hello and welcome back to net apps converge2024 we're here really just so exciting to understand what's going on within the entire ecosystem that net apppp has brought together with their Sellers and their partners and I got to say I'm really excited because I get to talk to somebody I've actually known for quite some time and we've worked together and built product together and uh it'sjust exciting to see what he's been doing at net app so I really want to invite you know sandep Singh on who's the SVP and general manager for Enterprise storage here at net apppp Rob thank you it is a great pleasure for us to be reconnecting and you having a opportunity to have a conversation yeah I mean Ithink again it's I mean it'sbeen a while we've both done a lot of other things and it'sbeen a lot of fun to really into what you guys have been up to andnow you get to see it from just a whole different level I mean George was talking about it earlier about kind of the high level Vision but why don't you kind of give us a highlevel vision of the unified storage and data approach that you guys are really taking because it's not just about block file and object it's about everything else that goes along with that yeah I'llperhaps start at the beginning in terms of I I've been here about 18 months I visited hundreds of customers often the Common Thread is data cloud and AI are the three forces that are really shaping the it landscape and the plans for customers um and you know data has become so much more about having to go not only store and serve the data but protect it from ransomware attacks and cyber security threats and clearly cloud and AI customers are figuring out how to harness the power of cloud on AI across the board uh but in the customer conversations the one challenge that everybody articulates is complexity and as soon as I double click on complexity it's complexity that gets compounded through bespoke infrastructure silos um and the reality for a lot of the Enterprise organizations is they have seven or 10 different bespoke infrastructure silos when they have talent shortages and skills gaps and they're having to go retrain and re automatewhen you think about data security if you have 7 or 10 different data security models there's no way to have confidence in that data security and when you think about protecting from disasters and Recovery workflows how do you have confidence in your dat your recovery workflows there this is where unified data storage is the game Cher for customers and only net apppp is delivering truly unified data storage and what we mean by that is basically a single storage OS on tap that can underpin any application data workload any data type whether it's structured or unstructured across on Prem and cloud and what that is bringing to customers is truly simplicity at scale not just within silos so they can train ones and automate ones they can have one data security model they can be confident in they can have one you know data recovery workflow um so that confident about the recovery instances as well um this is what's exciting about unified data storage yeah andI think again that cognit cognitive load that's put on it people today where they have to learn all of these bespoke Technologies and stuff like that and like you said ontap I mean I was at net app even before you were at net app a long time ago and Ilook at it and go it's always been about ontap and how you really operate wherever it is on Prem in Colo in the cloud it's really on Tab you're learning that one thing right I mean that's really helps these organizations especially when they're under attack from things like ransomware and other security and cyber resiliency they need to bake in tell us about that and what you're hearing from customers yeah ransomware is just a top of Mind sea Suite priority across every customer that I talk to nowadays most of the questions are going to be around ransomware right um it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when people recognize that and they also recognize that storage often becomes that last line of defense and this is where it becomes incumbent on the it leaders to get the most Secure Storage uh in their infrastructure and that is where netop comes into the conversation uh where we are delivering the most Secure Storage on the planet what we mean by that in the context of ransomware is we've got a rich Suite of capabilities for ransomware protection but where we're really changing the game is in the ransomware detection side of it detection so far has been an offline postprocess via backups that can be hours to days later we are graduating detection to be a first class citizen in primary storage where it's real time it's built in and it's designed for 99% plus accuracy what that means is now customers can be confident about their storage infrastructure being able to detect a ransomware attack immediately have a recovery Point created and alert the admins and now they can enable rapid recovery before their data really gets impacted um so that's where we're really changing the game we're super excited about that we''re seeing a dramatic uptake in the overall capability with that's through the uh autonomous ransomware protection that's built into onap we're justseeing a dramatic adoption across the board and with today's announcement we've gone a step further we've had Ransom or recovery guarantee we've now added in a cyberVault uh solution available to customers um so they can now add an additional site that is a cyber Vault it's built on lowcost infrastructure whether on Faz or Net appc series it's with the logically air gapped um storage infrastructure that's been hardened from a security standpoint and it provides these indelible immutable snapshots uh the full copies of the data that are available for Recovery points for customers yeah Ithink thatis the key it's built off of those snapshots that have really been a defining I would say technology since the beginning of net app about having those and being able to make them immutable and then going that next step in making them air gaped is critical and I think that has to be one of those things that you know cross we were talking about Federal and uh sisa and some of what's going on with sled that has to be a top of mind for everybody not just in the governments um absolutely and talking about Federal this is where net apppp is the only storage validated for storing the top secret uh data um that's where customers are trusting net app with that level of security uh to make sure that their data is going to be secure um and then the other thing I'll just touch upon briefly is the major part of our announcement was that next major advance to unify data storage that's with the introduction of the new net apppp AF a series systems and the in the context of ransomware it is built in uh it's all of these capabilities that we just talked about they are built into to the new net APPA series that was the thing is like performance and data protection that I that was what I took away from it and it really helps everybody that it's built in and in fact we were talking to Gabby earlier on tonight today because it isn't tonight yet but that around how basically it's built in and Ithink everybody likes that because it goes back to people understand how to work with a net app array and it's how that works all over the place as well yeah absolutely I'll touch U briefly on the you know major portion of our announcement with the new AFF a series what we are you're talking about is it's unified data storage built for the AI era uh what that means is now basically the new FFA series is powerful intelligent and secure U powerful in the sense that it can help customers turbocharge every workload it's 2x you know better performance um it is up to 40 million iops that's an astounding number you and I have lived uh the storage remember when we got to like a million I Ops it's like you know 40 million though up to 1 terabyte per second of throughput across a cluster all of that when you couple that with 69 measure data availability always on data reduction there now what that means is customers can turbocharge every workload without trade-offs whether it's optimizing their VMware environment op you accelerating their sap SQL or collapse or seizing the AI advantage and building the capability four AI gen AI workloads so that's the powerful side of it from an intelligence standpoint top of mind for everybody right now is lowering cost customers can easily protect manage and mobilize their data and they can do it at lowest cost across the data life cycle they can simplify hybrid operations across the board and it's intelligence is also part of building that foundation for Enterprise Ai and then secure part of it you and I just talked about all of the ransomware side of it yeah no Ithink that's great but youalso had another announcement and Ilove this because I was around at net apppp when Flex pod launched so you have the aiod and you're doing it this time with Nvidia and Lenovo and we're going to welcome them up in a short little while but kind of getgive a little bit of the high uh high pitch on whyaiod absolutely uh look overall AI gen AI every organization is looking at how to harness the power of AI and geni whether it's to drive productivity gains um to deliver that next level of innovation or deliver that next level of customer experiences so far we've seen a lot about larger scale AI of service providers for large foundational model training uh that's an expensive investment across the board as Enterprises are graduating and looking of graduating from experimentation to production deployments there the use cases are shifting a lot more to Beyond model training into fine-tuning retrieval augmented generation and inferencing and really the power for Enterprises is to be able to take their Enterprise data and combine that with the pre-trained Gen AI models to you know bring make it more cont ual for them and the this is why we teamed up with Lenovo and Nvidia to build a new Converse infrastructure this is the new aiod with Lenovo things system servers uh alongside with Nvidia ovx uh certification it's designed to enable Enterprises to take their Enterprise data use rag with it with this conversion infrastructure it's super simple so that it's prevalidated it can be you know fast time to value for customers uh it's a great value proposition for partners uh to help deliver it to their customers along the way it's powerful because it brings along the think system servers it brings along the Nvidia l4s gpus with it uh and it brings along the net app um the AF uh C Series across the board you've got data management built in you've got the Enterprise AI uh Nemo retriever overall software Stacks built in from Nvidia um so I think of it as a gen AI converge gen AI in a box and it's affordable for customers so as organizations are looking at deploying and production deployments affordability absolutely matters yeah no we see this most organizations aren't going to go and you know go against and try to compete against the large llms what they're going to do is bring a model in like an open source model into some of the Nvidia systems or you know partner with Nvidia with the models that they have and really ride that curve and what we've seen is actually in our power law uh distribution for Gen is that yeah the big models are here to huge but as you start to go out where the vast majority of the customers are buying fors for verticalized uh instances such as Finance or Telo and when you get to Telo hey you're going to put something out at the edge in you know at a base station or something like that to do inference and to be able to be responsive Ithink that's the kind of thing where you need these types of AI pods that really go and fit yeah absolutely we are super excited about this aiod with Lenovoand Nvidia um it you know augments our overall portfolio of solutions that we're building and enabling customers with around Ai and geni and you know it's look net apppp hosts a lot of the customers unstructured data that Ai and gen are built on right and we see it as being that good Steward and shepher of enabling customers to be able to truly harness the power of AI and gen Ai and like you said you're out talking to customers all the time wetalk to them in our research and one of the things they always talk about is they're they don't necessarily want to bring all their data to the AI they want to bring the AI to the data is that a common theme that you're hearing as well absolutely I would say you know first you know gen AI it Absol builds upon unstructured data so that becomes important ifyou already have the unstructured data stored on net app for example it becomes the opportunity to go how do we enable AI geni with it um you know the bringing data or AI to data is critically important lots and lots of that data has gravity um at the same time it's archetypical workload for hybrid workflows uh this is wherenet app has invested in over a decade in really integrating at this Cloud native level with the hyperscalers and we have a variety of Technologies to enable customers to securely and efficiently be able to mobilize uh their data uh and that's part of enabling those hybrid workflows and what's becoming essential especially for the production workloads in Enterprises is all about how do I have data management tied uh for Enterprise AI you model versioning the data sets associated with those models the data lineage the data security and governance and privacy of data just becomes so critical uh it's just a top of mind I was in a conversation with a CIO of you know a financial services provider and that was like just the top of mind uh critical part of it yeah so these are all elements that are Fe feeding into you know important needs for uh customers across the board yeah especially when they're looking at things like the European AI act and other stuff coming down the pipe but why don't we park it there for a moment because wehave some special guests that are going to come up on stage with us in a minute and you know we'lltalk through that in a second so why don't you stay right there and why don't you stay right there while we get bring up those special guests we're going to bring up Nvidia and Lenovo and we're going to dig a little bit deeper into the aiod that was just announced today so you stay right there with the cube the leader in high-tech news and Analysis thanks