And now it's time to hear from a customer who is really laser focused. Really laser focused on how to use NetApp products to change the future. Check this out. It is my great pleasure to welcome the CTO of National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Phil Adams. Phil, how are you? Welcome, Phil, and thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. So, Phil, last year your lab made history. They had an incredible breakthrough that Phil tells me took six decades to get to that point, and it has the potential to change the future of clean energy. Tell us what happened, Phil. So late last year, our scientists made a few calculated tweaks through an experiment we were running on the National Ignition Facility. We then aimed the world's largest laser beams at a BB sized target filled with hydrogen. This forced the atoms of hydrogen together to create a fusion reaction known as ignition, where it produced more energy than the lasers put into it.was the first time ignition was demonstrated in a lab setting, and then we repeated the experiment again with an even greater energy gain. So just a few small tweaks, huh? Just a few small tweaks. So it was an incredible achievement, Phil. Tell us more about what makes this innovation so significant. Yeah, it's been compared to the Wright brothers first flight, which was only 12 seconds and 120ft, but was pivotal in revolutionizing travel as we know it. Although it took another ten years for the first commercial flights and another 30 years after before we can do the first supersonic flights. The advancements in aviation were due to the Wright brothers demonstrating the art of the possible. Similarly, on the NIF, we prove that with the right conditions the science is not just feasible, but repeatable and controlled. Fusion ignition is no longer a dream, but a tangible reality. These experiments on the NIF serve as a proof of concept that what many considered impossible is indeed possible, and this breakthrough history will show, is a catalyst for innovation and will rapidly advance our endeavors with stockpile stewardship, materials science, astrophysics, but also more provocatively, leading humanity down a path to clean carbon free energy. Now we've got a long way to go before that can become a reality, but I think we can mark this moment as a pivotal one in human history. Phil, there are so many darn unbelievable elements to this story, but you know, your mission has always been bigger. Your mission has always been to keep our country at the forefront of innovation, at the forefront of scientific discovery. How do you do that? How do you stay on the cutting edge? The Department of Energy and NSA sponsored research at many universities and national labs across the country, and that's how we sustain large scale scientific facilities like the National Ignition or like the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and continue working on cutting edge research programs like the National Ignition Facility. There's no blueprint when your mission is to make the impossible possible. However, there are a few ways that we keep at the forefront of scientific innovation. We attract dedicated scientists and engineers who are passionate about the mission we have. We provide an environment that's conducive to learning, inclusivity, and collaboration. And once we've established the skills, knowledge and abilities, it's a matter of staying laser focused on the milestones we need to hit and continuously improving our processes so we can do it even better next time. A lot of laser focus goes on at night. Exactly. And so what's happening behind the scenes that enables you to do all of this research and do all of this innovation? As you mentioned, the fusion breakthrough took six decades of effort by the inertial confinement fusion community and 12 years of various attempts on the NIF. And that's not to say that all breakthroughs will take that same amount of time. However, to support this kind of leading edge research, the infrastructure in our facility must be reliable, available and maintainable so we don't miss that eureka moment. For my team, it's been a matter of being able to deliver the platform that a researchers and operations teams need and get out of the way so the science can happen. We keep the data for 30 years, and considering the efforts to get the data in the first place, we don't delete anything. As a result, it does pose some challenges to our IT team in terms of being able to make sure that we can store that data efficiently and safely. Just a few challenges to the ID team, right? So can you tell us more about the infrastructure that enables all that? We leveraged NetApp technologies to help us meet the stringent requirements of the NIF. FlexPod and AFF enables our systems to have excellent performance in low latency. FabricPool and StorageGRID transparently brought data lifecycle management to our scientific archive, and it lowered our total cost of ownership. SnapCenter and SnapVault offered a robust, enterprise wide backup and recovery solution. And by implementing these technologies that provided our IT team a manageable way to keep this data for this time frame. And fill it kind of goes back to what we've been saying today to the audience. You know, you got to have an intelligent data infrastructure that capitalizes and turns all of the data into opportunity and turns all of the data into innovation, like you like at your lab. And so tell us a little bit more about how do you look at this data holistically? How does that tie into your larger AI initiative and your cybersecurity strategy. From a threat perspective, you've got everything coming at you from ransomware, internal threats, external threats, not to mention the oops, we deleted something problems that we had to insulate ourselves from. As a result, we had to take a holistic data protection view in order to mitigate these issues. The waffle file system and data ONTAP's Raid DP provided data integrity for our data. F policy is a powerful capability that we're using to bring us closer to a zero trust architecture, and it not only allowed us to examine file activity, which is advantageous in ransomware detection, but it also checked many boxes with audit compliance. Regular snapshots and analysis of snapshot change data over time is great not only for ransomware detection, but also, more importantly, lowering your recovery time from that event. And you know, now that we were already doing regular snapshots, implementing SnapCenter and SnapVault gave us a complete data disaster recovery strategy we needed across our enterprise. Well, thank you, Phil, for taking the time to be with us today. I know we've had a long partnership together, and from my heart, I feel humbled to be the partner for Lawrence Livermore National Labs for the work you do. We are glad to be a small part of the incredible journey you're on to make the future better for all of us. Thank you Phil. Thank you. Thank you . All right.