hello everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of net app converge here in Las Vegas Nevada I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host and analyst Rob stret Rob it has been a day so many product announcements enhancements refinements so many great conversations that we're having here on the cube with netup Executives as well as partners andcustomers yeah and I think that's it the whole idea of outcomes and solutions tied to these announcements has been fantastic and we're going to get to bring it all together again Jeff we're going to need you to take it home for us I'd like to introduce our next guest our La our final guest todayon the cube Jeff bter VP of product marketing here at net up thank you so much for coming on the quebe thank you for having me so this has been an incredible event um I mean it's is still ongoing but as VP of product marketing I'd love you to talk a little bit about what you wantcustomers partners and even our viewers at home to take away fromwhat we're hearing about today yeah I mean this is a tremendous event it's a great time for the net Community to come together I've been with net for 16 years I started in sales here right so a lot of these folks are family for me and so uh especially after Co being able to get back all together in person is just amazing and we had the luck oractually to be quite honest we planned it this way of having a major launch at the same time so that we could celebrate that launch together um which was awesome except I had to do this and the launch at the same time so I don't know why news prebs over the week but then the really huge launch um today and everything and it's just been seen amazing traction online a lot from the cube already so we appreciate that and um justbeen tremendous response to everyonein the net family andthere's been really kind of three things that you really want to hammer home here whatare those three things so there's really three things about the announcement this week um or today it's really on unified data storage for the a right which are enhancements to our new unified data storage I know you've talked tomany people here right but the AFA series is our thorough breed for unified data storage right our high performance array and so the refresh of that line really injects a shot of adrenaline so to speak into our mid-range and high-end uh performance flash system so with the new AF a1k the FF A90 and the AFF a70 right amazing new storage we've optimized it it's ready to take on AI workloads and pretty much anything else you want to throw at it right and one of the things we didn't hit on though that I wanted to hit on was and Ithink was neat in that lineup was the flexibility of it scale up scale down start small grow big and I think that to me even though we didn't hit on it and we talked about it you know you're still getting the 40 million iops which is like crazy so yeah that that's always been the Hallmark of net app going back decades right is the ability to fundamentally flex and the ability to have you know we have the single unified storage operating system with ontap and you can start at a very small level scale up to a massive level and it's the same environment and we have customers who started with one small system and built it into a gargantuan cluster now doing you know up to 40 million iops or 1 terabyte pers second of throughput right and it's just grown that way over decades we have customers who've had the same cluster the same system up for a decade all the hardware is refreshed underneath it and it's just never gone down on them and so that'sa key part of our initiative is being able to have that unified data storage that just keeps going and then offering all these different flavors right even in the launch today Integrated Systems versus modular systems have your choice andLead it to where the customer needs it to go yeah and then you had two other things that I kind of interrupted you about but you know yeah so the two other things were really you know we continue to say that we are the most Secure Storage on the planet and I think we have all the Plott it and proof points to prove it I won't spend the next you know 25 minutes you know listing them unless you want well wetalked about uh no such agency and we talked about sisa and all the good stuff that you're doing there I don't know what agency that is I don't exactlyso yeah but I mean so all of this work we're doing there and then we just continue to enhance it right so um with the addition of autonomous ransomware protection now building an AI model in so it could be 99%plus accuracy um being able to have the tamperproof snapshots built in and now elevating it into this cyber Vault architecture that we built to really make it easy for our customers and what I love about and you may have heard this from some of your other guests is the cyberall concept actually came from our customers right um and a lot of our customers were taking the tools we had built and already building them into cyber vaults and we said this is amazing let's support you let's make it even easier and let's make it into a package up solution so that you have a complete Soup To Nuts reference that can enable you to build the Cyber Vault and protect against ransomware so that was the second part and then the third part was really about continuing to be the data foundation for Enterprise Ai and I know you interviewed today Partners from Nvidia from Lenovo we have these incredible Partnerships going back uh a decade or more with both really and we've really tightened those relationships over the last 5 yearscoming out with you know our first converion infrastructure stack with Nvidia in 2018 building that joint partnership we've had with Lova over the last couple years now bringing them all together into one happy family with the uh net app uh aiod withLeno net app a iPod with Lenovo for NVIDIA ovx say that three times fast I to say it's long it's very long it's got all the words in it so yeahwe actually talked about it because wecame up with this uh Power law distribution of geni andwetalk about the fact that a lot of people were focused on the far left side of it where the big huge models are being built but really where the most of the work is going to be done is down that power law out in the financial services and Telco you're going to have the Telos putting things like this out at base stations so that you can do inference and you can do geni based applications much more close to where that milliseconds count and things of that nature and that would seem like a bigtheme is again we're going where the AI needs to be bring the AI to the data yeah it's all about I mean a lot of people used the phrase democratization of AI right so there's certainly going to be the big five or 10 people training these huge llms and there certainly will be large Enterprise training llms and we do have solutions for them right so our super pod Solutions with Nvidia and others so we're notparticipating in that space um but we recognize for a lot of them they're going to just rent gpus on the cloud for a lot of those large scale even if they want to train a large language model it's hard to get that many gpus together right and so you go to the cloud to train your model but then when you want to go ahead and actually make it an ongoing part of your Enterprise that's where the fine-tuning inferencing and retrieval augmented generation come in and that's where these sort of targeted architectures like ovx really are going to start to shine yeah but even with the cloud you're there because of the hybrid nature of ontap as well correct absolutely yeah no we're in all the major Cloud vendors so that that's the awesome thing for us is we can support you wherever the data is and wherever you are on that Pipeline and that really is what we want to do is let you inthis case the gpus are probably the most valuable and scarce resource so let's bring the data wherever those gpus are that you want to use and make it seamless in doing that and that's exactly what ontap is able to do with intelligent data infrastructure so in all the conversations that we've had today here on the cube two things are really clear number one and that is nups really strong culture of innovation and number two that it has a real partner first philosophy inhow it goes about business and then just the example you were talking about earlier about Co coolab co- collaborating co-creating with your customers how do you do that I mean I think thatis the secret sauce that so many other customers andtechnology companies are trying to emulate and trying to do have you determined any best practices in terms of working hand and glove with customers yeah so there's a couple different ways I think we structurally do it and I could probably give adissertation on it but um I think you know our chief commercial office we built an entire practice that's designed about how do we connect sales into the rest of the company and really operationalize things in both ways right so how do we bring best practices out to our salespeople and how do we bring all the feedback from them and really pour it into the central channel the other part is you know Co was hard for us because our product team spends a lot of time out with customers right and so um we're constantly on the road I'm constantly on the road I think sandep lives on an airplane I'm not quite sure but he is everywhere andit's amazing and so we're just constantly talking with customers so a lot of the Cyber Vault idea came from several of us who were meeting with customers who had done it and so we literally were just out there meeting with customers so obviously there'sa scalability limit right and that's when we have specific processes in place to bring it in but it's just this Relentless obsession with what do the customers want to do next right and how can we help meet them where they're skating to right and that's just where a lot of our Innovation is and that's kind of at the heart ofhow we build things it'swhere is the market going to go where do our customers want to go and how can we help them and it's a real mindset of having to think that way and training your people to think that way wealways joke that the AFF which is our bread and butter now really L Us in all Flash and everything even before it existed people were taking our old fast systems and putting all ssds in them even though we said it wasn't technically supported and they're like this is absolutely amazing you guys should do this and we're like okay so there's obviously some engineering work to uh to rigor eyesee that but that's the sort of customer-led innovation partnered Innovation partnering with these huge Partners you had gen on right so all these huge Partners we work with um Ispend so much of my time with partners and they're just a part of our family yeah Ithink that I mean having been at net at myself you know we worked together yeah while ago a moonor two but Ialways loved the culture and Ithink to me that was always and it was engineering you know just really building stuff the customers wanted Ithink one of the things that sandep and I were talking about again you know base technology back then you know everybody loved the snapshots and in seeing what's being done to make them immutable and air gapped and with cyber Vault and stuff like that really cyber resilience is just such a key thing to customer days you must be hearing that from the customers absolutelyday in and day out right it'swhat I say talking to every customer right is every customer has a chief fear and a chief opportunity right and the chief opportunity is AI with a little bit of fear of what do I do about AI right but and then the chief fear is ransomware right because it'svery much the sort of thing that can turn a bright sunny day into like the worst day of your work life right inan instant when you get that attack so now everyone's worried about it everyone's trying to find it and you know the dangerous thing about ransomware is we all know that no system is going to be foolproof right you're going to get attacked by ransomware over time right there's the joke like there's two type of companies those that have been hit by ransomware attack and those that don't know they've already been hit by a ransomware attack right it's so everyone's going to get hit and so you can't go out there and say we've got the solution right we've got the Cure you're going to be 100% immune to it and that's hard for it people because we're used to thinking in binary terms like I want to come up with a solution that's going to work that's going to block me from Ransom somewhere and so it's all about what's my best threat avoidance what's my risk avoidance and where can I really help invest and that's really what we've been doing in N app is how can we take all these Technologies we have and make it easier forpeople to consume yeah and you even came out with the part of this whole announcement was the guarantee around that as well yeah we've had the ransomware recovery guarantee now for I think a year maybe 18 months or so and we've continued to strengthen it because and that Ransom our recovery guarantee I always say it is marketing and I mean that in the finest sense of the term because we don't ever intend to payout on it yeah okay it'snot a guarantee where we went in the back room and said okay 10% of our customers are going to lose data so we'll have to pay out this much so we'll put this much we literally what the guarantee fundamentally says is we believe so strongly in our snapshots that any data that you have backed up in your snapshots you're going to be able to recover from right so there's all the t's and C's the lawyers who are watching this right now want me to say that you know there's no 100% proof against ransomware right um but that'sthe heart of the guarantee is saying hey we trust somuch in this technology that we've hardened over the last 30 years that we know you're going to be able to get your data back from you if you put it in there Jee you're going to get the final word on this conference whatare you taking back home with you after being here with the energy and the momentum and the excitement around these new products last I think you said it it's all about energy and momentum you know netf has been on the tear right if you look at I'm not going to talk about the last quarter but if you look at the three quarters before that we've been performing extraordinarily well and I think that the reason that matters to us is yes we want to perform well but it also means that we're on this incredibly sure footing to continue to innovate for customers and so you just see everyone here having I mean the theme of this place is Festival right and it really is a party and it's not adebauchery party it's a let's go learn we're so excited to be here right and that's cool right because it's a job um but it's not just a job for a lot of us it's a passion we love helping customers we love coming to work so much of my family is here I don't know how many hugs I've gotten from people I haven't seen in years right um and so that that's the energy and momentum that we're all going to in the next couple days take back to our partners take back to our customers and really Drive everything that we launched today for unified data storage into the AI era into the Jeff thank you so much for coming on the cube a real pleasure having you thank you for having me I appreciate it I'm Rebecca KN for Rob stretche that wraps up the Cub's live coverage of net app converge stay tuned for more you are watching the cube the leader in technology Enterprise news coverage and Analysis