the dataset size, and in fact, in mid-September we did a live webinar. Remember, I'm an old geezer, so if you're recording your webinars ahead of time to your demos, your product doesn't work. So while we do record them at the point of attack, of course, when you watch them live. We are doing that demo live. So we recovered 4.5 petabytes in four seconds. I kid you not. That could have been 10, could have been 20. Excuse me, but we guarantee under one minute for anything primary 20,. Excuse me, but we guarantee under one minute for anything primary. On the secondary data sets, such as your Veeam or Commvault or IBM Protect backup repositories, we guarantee recovery of under 20 minutes. And that same webinar in mid-September, we recovered a 25 petabyte. That's right, 25 petabyte. Veeam backup repository. It could have been Commvault, could have been Veritas, slash, cohesive, zerto doesn't matter to us because we work with all the major backup vendors. We recovered 25.5 petabytes in 12 minutes, wow.

Speaker 2:

So the next generation data protection is continuing to backup, replicate, snapshot, archive all the things you need to do to protect your data. But then you need to wrap a wrapper of cyber resilience and cyber recovery. The average enterprise to close this segment out, evan, the average enterprise suffers 1,258 attacks per week, so it's not going to be attacked. It's when and how often. Anyone who thinks they're not getting through. Why don't you talk to the major US telcos, evan? I think it was two weeks ago when all the major US telcos came under attack Every one of them. So if you think you're immune because you're a big global enterprise, if anything, you are like the lighthouse. All the boats circle around the lighthouse. Right, you can guide them safely. In this case, your lighthouse is guiding them to your valuable data so they can try to steal it or destroy it. So you've got to wrap that cyber resilience and cyber recovery around your next generation data protection technology.

Speaker 1:

So well said. Well, here's hoping for a more safe and secure enterprise in 2025, leveraging a lot of this technology. Let's talk about the march to the cloud. It's been relentless, but there has been a rethinking, I think, of cloud with the rise of Gen, ai and these security challenges you just walked through. So people are really considering private modalities, balancing on-prem versus cloud. What do you see as the balance between on-prem and public cloud and what are you hearing from customers today?

Speaker 2:

So we see clearly with our global Fortune 2000 customer base is that cloud is of a hybrid model. You create a private cloud inside with all the security and protection you need and that private cloud mimics a public cloud Easy to deploy, easy to upgrade, easy to manage. You can provide SLAs to your internal customers. Then you leverage that with a hybrid cloud deployment. For us it's our InfuseOS Cloud Edition which sits at Microsoft or at AWS and looks to the on-premise storage, primary or secondary. In fact, all the backup vendors could back up to our InfuseOS Cloud Edition and they will think they're backing up to an InfiniBox on-prem, when in fact it's at a cloud vendor. So the world is a hybrid, multi-cloud world. Most of the big companies on this planet don't just use one cloud vendor. Many, many, many cloud vendors are leveraged by the big global Fortune 2000. We see it as a way to move data seamlessly back and forth and basically what they do is prioritize their data. Which ones do I need? The highest performance? Probably going to be on-prem. Which ones do I absolutely, absolutely, absolutely need the highest security? And, yes, you will be attacked, as we pointed out. So guess what? Probably on-prem. So what you do is, if you're a big enterprise account. You look at all your data sets. You figure ah, these secondary data sets. Ah, we have several customers. They back up to the cloud using our InfuseOS Cloud Edition with their backup vendor or they will replicate an InfiniBox all-flash array, replicating to InfuseOS Cloud Edition, which basically is an InfiniBox SSA replicating to an InfiniBox sitting at a cloud vendor. So those are very good workloads for a hybrid multi-cloud.

Speaker 2:

Anyone who thinks the cloud isn't here, you're nuts. Anyone who thinks that everything should run in the cloud, you're nuts. On a different way, just sit there with a spreadsheet for all your high transactionally oriented data that you need and figure out. Well, I need X amount of nines of availability, I need X amount of performance and I'm moving data back and forth this much. Sit there with a spreadsheet it's called Excel, very easy to use and you will see that for many of those workloads, being out in the cloud is a bad idea. It's super, super, super expensive. So you need to take a look at that. But thinking that no workloads go to cloud, that's crazy too. It's a hybrid multi-Cloud word. Leverage the Cloud for the right applications, workloads and use case Profile. What are you doing? Where's the security? Where's the performance? Where's the availability you need? Then you'll be able to determine. These workloads are great for the Cloud. These are great on-prem and seamlessly move them back and forth with the capability like we have within FuseOS Cloud Edition.

Speaker 1:

Oh, so well said. So shifting gears. We've been talking about sustainability and efficiency in our industry for a couple of decades at least, but the rubber is really hitting the road now. As you know, we can't build enough data centers fast enough. We have real floor space challenges. We have power grid challenges. How do you think about customers optimizing their storage infrastructure for these challenges and the sustainability goals? That are not just imaginary now they're real and they're out there.

Speaker 2:

Well, there's a couple of things you need to do. First of all is get the most efficiency impossible out of your enterprise storage, and that's in a couple of ways. First of all, you want to automate and optimize everything you can. We have several customers Gartner, peer Insights allows end users to write reviews. We have over 500 of them, and there are tens and tens that have said we've had an InfiniBox for six years, five years, four years we never touch it. Talk about automation and reducing your operational expense.

Speaker 2:

One of our customers, british Telecom, did a webinar with us at the very end of 2022, or, no, sorry, 2023. They went from 15 storage admins to four when they switched. They're actually running 15 more petabytes than they were with the other admin. By the way, the 11 people given the fact that there's an IT skills gap they all kept their job. They just stopped working on Infinidat or on the storage estate and started working on something else. So you want to make sure you're doing all that. Second thing you want to do is try to consolidate as best as you can, both on A the capacity you can do per rack view, but also can you shrink workloads. For example, one of our customers had 288 floor tiles. Imagine that, evan, 288 floor tiles of all flash. Now when they switch to Infinidat, every one of those workloads, plus about about 10 more workloads, is running on 62 floor tiles.

Speaker 2:

Talk about saving watts, slots, power, floor space, operational IT resources. In short, not only cutting their costs with efficiency, but getting greener IT. We view it as what we call E-squared Environmental advantage and economic advantage go together. Many people think that being environmentally friendly, having a green IT dentist center, costs more money. Farthest thing from it, evan. You save money by being green. And wait a second. We all know that computer equipment not just storage but servers and networking gear and anything that's physical, okay BBUs, all kinds of things. They are filled with pollutants, so that requires special recycling.

Speaker 2:

So when that customer of ours went from 288 floor tiles to 62, they had to recycle 288 floor tiles. That's not cheap. That's not putting 288 glass bottles or aluminum cans in your recycling. It's way more expensive. Now, with the 62 floor tiles, as they move to our G4, our most recently announced generation and they are doing that they'll be recycling 62 floor tiles worth of toxic equipment versus 288.

Speaker 2:

So in this case, not only it gives you a greener environment day to day, with reduction in power and cooling by getting these efficiencies of shrinking that footprint inside the data center, but there, when they're doing a refresh, which happens in the enterprise every three and a half to five and a half years, depending on the enterprise they have to recycle all that stuff. That's what they have to do. So the more you shrink the footprint, consolidate workloads onto less and less storage, it helps you on the recycling side. The day-to-day environmental impact clearly reduces your operational expense for admins down from 15. Talk about saving lots of money. So we see green IT as a way to save money across the board. And that level of automation and consolidation what provides you the capability of saving money and having a greener IT environment.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's a mic drop moment. Congratulations on that, Really impactful. A lot happening on the VM and container side within the enterprises shifting landscape of new technologies coming in, vendors changing consolidation, happening what your customers are asking for when it comes to a more unified virtual machine or container environment and efficiency in that world as well.

Speaker 2:

Well, we see a broadening of the aperture. As we all know, there's been one company that has been exceedingly dominant in this interstitial layer, referred to as virtualization. But obviously now, with containerization, I would argue it's an interstitial layer, right? You've got bare metal applications that sit on bare metal and then you've got something in between that allows you to put apps on top of that, whether that be in a virtualized environment or now in a containerized environment. You've seen, with things that have happened in the last two and a half years, people wanting to open that aperture and explore new opportunities. We support that. With the older environment, we do great vCenter, ops integration, what we do with vVols, what we do with replication, what we do with how we integrate with that previous platform, which still, by the way, is very ubiquitous. Over 95% of our customers use it. That said, people are looking for other ways, given changes in the industry, to have that interstitial layer. It's a different type of virtualization Hyper-V, openshift, virtualization Manager, kvm from the Kubernetes environment, right? Those are all different type of virtual interstitial layers.

Speaker 2:

And then, of course, containers. Okay, whether that be Red Hat, whether that be Roll your own, what are you doing? Do you have a CSI driver. One of the things that containers don't do is support persistent storage that all the virtual engines do. Well, guess what? We support persistent storage. So we make sure, whether it be primary storage or secondary storage, that we provide the level of support they need in this wider aperture.

Speaker 2:

What they were doing with the previous dominant player in that interstitial layer, on the virtualization layer, whether exploring new opportunities in other types of virtualization engines, or what they're doing with the modern world of containers, whether it be primary storage or secondary storage, we support it. In fact, Evan, later this week you're going to see a blog from us about what we're doing with the Kasten part of Veeam for container modern next generation data protection. We're doing a lot of things with integration there and of course, we do tons of it with Veeam on the, if you will, more traditional virtualization engines. But whatever it is, we see a lot of widening of the aperture, lots of exploration.

Speaker 2:

Some customers even told us, well, we'd love the older generation on that interstitial layer. But you know what we're going containers, or we're shifting to OpenShift Virtualization Manager, or we're going to Nutanix or Hyper-V. So we make sure, with all of these interstitial layers between a bare metal layer and applicators get to sit on something in between right that interstitial layer sitting on top of the server infrastructure that we can support, that for standard primary storage, for secondary storage, for disaster recovery and clearly, what you need to do for cyber resiliency and AI generation sitting in these possible new environments that people are exploring.

Speaker 1:

Great to see how much you just listen to customer demands and take their feedback on board. That sounds easy, but it's not so easy in the real world. 2025, you wrote in a recent blog will be a huge year for scalability and performance. For AI workloads. Everyone is pushing right the silicon layer, the ASICs for improved, more complex workflows. What does that mean on the storage side, for scale, for performance? You guys are always known for pushing the boundary. What are you seeing on that pipeline that'll need to change to support next-gen?

Speaker 2:

AI. Well, we already mentioned on the RAG side of what we're doing to help automate, but we also see just base performance. So, for example, independent of what we've done with the RAG architecture, which is now available, earlier in May we announced our G4, our latest generation of the InfiniBox and the InfiniBox AllFlash, our SSA we increased the bandwidth, which is what you need for most AI workloads, over two and a half times Over two and a half times. Now for certain workloads let's say, a database with an NFS support and I was doing supply chain AI or AI on my accounts payable account that's all going to be coming out of NFS, but with a database connected to it, not the file side. So we already have the fastest performance in that world, which is the latency. Our latency is 35 microseconds and in fact, you can sometimes get it to be even faster. So, from that AI perspective A, we already have very large systems.

Speaker 2:

But we want to make sure that, in addition to the RAG architecture with the G4, we've increased the performance two and a half times for bandwidth. So when it is really file data that you're using for your LLM or SLM, or when you're doing NFS support for traditional database, that our latency is as low as you need and those two things combined to give the type of performance you need for Gen AI and what you're going to need. Our systems already are very large in a capacity perspective. So whatever you need whether it be a hybrid array or all flash array we have these very large capacity you can leverage. But the key thing is that bandwidth increase with our G4 and our incredibly low latency at 35 mics. So whichever method you're doing, whether that be NFS import on a database or whether that be traditional file, we provide both types of performance that you need for AI workloads.

Speaker 1:

Well done. So I'm hearing that 2025 will be a year of data modernization for many industries. Healthcare, for example, is making a huge push to get around their legacy data challenges and get rid of some of the technical debt they built up. What are you hearing in terms of how to get started on a modernization journey? What are some of the good first steps and you know how do they cut the cord when it comes to all of this technical debt they built up over decades in healthcare, for example?

Speaker 2:

Well. So, from a modern modernization perspective, you're looking at a couple of things. First of all, you want to have next generation data protection, where you're not only doing traditional backup but you are again modernizing your backup so that it includes a healthy dose of cyber resilience and rapid cyber recovery. You also want to make sure that, instead of having storage admins do everything, you're automating as much as you can automate, and the more automation you do, the better it is. So let's take, for example, at Infinidat, not only do we have tech support, by the way, we start with level three. So, unlike our competitors where you have level one, someone right out of university or college, then you have someone a little bit more experienced. Then you've got people who've been doing tech support for years and years and years and are very good at it and are technically deep. We, people who've been doing tech support for years and years and years and are very good at it and are technically deep, we only do level three. Well, guess what? If there is a problem, you're going right to someone who can solve it, not going through the traditional. Let me send an email. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, we also provide what we call technical advisors, which are not tech support. Technical advisors' job is helping you optimize your applications, your workloads and your use cases on our storage environment. All accounts get that and they get it at no charge. You also want to make sure that you're leveraging the speed of systems to shrink the number of systems.

Speaker 2:

One of the things many of the storage analysts refer to Evan you're well aware is small array sprawl. I get an array. It works for one workload. I get try to put a second workload. Eh, it doesn't make it. So what do I do? I buy another small array and even those arrays are only two or three RACU. The next thing you know, you got 36 of them. So you got 72 RACU. One of our 42 RACU. Our highest end boxes can dramatically shrink that. As I mentioned before, we had a vendor or a customer who had another vendor at 288 floor tiles of All Flash. With our All Flash they're running at 62.

Speaker 2:

So all of that modernization and automation helps them save money, free up IT resources. We all know we've read a million times in the last probably two and a half to three years now about the IT skills gap. It's not getting better, it's getting worse. So you need people to manage more from an infrastructure perspective and while we focus on the storage side, obviously the network vendors and the server is trying to do the same thing, because there's less people to manage the network, less people to manage the storage and, by the way, the era of the VM administrator is probably going to include VMware, other forms of virtualization such as OpenShift, virtualization Manager, hyper-v and containerization. So, again, a person doing way more work. So this automation and this modernization effort helps you optimize what those humans can do. They can only manage so much storage per person.

Speaker 2:

Well, if you've got four people managing 100 petabytes versus 15 managing 100 petabytes, you just freed up IT resources to help address that skill gap and clearly modernize and optimize your existing storage infrastructure with new infrastructure that helps you save money, save time and, as we mentioned earlier in the broadcast, deliver a greener environment.

Speaker 2:

Right, everyone's trying to get ESG off the board and a greener environment has real cost reduction implications, not just when they recycle their old generation for new, but literally day-to-day power cooling, bandwidth and, as you yourself pointed out earlier, we're at the cusp of where the amount of IT that's happening Gen AI, but beyond just Gen AI is forcing the incredible build of data centers everywhere. Well, guess what? Whatever you put in, you want to optimize it, because building a data center is exceedingly expensive and you have lots of impact on the environment and on the power and cooling needs and the humans you need to manage that data center. So, modernizing, consolidating, shrinking all that helps you deal with today's challenges of the modern data center and the applications that are trying to run in that modern data center.

Speaker 1:

Oh, so well said. So you've been known over your career for thinking outside the box, pun intended different business models, different consumption models, different service and SLA models that really disrupt the status quo, anything on the horizon or otherwise, you want to call out in terms of meeting these new business demands and financial imperatives and other requirements in different ways than the industry has traditionally done before.

Speaker 2:

Well, we see a need to make sure that storage as a service is available. We provide that. We have a number of customers globally in the storage as a service model. The vendor actually owns it and people if you will rent it, so they pay per month or per quarter. We make sure that we do that. We still do traditional applications and we even have a model which is kind of a hybrid of that, which is where you buy the storage part of it up front. We ship you a fully populated box and as you consume more storage, then we bill you for that.

Speaker 2:

So it's not storage as a service, because you end up owning it, right. It's a CapEx purchase on your part, but you don't buy the whole thing up front, right? So there's a way to spread your payments out, but you do own it, okay. And then, of course, traditional CapEx, which a lot of people are used to, and then, of course, storage as a service. We own it, we take care of it, we work with you and we bill you quarterly or monthly and it goes up and goes down, just like your home utility bills goes up and goes down.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant. What a great approach. So 2025, I can't believe it's almost here. I know my schedule is already booking up, with CES and HIMSS and NRF, the big retail show, rsac, coming up. We're both going to be very busy. What are you excited about as we head into the new year?

Speaker 2:

personally, professionally, event-wise, otherwise, Well, you know we are all about optimizing applications, workloads and use cases. So Gen AI is exciting, you know, regardless of the you know legal and political issues, and I would caution that for enterprise accounts, even small accounts, you need to be very careful how you do your Gen AI, if you do it the wrong way. Next thing, you know your IP is public and that's not what you want. If you're a development team, say, I was watching Perry Mason last night and the murder You're really really dating yourself, Barry?

Speaker 1:

Mason is not known to anyone under 30, but let's I know who he is.

Speaker 2:

And the case was someone who stole designs for swimsuits and then tried to put them out there and stole them from another designer. Well, if you're designing that swimsuit or the baseball cap or the shoes, or certainly more sophisticated things like a modular phone or software, if you do it the wrong way, that stuff can be stolen. So you need to make sure and in this case it's because you did it the wrong way and basically exposed your proprietary information. So the next thing, you know wow, their phone looks just like mine. You try to sue them. Did you use Gen AI? Absolutely? Oh well, you know that was the open source one. So the second, you get it all that source code and all that hardware design on that brand new cell, a storage perspective. We can help you. It's very easy to do. We've got the performance, we've got the RAG infrastructure, so we've got all the right things.

Speaker 2:

I think the other thing is people still need to be afraid and I really do mean afraid of cyber In 2024, security analysts $9.5 trillion. If you go back and look at 2023, it was like $8 trillion. So if you don't think it's going to be $109.5 trillion, if you go back and look at 2023, it was like $8 trillion. So if you don't think it's going to be $10 or $11 trillion, and when you look, especially when you're in a publicly traded company, one of the top concerns of the global Fortune 500 CEOs is cyber. So, despite the environment, despite some of the turbulent political situations going on in the world, cyber is it. And, by the way, a lot of these cyber attacks are government authorized. Well, so it's one government fighting another. So you know there's a lot of stuff around the data in the world and, let's face it, data is the new gold. This is not the 19, or sorry, the 1849 California gold rush anymore, the Yukon gold rush or the gold rush that hit South Africa in the 20th century. It is digital gold and everyone's trying to steal your digital gold or somehow melt it so that you can't use it to run your company. So it's very important that you embrace cyber and truly understand that cyber is critical to the company's protection.

Speaker 2:

And when you have a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, don't leave storage out because you just left open the door, wide open, not unlocked. You opened every window. You have a bullhorn on the front of your lawn saying I'm on vacation, steal my stuff, oh yeah. And you post it on every possible social media all over the world. Come to my address, 2222222 2nd Street, and steal my stuff. So if you don't do cyber, you're inviting a problem. And if you don't include storage in your cyber, a problem. And if you don't include storage in your cyber, you've just left all your jewelry, your television, your computers, everything of value. Even your clothing is just right there already in a box for them to walk out the door, and that's not what you want. So making sure you embrace the next generation of data protection imbued with cyber is a critical thing that you need to do in 2025 as well.

Speaker 1:

Well, on that very sober but realistic note, we'll wrap up. Finally. You know you're, like myself, a workaholic, mainly because you just love it. But will there be a Hawaiian background to match your Hawaiian shirt this winter? Christmas, new Year, are you going to get some golf in, or what's happening?

Speaker 2:

Well, no, I'm having knee surgery this Wednesday, so no trip to Hawaii and not going out on the golf course for a while. But it's minor knee surgery.

Speaker 2:

So I should be ready to go in another month or so, but we love talking to you, evan, and what you do, and how you not just talk to the vendor base, but how you communicate with all the end users. You have lots of insights you get because you've got end user clients, not just us on the vendor side. So you know what's going on in the end user world and it's very valuable to us on the vendor side, to our channel partners and from one end user to another. So again, thank you for the services you provide in letting the world know about what's going on in the enterprise, what's going on across the entire IT horizon, not just in the storage world not that you're not a storage geek at heart but that you know what's going on everywhere and get that out so people really can make the right and informed decisions for what they do, to make more money for their company, to save money for their company and to keep the money of their company protected from cyber and other threats that are out there these days.

Speaker 1:

Indeed, and thanks for all the insights and unique opportunities you're sharing, and thanks everyone all those 600,000 followers for listening, watching and reach out to Eric. Follow him on Facebook even or LinkedIn Twitter. He's quite a hoot to engage with on social media as well. Take care everyone. Thanks for listening, watching and, as always, sharing Happy holidays, take care.