Data Protection at Scale: Recovering Petabytes in Seconds

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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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
And I'm here at RSAC with the one and only Zoggin
Store, Eric Herzog, CMO, atInfinidad Eric how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Great, evan, great to see you again.
We're here at RSA.
Love that you're hanging withus here in our booth.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yeah, really excited to be here.
You have so much going on.
Talk about the year ofresilience.
What does resilience mean andwhat's new?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
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 sellhigh-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 thetraditional storage stuff.

(00:46):
What we've done in the past twoyears is imbue and embed inside
of our system cyber resilience.
So we do everything fromimmutable snapshots, fenced
forensic environments.
If you have an attack, you putit in a closed environment to
test to make sure there's nomalware or ransomware.
We just added last yearintegration with data
center-wide cybersecuritypackages, so a SIM or a SOAR

(01:08):
package.
You know QRadar, splunk,microsoft Sentinel and we can
actually take cues through anAPI.
They sense an attack, weautomatically start executing on
storage activities, trying toreduce the threat window and
minimize the impact of a cyberattack.
Remember, 90% of a largeenterprise's data is sitting on

(01:28):
their enterprise storage.
So you don't want to leave thefront door wide open and say
come, steal my stuff.
And by not including enterprisestorage in your comprehensive
cybersecurity strategy, you leftnot only the door wide open,
you put a sign in front of yourhouse 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 cyberresilience, and then we

(01:51):
bolstered that with incrediblerecovery.
So, for example, we can makesure that, regardless of data
set size, we can recover onprimary storage in one minute or
less, and we guarantee that toour customers.
We did a webinar a couplemonths ago.
We recovered four petabytes infour seconds, I kid you not.
So all about resilience andrecovery beyond traditional

(02:13):
storage resilience, which hasalways been very good.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
And what are customers telling you about
their hopes, fears, expectationsfor this year?
You work with some of thebiggest global blue-chip
enterprises around the world.
What's on their minds?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Well, the biggest thing is it's not if they're
going to be attacked, it's whenand how often.
Several surveys have come outrecently from some of the
analyst community of CIOs andthe number two spends.
Number one was storage.
Number two was AI.
Now we happen to have an AIsolution as well.
Obviously, at this show, we'refocusing on cyber, but Obviously
, at this show, we're focusingon cyber.
But number one purchase,despite all the weird economy

(02:45):
stuff going on.
Number one was cybersecurityand number two was AI.
So we fit into that bucketbecause our storage is not
regular storage, it's storagewith all this embedded cyber
technology that allows cyberstorage to be part of your
comprehensive cyber strategy,not left off to the side so it
can be easily attacked by thebad guys.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
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 (03:20):
Well, the secret sauce, quite honestly, is our
performance.
We can do 35 mics of latencyand everyone's got fast flash.
But what happens is is you fillup a flash rate and literally
it slows down.
With our patented NeuroCashtechnology it has over 20
patents we don't slow down somany times.
You'll buy a flash rate fromanother vendor.
You'll put a workload.

(03:41):
Now you want to put a secondone.
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.
So, for example, at one customerthey had 288 petabytes of flash
from someone else.
Now they're running all thesame workloads on 61.
Wow.
So talk about saving watts,slots, power, floor space and

(04:04):
operational manpower.
They used to run their oldstorage farm with 10 admins.
Now they're running a storagefarm leveraging us with only
three.
So talk about freeing up ITresources.
As you've written aboutyourself, there's an IT skills
gap, and those guys didn't losetheir job, they just took them
out of storage and put them inanother area of IT because
there's a skills gap right now.
So we could even help on thatfront as well.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Brilliant.
And what about some of theoften not discussed aspects of
our industry user experience,customer experience guarantees.
You know how to do businesswith Infinidat contracts.
Wise, you're a little differentthere as well.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Yeah, so let's take the guarantees first.
We guarantee performance.
In writing.
We guarantee 100% availability.
In writing.
We guarantee the cyberresilience.
In writing.
Several of our competitors.
They say they have immutablesnapshots.
They actually have a backdoor.
We don't have a backdoor so wecan't even get in.
No one can get in.
We guarantee the recovery timeagain under a minute on primary

(05:05):
storage and on backup storage,under 20 minutes.
And we're talking unlimitednumber of petabytes.
So we recovered a Veeam backupdata set on our purpose-built
backup appliance.
It could have been Commvault,ibm Protect any of the backup
guys Recovered 25.5 petabytes in12 minutes.
Wow.
So all that stuff is guaranteedin writing.
So that's one.

(05:27):
Second thing is the way we putall the automation.
All of that automation means wehave customers in writing
public references who said I'vehad an InfiniBox for four years.
I haven't touched it after theoriginal install.
It just kind of like thatEnergizer bunny just goes and
goes and goes.
So customers like that.
We have a customer in Europe$70 billion US dollars.

(05:49):
They had 15 admins runningstorage.
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 dealwith.
And again, the bulk of ourcustomers are the Global Fortune
2000, which means they're themost demanding.
So if we can make it easier forthem to do things, they do.
So that that's how we reallyfocus on these moments.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
Where do you go from here?
How do you?
What's next?
What are you excited about onthe horizon?

Speaker 2 (06:15):
let's say well, the big thing on the horizon for us.
Obviously we're continuing topress the cyber button, which is
why we're here at rsa.
But the other thing about AIhow do you get storage
implemented in an AI world?
In this case, how do youstorage for AI applications and
workloads?
So we've come up with an AI RAGsolution retrieval, augmented
generation and that allows us touse our existing storage,

(06:39):
competitor storage, as long asthey have the NFS protocol, and
cloud storage with the NFSprotocol path.
That all together and have itwork with vector databases,
large language models, smalllanguage models and constantly
reiterate Remember, a humanlearns every day.
Every day, the smart human islearning.
Things change every day, right?
Who would have thought aniPhone back in 1970, if you said

(07:02):
, wait, in 2005, there's goingto be a phone that's more
intelligent than an IBMmainframe?
They would have looked at youlike you're crazy, right?
So you always want to learn,and RAG and AI is all about
constantly learning becausebusinesses, particularly who we
sell to they're changing everyday.
If you're going to use AI forsupply chain or AI for
financials, every day thatchanges.

(07:22):
You have to constantly learnall the time, and that's what we
do with our AI RAG.
So you have to constantly learnall the time, and that's what
we do with our AI ranks.
So AI is a hot button itembeyond storage, and what we do
is make sure that the storagecan keep up with all these
changes people are trying tomake by leveraging AI into their
businesses.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Incredible.
All that juicy juicy data needsa good home.
You also have some reallyinteresting partnerships across
the industry.
They're pretty open andflexible and you have some
announcements this week as well.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
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 eventcoming up Right, white Hot, and
we'll be presenting, for example, at KubeCon in Europe.
Yeah, and we'll be on a panelwith Red Hat.
Red Hat invited us to be on apanel, so that will be coming up

(08:09):
later this month.
Well, in the month of May.
We work with all the backupvendors, everybody, All the
security vendors.
So we work with the IBMSecurity Division, palace.
We work with all the securityvendors Because, remember, while
we have cyber, we still have todeal with key management
systems and other things thatneed to be deployed.
Remember, it's an ecosystem.

(08:30):
And because, while we sellsystems as you know, evan, well,
we're basically a softwarecompany.
So it's all about how we do theintegration with other pieces
of software, cyber, for example,our automated cyber protection
that we brought out last yearintegrates with any SIM, any
SOAR or storage operationscenter to automatically start
doing things that help reduce athreat window.
That's all about software.

(08:51):
So that's what we do and that'sabout the ecosystem as well.
Right, so we make sure we havea strong ecosystem of anyone
that are and again, we're mostlyhigh-end enterprise, we only
have a high-end system and again, global Fortune 2000.
So you got to work with thisguy, got to work with that guy
and we make sure that we do thatand do it in a very
comprehensive and business valueway, as well as technical value

(09:13):
.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
Wonderful.
So it's a big week here.
You've broken out the purpleHawaiian shirt.
This is a very special shirt, Iguess just for RSA.
But what's next?
What colors can we assume arein the wardrobe for the next
event?

Speaker 2 (09:26):
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 75different Hawaiian shirts in my
closet, I believe you.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
I believe you.
I'm going to take you up onthat.
We're going to do a tour of thecloset at Zoginster.
Thanks, eric, we're good to seeyou, thanks.