What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Data Protection at Scale: Recovering Petabytes in Seconds
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Cyber resilience has become the new frontier in enterprise storage, transforming how organizations protect their most critical data assets. In this illuminating conversation with Eric Herzog, CMO at Infinidat, we explore how modern storage systems have evolved beyond traditional reliability measures to incorporate robust cybersecurity capabilities.
Herzog reveals the stark reality facing enterprises today: "It's not if they're going to be attacked, it's when and how often." With 90% of enterprise data residing on storage systems, leaving them unprotected effectively invites attackers to compromise your most valuable information. Infinidat's approach integrates immutable snapshots, forensic environments, and direct connections to security platforms like SIEMs and SOARs, enabling automated responses to detected threats.
The conversation highlights remarkable recovery capabilities that seemed impossible just years ago - restoring four petabytes in four seconds, guaranteed recovery of primary storage in under a minute, and backup recovery of unlimited petabytes in under 20 minutes. These achievements aren't just technical milestones; they represent business continuity assurance for organizations that cannot tolerate extended downtime.
Beyond security, Herzog discusses how Infinidat's performance technologies dramatically reduce infrastructure requirements - one customer consolidated from 288 petabytes to just 61 petabytes while maintaining workload performance. This efficiency extends to operational resources, with customers reducing storage administration staff by up to 73%. As organizations increasingly prioritize AI initiatives, Infinidad]t is also developing RAG solutions that integrate with existing storage infrastructure to support the constant learning necessary for effective AI implementations.
Curious about how your organization can transform storage from a vulnerability to a cybersecurity asset? Listen to the full episode to discover approaches that leading Fortune 2000 companies are implementing today to protect their most critical data resources.
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And I'm here at RSAC with the one and only Zoggin Store, Eric Herzog, CMO, at Infinidad Eric how are you?
Speaker 2:Great, evan, great to see you again. We're here at RSA. Love that you're hanging with us here in our booth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really excited to be here. You have so much going on. Talk about the year of resilience. What does resilience mean and what's new?
Speaker 2:Well, so what we've had historically was traditional storage resilience, right, triple active active controllers the only ones in the industry. We guarantee 100% availability. Obviously, since we only sell high-end storage, we don't have entry or mid-range. All about reliability. 28% of the Fortune 50 use us, so the most demanding customers on the planet, that's more the traditional storage stuff.
Speaker 2:What we've done in the past two years is imbue and embed inside of our system cyber resilience. So we do everything from immutable snapshots, fenced forensic environments. If you have an attack, you put it in a closed environment to test to make sure there's no malware or ransomware. We just added last year integration with data center-wide cybersecurity packages, so a SIM or a SOAR package. You know QRadar, splunk, microsoft Sentinel and we can actually take cues through an API. They sense an attack, we automatically start executing on storage activities, trying to reduce the threat window and minimize the impact of a cyber attack.
Speaker 2:Remember, 90% of a large enterprise's data is sitting on their enterprise storage. So you don't want to leave the front door wide open and say come, steal my stuff. And by not including enterprise storage in your comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, you left not only the door wide open, you put a sign in front of your house and you post it on Facebook, come steal my stuff. So by imbuing it with cyber, we've gone beyond traditional storage resilience now to cyber resilience, and then we bolstered that with incredible recovery. So, for example, we can make sure that, regardless of data set size, we can recover on primary storage in one minute or less, and we guarantee that to our customers. We did a webinar a couple months ago. We recovered four petabytes in four seconds, I kid you not. So all about resilience and recovery beyond traditional storage resilience, which has always been very good.
Speaker 1:And what are customers telling you about their hopes, fears, expectations for this year? You work with some of the biggest global blue-chip enterprises around the world. What's on their minds?
Speaker 2:Well, the biggest thing is it's not if they're going to be attacked, it's when and how often. Several surveys have come out recently from some of the analyst community of CIOs and the number two spends. Number one was storage. Number two was AI. Now we happen to have an AI solution as well. Obviously, at this show, we're focusing on cyber, but Obviously, at this show, we're focusing on cyber. But number one purchase, despite all the weird economy stuff going on. Number one was cybersecurity and number two was AI. So we fit into that bucket because our storage is not regular storage, it's storage with all this embedded cyber technology that allows cyber storage to be part of your comprehensive cyber strategy, not left off to the side so it can be easily attacked by the bad guys.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and you have a really innovative approach when it comes to footprint, capacity, size, data center power the whole nine yards. What's the secret sauce there?
Speaker 2:Well, the secret sauce, quite honestly, is our performance. We can do 35 mics of latency and everyone's got fast flash. But what happens is is you fill up a flash rate and literally it slows down. With our patented NeuroCash technology it has over 20 patents we don't slow down so many times. You'll buy a flash rate from another vendor. You'll put a workload. Now you want to put a second one. You have plenty capacity. You put the second one on. It slows down. So what do they do? Sell you another rate? We don't do that.
Speaker 2:So, for example, at one customer they had 288 petabytes of flash from someone else. Now they're running all the same workloads on 61. Wow. So talk about saving watts, slots, power, floor space and operational manpower. They used to run their old storage farm with 10 admins. Now they're running a storage farm leveraging us with only three. So talk about freeing up IT resources. As you've written about yourself, there's an IT skills gap, and those guys didn't lose their job, they just took them out of storage and put them in another area of IT because there's a skills gap right now. So we could even help on that front as well.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And what about some of the often not discussed aspects of our industry user experience, customer experience guarantees. You know how to do business with Infinidat contracts. Wise, you're a little different there as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so let's take the guarantees first. We guarantee performance. In writing. We guarantee 100% availability. In writing. We guarantee the cyber resilience. In writing.
Speaker 2:Several of our competitors. They say they have immutable snapshots. They actually have a backdoor. We don't have a backdoor so we can't even get in. No one can get in. We guarantee the recovery time again under a minute on primary storage and on backup storage, under 20 minutes. And we're talking unlimited number of petabytes. So we recovered a Veeam backup data set on our purpose-built backup appliance. It could have been Commvault, ibm Protect any of the backup guys Recovered 25.5 petabytes in 12 minutes. Wow. So all that stuff is guaranteed in writing. So that's one.
Speaker 2:Second thing is the way we put all the automation. All of that automation means we have customers in writing public references who said I've had an InfiniBox for four years. I haven't touched it after the original install. It just kind of like that Energizer bunny just goes and goes and goes. So customers like that. We have a customer in Europe $70 billion US dollars. They had 15 admins running storage. They switched to us. Now they have four. So from their perspective, that's all about ease of use and automation. Make it easier for them to deal with. And again, the bulk of our customers are the Global Fortune 2000, which means they're the most demanding. So if we can make it easier for them to do things, they do. So that that's how we really focus on these moments.
Speaker 1:Where do you go from here? How do you? What's next? What are you excited about on the horizon?
Speaker 2:let's say well, the big thing on the horizon for us. Obviously we're continuing to press the cyber button, which is why we're here at rsa. But the other thing about AI how do you get storage implemented in an AI world? In this case, how do you storage for AI applications and workloads? So we've come up with an AI RAG solution retrieval, augmented generation and that allows us to use our existing storage, competitor storage, as long as they have the NFS protocol, and cloud storage with the NFS protocol path. That all together and have it work with vector databases, large language models, small language models and constantly reiterate Remember, a human learns every day.
Speaker 2:Every day, the smart human is learning. Things change every day, right? Who would have thought an iPhone back in 1970, if you said, wait, in 2005, there's going to be a phone that's more intelligent than an IBM mainframe? They would have looked at you like you're crazy, right? So you always want to learn, and RAG and AI is all about constantly learning because businesses, particularly who we sell to they're changing every day. If you're going to use AI for supply chain or AI for financials, every day that changes. You have to constantly learn all the time, and that's what we do with our AI RAG. So you have to constantly learn all the time, and that's what we do with our AI ranks. So AI is a hot button item beyond storage, and what we do is make sure that the storage can keep up with all these changes people are trying to make by leveraging AI into their businesses.
Speaker 1:Incredible. All that juicy juicy data needs a good home. You also have some really interesting partnerships across the industry. They're pretty open and flexible and you have some announcements this week as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we make sure that A we work with all the big vendors. So Broadcom, formerly VMware, is a big partner of ours. Red Hat with us is White Hot. Yeah, they have a big event coming up Right, white Hot, and we'll be presenting, for example, at KubeCon in Europe. Yeah, and we'll be on a panel with Red Hat. Red Hat invited us to be on a panel, so that will be coming up later this month. Well, in the month of May.
Speaker 2:We work with all the backup vendors, everybody, All the security vendors. So we work with the IBM Security Division, palace. We work with all the security vendors Because, remember, while we have cyber, we still have to deal with key management systems and other things that need to be deployed. Remember, it's an ecosystem.
Speaker 2:And because, while we sell systems as you know, evan, well, we're basically a software company. So it's all about how we do the integration with other pieces of software, cyber, for example, our automated cyber protection that we brought out last year integrates with any SIM, any SOAR or storage operations center to automatically start doing things that help reduce a threat window. That's all about software. So that's what we do and that's about the ecosystem as well. Right, so we make sure we have a strong ecosystem of anyone that are and again, we're mostly high-end enterprise, we only have a high-end system and again, global Fortune 2000. So you got to work with this guy, got to work with that guy and we make sure that we do that and do it in a very comprehensive and business value way, as well as technical value.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. So it's a big week here. You've broken out the purple Hawaiian shirt. This is a very special shirt, I guess just for RSA. But what's next? What colors can we assume are in the wardrobe for the next event?
Speaker 2:Well, I've got the green one. I've got the blue one. You're going to laugh, evan, but if you come over to Casa de Herzog, you're going to see 75 different Hawaiian shirts in my closet, I believe you.
Speaker 1:I believe you. I'm going to take you up on that. We're going to do a tour of the closet at Zoginster. Thanks, eric, we're good to see you, thanks.