Alright everyone, I know it's a little bit early but I'm gonna start a little bit ahead of time because there is a lot of information for me to cover about ring signatures today. So before I begin, can I just have a quick pull of the room? How many of you know what ring signatures are? Perfect. So unfortunately since I have so little time, I'm gonna kind of jump right into ring signatures without an initial explanation. There are a lot of other resources you can use if you want to have an initial explanation about ring signatures. But we're going to be looking specifically essentially why ring signatures suck and what you can do about it. And under which use cases should you be concerned about how ring signatures work and ultimately what sort of entropy they provide with Monero transactions. So ring signatures, they are one of the four primary components of privacy that Monero offers. The ring signatures are used to obfuscate the sender in the transaction or more accurately which output is used in the transaction. It makes it seem as if several outputs are each independently being spent, you don't know which source of funds is actually being used. So we're just going to talk about that one component today. So if you look at a ring signature, it kind of looks like this. First it's important to understand outputs. Outputs are like pots of gold. They're single use pots of gold. When you send a transaction to someone else, you create a new pot for them and you dump whatever gold or Monero you want them to keep. And then you make a new pot for yourself that you dump all the change back into yourself for. That is how Monero money is held. It's held in these outputs. It's really important to understand how outputs just generally work. They're stored as essentially pots of gold, so to speak. And so on the screen here you can see an example of a ring signature. A ring signature contains several of these outputs. The highlighted one, let's say, is the real source of funds you want to spend. If you want to give someone five dollars, you need to give them a five dollar bill.  That is the output you do control and the output that you are spending in the transaction. These other black pots, so to speak, these other outputs, are called decoys. You do not control these outputs and they're just essentially money other people control, but you select these from the blockchain to make it seem as if these sources of funds are also used in the transaction. Collectively you have this ring of, in this case, seven outputs. Seven is the current minimum ring size for Monero of potential sources of funds that are used in the transaction. These seven potential outputs are the sources of funds that could be used in this transaction. So that's the general idea of a ring signature. Now it's important to also understand the key image. The key image is a reference to the actual output you do control. It has nothing to do with any of the decoys. This is important because otherwise you could just fabricate a transaction with everyone else's money and make it seem like you're spending other people's money. You need the key image in order to actually make sure someone's putting something up for stake. They actually have the right to spend the funds that they say they are spending. But the key image is really important because there are potential attack vectors with how the key image can be used across several different chains. We'll speak about all of that during this talk today. So history of the ring sizes of Monero. Monero was launched in early 2014. When it launched, it had a ring signature feature. But there was no requirement that you actually included decoys in your ring signature. You could create a transaction essentially without using the feature where you had no other decoys, decoy outputs in your transaction. And that was pretty bad. There are several research papers I highly recommend. You read MRL1 and MRL4, which are two research papers on this topic, or else you can talk to either me or Sarang after. And as a result, we decided in order to actually protect the integrity of the privacy really in Monero, we need to have a minimum ring size. And so in March 2016, the minimum was increased to three. And then in September, the minimum was increased to five. In early this year, we learned of a new attack vector. And it was increased to seven in order to provide protection against this attack vector. I'll speak about this vector later. And going forward, we don't have a super concrete set plan. So I'll speak about how we weigh the pros and cons and how we decide what considerations are necessary to increase the ring size. So this is the first attack I really want to cover. And it's really critical to understand the idea of a zero decoy attack. Because every single other one of the attacks essentially replicates the same sort of effect, but just does it in a different way. So once you understand the impact of how zero decoy attacks work, you can pretty much understand anything else. So we have the ring signature there, for example. There's seven outputs in the ring signature. Six of them are decoys. In Monero's past, you could create transactions without any other decoys. This is an example here. Suppose you had a ring with just this one decoy. In this case, there's absolutely no ambiguity. You know that this output was spent in that specific transaction. So if my ring size seven transaction included this output in my ring signature, you would know since that output was known to be spent in that other transaction, it could not have been spent in this ring signature. So instead of having an effective ring size of seven, you're now down to an effective ring size of six, because this one output is known to not possibly be a real one. It's known to be a decoy. And if you repeat this process for several other six outputs, you then are able to determine, OK, well, now that you know that none of the other decoys are the real one, like you know that they are actually decoys, you're able to know that the output that you sent in the transaction, the real money you spent, was actually spent in this ring. And this is where the chain reaction effect comes in. So even though your transaction used a ring signature, since your ring signature was compromised, it actually negatively impacts other transactions which use your output in their ring signature. So as an example here, you have another ring signature, and one of the outputs that they selected was one of yours. Since this output is known to be spent in the transaction on the left, it is known as a decoy for the transaction on the right. You know it is not a convincing possible output that realistically could have been spent. So that's the general idea of the zero decoy transaction. In effect, it's a mechanism to attribute outputs as known to be spent in other transactions in order to ultimately learn more and ultimately break down the ring signatures so you know what real output is actually spent in these transactions. So going over a few other potential attack vectors, this is something that we just essentially discovered earlier this year. It sort of came out of nowhere. Air drops were all the rage earlier this year, and someone decided that Monero is a pretty big coin. I'm just going to do one for Monero. And we're like, oh, that actually has a potential for a lot of damage. And I don't know of anyone who hypothesizes this ahead of time. So we sort of had to adapt to this sort of situation. So if there's a split where Monero might have its existing blockchain and someone forks off, there are a lot of considerations if people spend funds on both of these chains. Because if they spend funds on both of these chains, they have the same output that they have on both of the chains. So if I have my one output of Monero before the split, I have the same output on both chains. So when you would send a transaction on both chains, the key image would be the same. You would have the same key image on both. Now, what you could do is look to say, OK, well, I know that since it's the same key image, I know that each transaction on both chains, if you made a transaction on each of these chains, would contain one output that was spent on both of these chains because the key images are derived from these outputs. So as a result, you can check to see if there are any shared outputs among these different ring signatures. And you can see here, for example, that there's one output that is shared. They have the same TX10 output on both. But all the other ones are different. There's no other overlap in these outputs. So you're able to say, OK, since this is the only possible output that could have been spent in both transactions, I know to eliminate all of the other ones here. Therefore, you have the situation where, since you have the same key image and only one match of the output, that you're immediately able to tell which output is actually spent in this transaction. If instead you use a tool that have been developed in the meantime after we realized this was a potential attack, you could create two transactions on both chains with the same exact ring signature for both. That way, you're able to compare the key images. The key images are the same, but there are several matches of these outputs. All of these outputs are potentially spent on both. Now, it's important to remember that if you are spending transactions on two chains, that you increase your attack surface. Because if on either of these networks, one of the outputs is known to be spent in a different transaction, it reduces the ring size for both of these transactions. For a fork of Monero, it's known that one of these outputs is spent. That also impacts your Monero transactions. It's a really important consideration, and we're luckily able to understand the attack a little bit better now, but this is something we really needed to address. Luckily, this is a tool that is enabled by default. As long as you're using a recent fork of Monero, if there are recent forks, they should include this functionality out of the box. Speaking to another new consideration, the idea of public mining pool data. For the sake of providing transparency to the miners who mine Monero, the miners prefer to know when the pool's mine blocks, and they prefer to know when they receive payments in order to have some transparency for the pool so that they know there's a lower chance of corruption from the pool stealing their hashes or stealing some of their Monero. This is fine from that perspective, but unfortunately, since a lot of transaction data is public, it actually increases, it makes a situation where many of the outputs that they touch might degrade the integrity of these outputs so that you would know that they could not reasonably be used in other transactions. Here's an example for support XMR, which is a common Monero pool, and they have a list of all the coin-based blocks that they mine, and they have a list of all the payments that are made. Unfortunately, you can use both of these pieces of information to determine, okay, well, they mined this block. They have this coin-based output that was generated. If this coin-based output is included in a ring signature somewhere, but it is not on this transaction list, I know that it is a decoy. I know that I can claim that this is fake in this case because otherwise it would have shown up in this transaction list. So to address this, there are several techniques we can use. So first, and so you have the case there where, sorry, there are several techniques we can use. So regarding the coin-based, unfortunately, there's not too much you realistically can do because you know that the pool would just reasonably mine it, but you can, as a pool, you can churn the output. You can essentially create a transaction, several transactions without publishing this on the transaction list, or perhaps even simpler as a wallet client, there could be an option to say, did you mine any Monero with this address? If you just check no, then it will exclude coin-based outputs in your ring signature. That's a pretty simple straightforward mechanism. For the payments made, there's a really unique thing we can do is have a different way of selecting what outputs are included in these ring signatures. And so I'll speak about this one because it's pretty interesting. So pools, when they send transactions to people, receive an output back to themselves as change. So I suppose they mine two blocks, and there's a certain payment threshold such that they're paying three of their miners, but they're not paying out all of the money that they have. They would receive certain ones of these outputs as change back to the pool. And what the pool can do is, for subsequent transactions, select exclusively from the outputs that they created, including the outputs that they sent to the miners. So if, for the example of a transaction here for a pool payout, they pay out to two miners here, and one is a change output back to the pool, they can create subsequent transactions with all of these outputs as potential spenders. And this is great because it preserves the integrity of these change outputs. It makes it so there's no practical difference between the change output and the outputs that are sent to the miners. So in a case here, you can see for a standard transaction that a pool would have going forward, or that someone would have, that it would just look like a standard ring size. You don't need to instead worry about this output because it is not known to be spent in any specific transaction anymore. So just simply by changing the selection algorithm for these pools, we can increase the privacy and preserve the integrity of additional outputs. So the last one I really want to talk about, and this is pretty straightforward too, is the idea of an exchange or a wallet provider touching a lot of outputs, and therefore having high visibility of a large proportion of outputs. If I'm an exchange and I possess a very large amount of Monero outputs, and you include my outputs in your ring signature, since I own that output, I know you did not spend it. So it's like, I know you can't spend my money, so I know it is a decoy. And if you have large players, this is a potential concern, especially if they're able to use this data on top of other public information that's revealed. So if I create a ring signature here, and all of my decoys are used from this attacker's holdings, it compromises the ring signature from this perspective because the attacker knows you could not have spent the money that they have. And so this is another concern going forward. It's a reason why we need, with Monero, we need to make sure that a single entity doesn't control like all of the outputs that Monero has. So what can you do at sort of addressing these concerns? What are general mechanisms you can take to protect yourself more than the ring signature can currently provide?  So if you, like in Monero's early history, you had a lot of zero decoy transactions, you know just don't include those outputs in your ring signature. You specifically avoid them. There is a tool that has been built out so you can do the same thing for two different chains. You can point the tool at the Monero blockchain and a different fork of Monero and say look for any issues with the key images, the key image reuse, and it will black list outputs if they are known to be spent in either of those transactions. And so this is generally just something you can do. Most wallet software will include this. It's currently not intuitive. It still takes additional effort from you to actually use. But generally it's best if you don't accidentally include money that you already knew could not have been a plausible spend for you to make. And so you could use the black, you can use the black ball list to exclude anything. You can include anything in as much that you want. But generally you should include the zero decoy out, the zero decoy transactions, which are no longer an issue with Monero. So it's unlikely you would select them anyway, but you can still blacklist them. You can blacklist the identical key image issue I just explained earlier. You can blacklist public pool data. So if a pool has an API, you could potentially use that to blacklist certain items. And then if you know that like large wallets and exchanges have a certain output list, which is highly unlikely you could blacklist these. Unfortunately this is probably going to be private information you would not have access to. Another thing you can do is called churn. And I don't want you to look or think too much into the actual entropy here. That's kind of a best case scenario. It's not exactly realistic in each case. But churning is the process of sending money to yourself. So in doing so, you're able to essentially have, instead of one transaction with a ring size of seven, you have additional transactions that each have their own entropy. Each have other transactions that reference all of these different outputs. So overall it increases the entropy from your ring signature. Instead of increasing your ring signature size, you can just send several transactions. So that way if one of these ring signatures is compromised, then you're protected by all the others. So in general, it's recommended, these numbers are still essentially being ironed out. We don't have a lot of definitive research here. But if you're worried, you can use churning to protect against different heuristics where people might suspect funds are bad. And in those cases, we would recommend churning between five and eight times depending on your use case. Ultimately, this all comes back to the use case again. And I'll speak about that in the next few slides about, ultimately, what does this mean for you if you're using Monero? And then, so finally, make sure that you spend during good times. Unfortunately, you won't necessarily always know the answer to this. But essentially, if you know that it is a bad time to spend Monero, you should try to avoid it as if possible. So if you know that there's an upcoming chain split for Monero, you should hold off spending funds shortly before or after this chain split because during this time period, there's a higher likelihood that a higher proportion of outputs would be compromised. So you should try and avoid these certain scenarios if possible. But if Monero was under attack right now, you would not necessarily even know that. So it's hard to... You can only do this for things you already know of. So let's talk about the different types of linkability that is available with how these outputs are connected to each other and what you really can do about it. So first is the idea of linking sub-addresses and transactions. There are two very popular, like, Monero ecosystem parts. One of is Moneruio, which is an Android wallet, and one is the Monero art. I have no reason to believe they're connected to each other, but let's suppose you're one person, you control both of these services, but you don't want any association between these two services. With Monero, you have a mechanism called a sub-address where you can publish an address on both of these different websites, and ideally, since there's no link between the sub-addresses at all, that it would keep these identities separate. Unfortunately, it becomes a little complicated depending on your spending habits on the blockchain. So suppose I made a donation to each of these sub-addresses. I did not know that they were linked together, but suppose that later I see that there's a single transaction that includes both of my outputs in two different rings. That would be highly suspicious because it would be incredibly unlikely to happen by chance. It would be unlikely for one transaction to contain both of these outputs. And so this is a situation that is, like, a big concern with sub-addresses because we tell people that this is a good way to keep your identities private, or the different addresses private, but depending on how you use Monero on the blockchain, you have plausible deniability, but you might still look suspicious. And so there's several things you can do. In general, for this sort of case, I would recommend keep the funds sent to each sub-address separate, and you need to churn each sub-address funds separately. And if you don't want to use sub-addresses, it might be simpler just to use two completely different Monero wallets entirely because it might be easier to keep those outputs separate and churned. So if I receive five payments to Monero and someone receives three payments to Monero Art, you should churn each set separately. Just make sure they don't touch each other. Make sure there's additional entropy before you put these funds back together. On the second situation, you have a situation where you're linking sub-addresses or addresses to a real-world identity. So suppose that in this case you need to add additional entropy before you interact with anyone that knows your real-world identity. So it's one thing for your online profiles to be linked. But if it's also linked to you individually, that's a large consideration that many people have. And in that case, especially if you're sending funds to a KYC-AML exchange, you need additional entropy before you send funds to an exchange if you don't want any suspicion of the funds coming from you. So you should churn before sending funds to these exchanges because it will provide you with additional entropy, additional possible sources that these funds could come from rather than just the standard ring signature. And then in the extreme case, you might want to say, every single output I touch should have no connection to any other output. And ideally, you're like, OK, wait a minute. Isn't this essentially fungibility, right, that every output is not connected to each other as no past history? And you're right that ideally under a perfectly fungible system, it would have a situation where every output is completely independent. Unfortunately, that's just not the case at the moment. With Monero currently, you have fungibility through plausible deniability, not through protection against every heuristic. So it still is possible that certain outputs might appear more suspicious than other outputs. And so this is a big consideration you have. And it's something to really keep in mind when you're spending Monero. So in this extreme case, you would have to keep every output separate and add an entropy for each of these outputs independently, which would involve churning each of these outputs independently, which is a lot of work. But it's required if you don't want any sort of on-chain connection or any reasonable on-chain connection between any of these outputs. So what are some of the challenges that we have for increasing ring size in general? So first, there are real costs to increasing the ring size. We can't just make a ring size of, I don't know, a million for every transaction because although that would be great for privacy, you wouldn't really need to worry about any of these concerns anymore. It's just not practical. There are real costs in verification time and real costs in transaction size. And each of these also leads to a cost of additional fees in sending the transaction. So we need to specifically weigh all of the benefits people have from the increased ring size of privacy in Monero against these real costs. So technically from a really strict level, the higher ring size is better. If you're able to increase your ring size strictly, that's better. But when you're specifically trying to weigh pros and cons, it's much more effective if you're able to tie these considerations to specific use cases. So for example, with ring size seven, that was selected specifically to protect against the chain split potential attack. That was a specific threat model that we had in mind. And so ring size seven was selected for that specific purpose. If we were to further increase the ring size, we should similarly justify it in a similar way in order to say we're increasing it for the reason because it has an actual impact that people have. So in summary, we covered four different ways for ring signatures to be compromised. We considered several considerations for the heuristic tests, ways for money to seem more suspicious than not. And we covered some of the best practices for using Monero's ring signatures correctly in a variety of use cases. And we covered the challenges of increasing Monero's ring size. If I had more time, I would talk about the difficulties of Monero's selection algorithm and many other components that go into ring signatures. But ultimately, the bottom line is that ring signatures are the weakest point of Monero's privacy. Unfortunately, they're the only system we have at the moment that provides a sort of trustless privacy for hiding the sending output. And hopefully we can move to a different system or find additional benefits in order to further increase the entropy set for all transactions with Monero. And so bullet proofs are an example of an improvement that we have. We have a real opportunity to reduce the verification time, the transaction cost with Monero. But ultimately, even with these improvements, we still need more in order to protect Monero against these sort of heuristics that might come up. So that's all the information I had. I know it's a lot. I was jumping right into it. We have the standard Monero information on there. More specifically, that's my email in case you need to reach out to me with any additional questions. I'll be around. Again, Serang and I can answer a lot of other questions. I'm going to check on time real quick. I have a few minutes, about seven minutes for questions, so I can take those now. But I appreciate speaking kind of the big concerns with Monero's ring signature mechanism. Yes, instead of the ring signature. So the reason zero-knowledge proofs were not chosen, so one, Monero started before zero-knowledge proofs became a big thing. And two, it's not a trustless system. So you still need to have a trusted party to provide the entropy for that system. No one in the Monero community feels comfortable providing the initial setup required to have this system. So to have a z-case-narc implementation, you need to have a specific group of people that create this entropy, and you need to make sure that they destroy this entropy otherwise the story is essentially toxic waste, as it's called. And if they don't, then they can produce money out of an error. And there's no way to detect that. So with Monero, we don't want that obligation. We want to say, OK, this is what we can do without you having to trust that the Monero team can print money out of an error. And this is currently the best scheme that we realistically have. Yes, absolutely. So the privacy of Monero is provided by the privacy of its users, frankly. And I think this is most, like, clearly evidenced as Monero had an opportunity for you to send a zero-decoy transaction. And at the time, some 70% of transactions did not use any decoys. And the best thing you can really do to approach that situation is make tools readily available. And for the zero-decoy case, it's, OK, we're prohibiting these. You can't send these that hurt other people's privacy. Because, yes, it's fine. You can argue that it's nice for someone to have the choice of being public. But if that hurts other people's transactions, realistically, you have to make the requirement. For change splits, there's a possibility for some better mechanisms going forward. But by default, the wallet clients that currently exist will use the same ring set on both. So there's a much lower risk. And based off the current ring size that we have, if there ever was an issue where a large proportion of outputs were being compromised, we would be able to at least have a high probability of detecting that before it would cause any major issues if we could at least warn people. So you're right that it definitely comes back to you need to make sure other people are spending funds in a not completely absurd way. And we just need to do our best to make sure that that's how people are generally spending their funds. Yes. So in some ways, yes. So mixing with Bitcoin, it's the idea is you take several sources of funds, you send it to a specific party, they jumble up who's-is-who, and then they send outputs back to each person. And you don't necessarily know which outputs were allocated to which persons. For Monero, it's similar in some ways because you make it seem as if you're spending other funds. The ring signature is most similar to a mixer. The big difference is you don't need to trust a person to provide this functionality. You could sign the ring signature offline just with a copy of the blockchain and then broadcast it later to the network. So in some ways it's a fair comparison. In other ways, there are significant differences in how it's actually implemented. Yes. Realistically no. In order to make something mandatory, ultimately you need to make something, a requirement on the consensus layer. I don't know of any way that that would be realistic. And I think that churning is not necessarily something that most people even have in their threat models. Unless you are highly concerned, unless you are like someone with a really high consideration for your privacy, like if you live in North Korea or something, then you would, like churning is important to you then, but if I'm just making a simple transaction, I still have plausible deniability under any reasonable circumstance we can come up with now. So the reason we can't really make it mandatory though is because churning transactions by definition or they look exactly the same as any other transaction. And so you can't really force people to make transactions necessarily. That's the sort of requirement it would take. Okay, so I think I'm going to take one more question and then I can hand it off to the next speaker. Did you have one? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that's definitely a big consideration. And I think it manifests itself mostly in two ways. So I didn't really talk about the input selection algorithm, but the selection algorithm is not consensus driven, so that is up to the wallet to decide which outputs to select. And if your wallet selects outputs really poorly, then it really harms you and the network. So, and especially if the wallet was widely used, if it was a widely used wallet, suppose an exchange when they had payouts purposely chose bad outputs to sabotage people. So that's an important consideration there. There are some changes you can do to consensus to make sure that X percent of outputs are from a certain percent of days to make sure people are generally honest, but that's currently not implemented. And currently there are no wallets I know of that have that sort of like undermining situation. My Monero used to have a different selection algorithm, but they have updated to the latest Monero selection algorithm. And then the second one is just a different ring size. Ultimately, if you have a different ring size, you have a different piece of metadata that stands out in the network. And so there are some discussions to move to a fixed ring size. Okay. Well, thank you. I'm always here to answer questions later. And I appreciate you coming to hear about ring signatures. Let's give S&P a hand. Thank you so much.


The European Union has been praised since February 24th as has Mokdan Klitsch once again reiterated here on stage that it has presented a unified front, that it has been able to act swiftly. Give us a sense of the discussions as much as you can from behind the doors, of course, to bring 27 nations together at a time like this and speak with one voice, cannot be easy, it could not have been easy. I know you're working at that front very diligently together with the high representative. Is the unified front of substance or do we see cracks in it already? No, I think that the level of consensus in Europe is extraordinarily high, extraordinarily high. And just to give you an example, it took two months, only two months, to set up the military mission to Ukraine. Whereas usually when we send missions to Africa, it takes one year or 18 months. But if you allow me, if I would like to make a certain comments regarding the meaning of this conflict, because if we don't concentrate and analyze the meaning of this conflict, I'm afraid that we're not going to be able to think about the question we raise, which is the way out. So if you allow me, I will make a few remarks. First, in terms of global meaning, this war, fundamentally, fundamentally marks the second death of the Soviet Union. This is for me the most important provisional conclusion. So in terms of meaning, this war, and we have to recall it, is a war of aggression conducted by a permanent member of the Security Council against an independent and sovereign state, which Russia was supposed to guarantee the security, the integrity, including Crimea through the Budabest memorandum of 1994, which carried a risk for Ukraine, because in exchange of this, it relinquished its nuclear equipment. So the cost for Ukraine was extremely high. And since we are in a Arab country in the Gulf, the best comparison is the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1991. Now second, the rationale of the war. Why put in wage that war? You need to read what Putin said. And he wrote a very interesting piece written in July 2021, which actually other Russians could have written, for example, Solzhenitsyn, of course, with much more talent, which means that the Ukrainian problem is not simply a Putin problem, to be a deep mistake. It's a Russian problem. And what Putin said is extremely clear. He said that Ukraine should not exist because Russia, Ukraine, Belarus belong to the same ensemble. They are the same nation.  So in his mind, they are part of the same nation because this is part of an imperial vision of the Russian world. Now the question you could raise is, why did he wait 2022 to wage this terrible war, which fortunately went miserably for the Russian army? The date, the chronology of the war, it had been launched on February 24th. And the day before the invasion, he made a declaration in which he said that Russia will support, recognize and support militarily the two puppet governments of the east of Ukraine. And I am amazed to see that nobody knows why he made this statement on the 23rd of February. And I raise the question to all audience here, could you tell me why this declaration had been made on the 23rd of February? So I'm going to give you the answer because even the ministers of foreign affairs, Europeans were not aware of this coincidence. And it gives you an idea of the meaning of the war. The 23rd of February refers to the eighth anniversary of the fall of the pro-Russian regime in Ukraine. The day Yukushenko left Ukraine, Yanukovych, and the day after it was the beginning of the democratic process. So the question is often raised, okay, they didn't accept the independence of Ukraine, but what did they wait 2022? Here again, the explanation is quite simple. As long as the political trajectory of Ukraine was compatible with the nature of the Russian regime, it was possible for Russia to manage the situation as they manage the situation in Belarus, okay? But since 2014, the political trajectory of Ukraine became very different, far from the Russian evolution, and then started the danger to which Russia answered through the annexation of Crimea and launched the famous Green Man in the east of Ukraine. So that is the reason why he launched this war. So on our side, on our side, did we make mistakes? Yes, we made a lot of mistakes. And let me mention those mistakes, sorry to give this background, but without this background, we cannot have a serious discussion on Ukraine. The first is, and in my view, and by the way, I'm expressing here myself on a personal basis, not reflecting the views of the HIVP, so please do not quote me in a way or another. So first, we didn't have, we never had a Ukrainian policy. Our Ukrainian policy was a byproduct of our Russian policy. And it led to a certain number of uncertainty, to a certain number of mistake, hesitations, including the question of NATO, I mean, to which personally I'm not favorable in the case of Ukraine. But we didn't give right and clear, precise indication. The second and big mistake is that we didn't react to the occupation of Crimea, which I remind is part of Ukraine. Because even after during the referendum of independence, 54% of the population of Crimea voted for the independence. Of course, the figure was much, much slower than the other regions of Russia, of Ukraine, but still the majority was favorable. So we didn't react, and the worst is that the sanction against Russia after Crimea did come after the occupation of Crimea, but after the shutting down of the plane. Third, I will be brief on this, the terrible mistake we made was to increase our dependency on energy on Russia after Crimea, after Crimea. And of course, we can fully understand the reasoning of Mr. Putin, who says that those Europeans are not reacting swiftly. And I think that one of, I mean, he virtually made after that all the mistakes possible, but he underestimated the role of the United States. But just, and I will just finish on this, and I hope that we will be able to come on the way out. The commitment of the EU is dramatically underestimated. I am virtually sure that the majority here of the attendants believe that the American support is more important than the European one. It's false. The last figure, published by the Kiel Institute at the end, come to the point and said that the commitments of the European Union on the economic side and the military side are superior to the commitment of the United States. Sorry. Well, thank you so much. I mean, obviously this was the background, the historical background that you provided, certainly key here. And the last point about the Europeans actually stepping up to the plates and their aid having at least equal weight as far as Washington's contribution is concerned is taken as well noted here. We have 45 minutes left in this discussion, certainly. I do want to go through one more round and take some questions from the audience members.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com. This is a recap video for that the jaspys 12 box bills mafia football mixer I need a need a table to jump on we poor planning on that maybe next time we do one of these I'll jump on a table All right, there you go big. Thanks all these folks for getting into the action really appreciate it There it is right there and here is the recap Not a bad break at all nice Miles Sanders some good relics Deandre swift It's a nice patch Joey Bosa Train whistle four out of five Kelvin Harmon Eastern stick Cortland Sutton Some cool relics some Jordan lasley's Neas William Justin Herbert out of mosaic Josh Allen rookie card out of score and this was the collegiate right here Look at that nice Zach Moss patch right here, and I think an even nicer Jerry Judy patching auto right here as well That randomizer went to Arizona And then Baltimore. I'm not Had the JK Dobbins There was two two relics on each side and then his autograph in the window right there That was for Baltimore and Minnesota got that Dalvin Cook base card right here And we bill's mafia mixer right guess what this is why we called it that we were given away this Josh Allen three out of 24 9 5 10 Pretty nice, right? I think we've valid around $1,750 around there give or take But a pretty great card and guess who won it It's Matt Staley he won that spot in a mosaic salo pack not a cello pack break a hobby pack break Won that spot and then got randomized this it could happen to you too. So check it out on jaspy's case breaks calm Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us, and we'll see you next time for the next break


Is this is it a saddle pad? Is it a flag? Is it a long arm, you know, an extension of my arm? Yes, it's all above. Let's see if we can move over off of that. Good. Bringing my life up, I'm pressing in. Bringing my frontal plane. Sometimes I'll say headlight front side of me towards him. You didn't see it, but when I relaxed my posture, he should halt. We'll step him over. Oh, we're going to have some fun with this horse. So you can use your saddle pad like the flag. Whoa, I missed that hind leg. Don't know if you could see it, but I missed his hind leg when I went off to cut an angle to arc around. There's his right hind came through. Notice him stepping under. Take that shoulder over. Now I'll step off. I want to see that. Oh, he stepped behind with the left hand, but I'd like forward. So I've got to help. That's my fault. I have to help him get forward, tip forward a bit. We'll repeat that. I rub, I walk past the rear like I do with the flag. We'll cross that left hind leg under. That's interesting.  It's probably a human problem. Who knows? Who knows?  So that's good. Front end's going to come through. Look at that, you guys. Oh, that's about when I'd stick that pad, as he's making a change, stick that pad on him. That's awesome. Now he's used to the human leading at his side. I want to teach him that I can get out in front. All right. Now, if you don't want to throw the saddle up to experiment, like if you want to work with him on accepting or just sort of tolerating this, we can reach up with the girth. And that's looking pretty nice. And then the saddle. I'm going to make sure I can tip him to me. I know I sort of flopped it out on purpose. He's in training, you guys.  It's not supposed to happen, but it just does. So it's OK. He's going to need to move in a second. I know that, yeah, I was just going to say, those hind legs are going to come up. Drop that girth, let that girth hit him in the leg. Start again. All right. His head's to the outside. Maybe I need somebody to hold him for me, right? Then while I'm cinching him up or girthing him up, he can be biting at that person and kind of like farrier visits for some people. OK. Looking to the outside, it's pretty much like guaranteed almost with him. I need to help support that idea of looking towards me. There's a little change there with him blowing some air out. He's trying to let down a rub. Make sure, rub the belly, the girth area. Make sure he comes to me. Then reach with the girth. See the girth? Reach up. Not going to come towards me. I had to talk about him biting at handlers. Not that I've seen him do it, just as a joke. And look it. I'm going to be the handler that gets nipped at possibly. Notice the hind legs. It's the way he expresses himself. It's a little young behavior, isn't it? It's a little bit of a almost like a horse that's not had a saddle. And here's something for you to think about. Maybe he was never in the frame of mind that he was really listening that well on the track to his handler. So let's just say his groom or whatnot is saddling him in his high-headed. He's looking away. They put the saddle on. It's like he's not paying attention. So maybe his ability to feel for the person, he just hasn't learned that yet. Carrying the saddle right now with the girth snug, he looks pretty nice. Looks pretty nice.  Oh, is that nice to have this. Must be because I worked them so hard, right? If I had it my way, with the exception of cantering on both sides of the ring, which I cantered on that side. I cantered on this side too, actually, now that I think about it, and with the exception of asking him for a canter, and an occasional trot, just going to make sure he moves over, it'd be fine if you'd have walked the whole time. You know? I didn't mention I dropped those irons. That can bother a racehorse, a trackhorse. I had one nice. I had one recently that I finished with another refined head, lively racehorse. And those stirrups coming down, that bugged them a little bit, because maybe in jockey land, maybe the stirrups aren't down there, I don't know. Who knows? I don't know much about racing. I just know about throwbreds. Step to the side, lift up. When I lift up, I convey a sense of movement. It's like using the rain. I want the halter rope here on the ground to simulate what will happen riding under saddle. I'm even using the coils near the saddle. This is looking just fine. He's starting to get to the point where he wants to stop. He's settled in. So I have an idea, as he has the same idea I do. Here's a mounting block. He goes, oh, no. You mean you're going to get up there, and maybe even get on? Now all plans are subject to change. And although I don't want to step down off the block, certainly I will. But the benefit to having a longer rope or lunge line, oh, it's nice, almost. But the benefit to having that longer rope is that I don't have to step down. There he wants to stop. Now interestingly enough, he's giving me the side. He probably understands. He's like, eh, people don't mount as much on that side. All right. The attention is gone, but the body is coming through. And, oh, that's nice. I'm rubbing his rump as he comes past, always able to bend his nose to me. That hindquarters is working great. Now I'm not talking about my movements. This is nice, isn't it? It's like, hey, buddy, what if I can't? What happens if I put blinders on? Will he feel for me then? Look at those ears, though. So no, I do like you. But how about if you give me the saddle? Now I'm not forcing it, you guys. I'm not forcing it. That'll work. That'll work. Ah, he says, oh, you're not so bad. You're not so bad. Looking and chewing. Oh, it's getting good. It's getting good. Oh, where are you going there, buddy? Don't come through me. There it is. Go there. Give me some space. You don't look very comfortable with your left foreleg up forward. Let's back up a step. That was a lot of work. Let's try that again with a little direct feel. Good. Good. I like these kinds of horses, though. You get the mind. He's got a nice rounded sort of horse angle. He's kind of put together fine and so nice. And the mind, you get the mind, the body will follow that. I don't need to work them hard. I need to work the brain, help them move over a little bit. Good. Now, if you were my horse, and I'm not saying to go do this because it's good if it's not for you all to do. But he's at a state where now he's so relaxed he almost would think about rolling. Now, I'm going to be out of frame for just a bit. I'll be back, but let's talk about that. If he rolls, it's one thing if you set it up and you ask for it and you direct his attention down and you want it to happen. But some people are so oblivious to what's taking place that for them to let their horse roll, horse will do it when they're not wanting them to do it. And the other thing that I notice is that people like in the wintertime, let's say, the horse is stalled up and they go, I'm going to put him in the arena and let him roll. Because it's awesome to watch him roll and look at the horse how he kicks his feet up and he gets up and he runs. And everybody thinks that's really great. Horses like it. But what are you teaching your horse to do? Come to the arena and it's the roll box. It's the sandbox you go rolling. I think that it's just like feeding your horse, hand feeding your horse or what not, giving treats. It's not for everybody. In fact, it's probably not good for many. But at a point that might work, just switching ropes to a shorter rope, you'll see why. I really like where he's at right now mentally, that is pretty happy with it, with where he's at. Pretty happy with this guy. Oh, look at that. I grabbed that rope off the ground and he sees it. It's like a snake. I'm going to throw it. All right. Trying to mesh together, get that horse with me. It's looking really good. It's looking really good. Look at that. It's a real horse here. He wants to know what to do, or he wants to do the right thing for the most part. There's a strong sense of self-preservation, so he looks for his buddies. And if he doesn't see the human as helpful, or if he doesn't see the human as a benefit, he's going to look away. Someone's going to run the show. It's either going to be you or it's going to be your horse, because Mother Nature says, hey, man, there's some stuff going on. If you do something and they look to us and we say, it's OK, come to me, or let's go right past that scary judge's stand. Let's go right past that weird rock on the trail. Look to me. All right.  And I'm not saying that anybody did that to this horse at all. This horse's got the new owner he has is doing a good job. And I'm talking about horses in general and the way people ride circles and things. So here we are, little swishy, but pretty happy with them. I'll help them stay put. I feel that the back tension. I'll direct a little bit, let them go. I hope that I don't get too far out of frame or too far back in the arena. We're going to explore the world here. See if I can just put my hand down on his neck. You can still see me, but just in a second here, we might be out. He's looking around, but in a good way. I feel like he's pretty mindful of me here. Do I always ride horses and rope halters? No, I don't. But a horse like this, he learned to push through his body lengthwise, push through his body, and go forward and brace against that snaffle. So I don't necessarily right now want that nutcracker snaffle action, pallet jamming bar pinching action, because I just spent some time on the ground with him. So why not keep that feel the same? Oh, I think he's kind of a horse that when I get, he says, I don't know what you want. So it's OK because he's moving the hindquarters. I'm not a frame here, maybe. He's backing up. I'll take that haunch. We're going to take that haunch over. We're going to say get forward, and he's going to find it. There it is.  Forward motion back to the circle, looking his lips, but still tight. I can feel him in the back. It's like a trembling. Now, he's not like terribly nervous. He's just braced up. You feel that, and it feels like they want to either scoot out from underneath you, or there he is.    We're going to find it. We're going to go forward. You're going to learn to go forward above all. It's the easier option right now. Eventually, he's going to like it. Right now, he's going forward because of nervousness. We don't want that, but I'll take forward. However, I get it. And it's better than rearing. But the other thing is, let's take that hindquarters. There it is and go forward. Now, I asked a lot of him to bend his head around.  So then I changed my plan. I said, take your head around, move the hunch, go forward. I did change my plan. Pretty soon, we're going to get a nice, get him to understand. I'm not so bad. I'm like, look, when I reach back and touch his rump, he gets nervous about that. Sometimes humans sit in funny places. Sometimes humans are going to lose their balance. So it's just another thing that we do. Right here, he falls. There he is. There he is. I want him to bring that head around to the left and relax. When I drop those reins, I'm just showing you what's going on. I'm exaggerating everything because that's looking really nice. Oh, let's just go forward out of there. All right, got the hunch. We got a soft feel. Got the attention. I'm going to try to get his ear to the right here, get him looking back to the right. I'll get move over a little bit. So I'm getting his attention, his ear and his eye to come to the right. Ear and eye, look to the left. He wants to go by the other side of the ring here. Look to the left. Look to the left. Look towards the good. Look to the right. He's tensing the back all of a sudden again. Sorry, guys. Well, I'm not going to say it. I'm not known to get, well, I don't want to. I always feel like I'll jinx myself. But I want to keep things calm. So I don't want to show you a excited situation. I kind of got that head coming around. I almost said I'm not known to get horses that excited. And then I thought about it. And I thought, you know what? Sometimes I'm on horses that are excited. So I don't want to scare a horse, though. But I will sometimes push a horse if it's going to help him get it. Right here, let's get that hind quarters.  I'm almost going to walk forward. I want to know that he's off my left leg. It's thigh, left sit bone, come forward, let him kind of go. I mean, I could go trotting and cantering, but I don't care about that. I want to work on, what did I get done on the ground? I'm doing the same thing now. These are the things that are going to help me get him to go forward and arc and to step under in a good way and to get supple and relaxed instead of being tense. So letting him have it. Let's let him explore again. And then we'll go back to some more hind quarter work. I like.


Live from the BuildGram Auditorium in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in San Francisco at the really cool historic BuildGram Civic Auditorium. We've been here all day talking with lots of great folks and we're happy to welcome back another Pure customer, Patrick Welch, the network services manager of the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Welcome, Patrick. Thank you, appreciate it. Tell us a little bit about the Department of Revenue. What do you guys do? What kind of information do you collect? Okay, we bring in all tax revenue for the state of Mississippi. Include vehicle services, so we do all, we register all the car tags in Mississippi. Income tax, corporate tax, any revenue that's generated in Mississippi comes through us. Tax refunds too? Or did you just take? We take and give. I have to do it too. So don't do this about some of the challenges that you had in your environment. I was reading your case study and it's totaling what you guys are taking in. It's totaling $7.8 billion a year, as we just identified. Some of it's being given back, but what was the infrastructure like to support that before you became a Pure Storage customer? Right, so we used an internal Mississippi, they're called ITS, so they handle all internal infrastructure, that kind of thing. They were using a mixture of Dell, EMC, Compellent, that type of thing. And we were, so we use a third party vendor who has an off the shelf software package. And they have about 50 to 60 customers in different states and municipalities and countries around the world. And in that environment of Dell, EMC, Compellent, we were about 47th on their list of productive sites. So we were way far down. We were not performing. Latency across the board was horrible. The user experience was the worst. If you've ever been on a website and clicked a button and you see the spinning wheel, we had that in droves and not just taxpayers, but our internal people that worked at D.O.R. were not able to work efficiently. So we came in and evaluated and I looked at the infrastructure and I said, my team can do it better. And then when they said, we'll do it better, I was like, okay, well now I have to go out and actually do it better. So I started researching other companies and Pure kind of rose to the top of the list. We talked with other customers and partners, kind of how they tackled those types of challenges. And we went through a lot of POC process, talked with a lot of vendors, things like that. We ended up buying Pure. We are now number three. We went from almost 50 to three, out of 50 to three. And the only two sites that are ahead of us are smaller sites. Their transactions aren't nearly as high as ours. Okay, hang on. So how much of that effect that can be attributed to the storage infrastructure? Do you have a sense of that? 99%. Really? Yeah, I mean because before we had, to be fair, Pure is all flash storage, right? And we're compelling and EMC or hybrid arrays. At the end of the day, the latency that we saw was due to read and write input being very low. We implemented Pure through the roof. We don't have, storage is not even something we would ever look at if we had a problem. We know that that is the performing well above capacity. Okay, got another follow-ups. I asked this earlier to another customer. So you're basically comparing an all-flash array to a sort of previous generation hybrid. So it could have been, I don't know, whatever, three, four, five, six years old. It could have been 10 years old. But so, had you, you had the option, obviously, of bringing in an all-flash array from the competition. We did. And you had processes and procedures tied to that.  Why?  Why did you choose that switch and that disruption? What business benefit did that bring you? There were several things that led to that. One of the things that we really liked was the proactive support. In terms of every three years, they swap out your controller as part of your support and maintenance agreement, which is, you know, huge for us because we don't have a lot of money. We have, budget is very small for IT, so I can't afford to replace equipment, you know, as often as some people can. So, the proactive support model, not just in terms of swapping out equipment, but personnel, our sales team that we deal with, our engineering team that we deal with, we're on a personal basis with these people. I have cell phone numbers, I know who to call, and that is, we found that out through, you know, talking to other customers that had, hey, you call these guys, they're gonna be there for you. And that was coming from not having that before. We knew that the people we had before were not gonna perform that same level of service, even if we went to their all-flash product. We were gonna have the same support that we had had before, which was not good.  Because you're a number, and in our business, we didn't spend near enough money to be considered, that's a theory of mine. I'm not sure exactly what the actual issue was, but it felt like we were not big enough to get that kind of attention.  Yeah, we're a little guy.   We have six arrays now, so I mean, we're not tiny, tiny, but we're not, also we're not city bank, you know, so. But I've never felt any different than a city bank type customer with Pure, they treat me the same way. You're in two years, you said, two years?   Oh, absolutely, yeah. I've done several, you know, I've done a case study, I've talked, you know, customers call me, and I'm happy to talk about Pure, you know, to anybody. I'm trying, I have a lot of friends in state government, I try to hit them all for making bad decisions. I'm like, if you like your job, you want to keep your job by this, so it's interesting to me, now one of the things the customers tell us is, is that they love a lot about Pure, but they really like the simplicity. You mentioned Compellent before, Compellent in its day was known for simplicity, you know, compared to the old mainframe storage, so it's interesting to note how technology has changed in, you know, whatever, 10, 12 years, comments. Yeah, Compellent was a great product. Back in the day, when it came time to evaluate products, they had not performed along the same track as a company like Pure, which consistently innovates its products. We, this is again, about feeling like a big guy, even though you're a small guy, they keep us in the loop of what they're bringing down the pipe, and it really makes us feel like we're invested in that, you know, ecosystem, and we know exactly how they're transforming, how they're going to develop their business going forward, and it helps keep us as a, you know, a happy partner. So, from what I'm hearing, Patrick, better experience all around, very happy. Did it save you any time? Are you able to now do things differently, add more value to your organization as a result of bringing in Pure? I wonder if we could talk about that. Oh, absolutely. We spent a good chunk of time troubleshooting issues directly related to storage before, whether it was storage creep, where we had too much data versus the capacity of the array, or the input output problems in terms of IO, latency, those types of issues. We don't see any of that anymore. So that frees our engineers up to work on other problems in the environment. What workloads are you running on Flash Deck? Mostly production SQL, so high SQL workloads, mostly. So from, you mentioned, you know, the dreaded spinning color wheel or whatever kind of computer we're running, and that was affecting not just employees, but also Mississippi citizens. Problem gone? The problem is gone from the aspect of our side of things. Now, there's Mississippi, so you still got a lot of rural customers who are still on some dial-up internet, so we can't solve that problem for them, but in terms of our side of the fence, we know they're not going to see any latency because of us. We're delivering the application as best you can. Like I said, we're number three in the list of their sites, and that is coming, we came 44 spots down. How quickly? In the last couple of years alone? Immediately. Yeah, I mean. We're like a neck brace from the Whiplash. Yeah, well, you know, we put it in, I'm just crossing my fingers because if I told them I could do this, and we're 45th, what did we really solve? We didn't solve the problem, really, but we came from that high up to all the way down to three. It felt like my team had accomplished something really great. And pretty dramatic improvements to your database. I was reading the case study within the context of your IT transformation that you improve database transaction performance by as much as 20x. Big. Also data reduction rates. So I want to get your perspective on your TCO, the impact of TCO, and why that's so important for a public agency. You know, I mean, a lot of things going to TCO, I think user experience is one of those things. Downtime for the state. The biggest cost we had was not really something you could see before, because our system went down all the time due to not being able to meet the requirements of the taxpayers and the people that work at the Department of Revenue. And we don't have that problem anymore. We would spend days of downtime before. That's revenue lost for us. So TCO in that instance is kind of hard to calculate, but I know that the number is big. I know we've saved a lot of time and money. Patrick, why not just forget all this IT stuff and throw everything into the cloud? I know as an IT pro, that might be fighting words, but hey, it's talked about in the industry all the time. Why the decision to stay on-prem and was that discussed? We definitely look at the cloud. We definitely have Azure workloads that are in testing right now. Unfortunately, it's not just as simple as us saying, okay, let's go to the cloud. Because if it was up to me with limited funding and that type of thing, I would love to move workloads into the cloud where it was applicable. The problem for us is IRS. So we have a lot of IRS regulations around the cloud. So the core infrastructure that we have has to remain on-premise. There's some things we can do, but the regulations are a mile long. So we have to make sure that we're always staying in compliance with IRS. That limits our mobility a little bit in the cloud, but we're getting there slowly, but surely. I feel like in the next 60 years we'll be there. But I joke, but I mean, just everything that we do, we have to go through compliance measures and we have to make sure we're checking all the boxes and there's one thing you don't want to have and that's IRS to write you up for non-compliance. And then, you know, because if you're attacked or hit by some vector afterwards, then you're on the hook.  That's why you were vulnerable. So we just have to be very careful, but we're definitely interested and we're looking to the future with the cloud. A lot of talk at this show, every show we go to about artificial intelligence, machine intelligence. What do you make of it? How does it apply to your organization? Can you use it? Will you plan on using machine intelligence for whether it's fraud detection or tax evasion, et cetera? What's the state of AI in your world? You know, I'd say infancy, but we know that due to the fact that the state hasn't kept up in terms of pay and that type of thing with private industry, we're gonna have to rely on artificial intelligence and automation and things like that to remain ahead of the curve in terms of compliance, performance, all the metrics we've talked about. You have to have either a very talented and well-paid staff or you're gonna have to leverage these types of technologies to stay ahead of the game. So you have made some big impacts from an IT transformation perspective. We talked about a minute ago. Where are you on this journey of digital transformation? What does that digital transformation mean to the Mississippi Department of Revenue and what stage would you say you're at? We're getting there. Like I said before, Mississippi is still very rural. For the first time ever, we had more online returns processed than mail. Believe it or not, Mississippians still like to mail their returns in. So a lot of that is rural location, internet access, that type of thing. But we're getting there slowly, but surely I feel like in the next five years we'll be probably 75 to 80% online refund based. I hope anyway, I hope we're not still at 50%. But it's a slow crawl, but we're getting there. We do things a little slower than most people. We get there eventually. Well, but you friendly are down in Mississippi. We are. Definitely. You got to have something. You do. So in terms of kind of like next steps, you've solved the performance challenges. You're kind of on this road to digital transformation. How have you improved the efficiency of your IT team? Say that one more time. How have you improved the efficiency within network services? I think most of it comes down to not having to worry about the equipment and the environment. We have more time to focus on each other, the tasks that we have in front of us. Before it was tackling issues that we knew were related to either vendor or product or storage or server. And now we're focused on expanding the skill set of the current staff. It allows us to leverage things like cloud and automation. We didn't have time to look at that stuff before. So when you ask me like, where are we at with automation? Well, we're still in the emergency because before all we did was fight issues related to previous vendors, previous products, that kind of thing. While it's not a magic bullet, and you're always going to have challenges, it frees us up to be able to work on those types of things. I feel like you've done it. As opposed to firefighting and whack-a-mole. That's all we did before. This guy's fighting this problem, he's fighting this one. They don't get time to learn and grow as employees and people. Okay, so automation is a big priority.  So right now we've deployed both of our major applications using Pure. So our big projects are kind of done. Now we're leveraging towards disaster recovery, modern-day DR, BCDR, business continuity, that type of thing. How do we recover in the case of a disaster? And that's kind of where my focus lays right now to make sure that the Department of Revenue, if we are affected by some type of disaster, that we're ready for the taxpayers' Mississippi to come up and running in a sister site and be ready to go. Okay, so that's a combination of infrastructure. Probably going to use snapshots, remote replication, but there's also got to be a software component as well. Absolutely. What are you thinking about, whether if you don't have a specific vendor product, but just architecturally, what are you thinking about? So we absolutely right now leverage Zerto with Pure, which is a very good combination. They work very well together and we have a co-low facility that's about 200 miles north of us. We'd like to get more geographically diverse. You know, as budget frees up and that kind of thing, maybe move out into the Colorado's or something like that. But our sister site, all of our data is replicated using Zerto. We're on, I believe, 15, every 15 seconds we're tracking journal history. So in the event of a disaster, and we've done test failovers where we've, you know, because you've got RPO and you've got RTO, real-time objective, recovery point objective. So it's important for us to be under 10 minutes in terms of how quickly we can recover the environment. So real-time objective. And we are, the last time we did a test failover we were about four minutes. So our business has completely transformed. Before, if we had a disaster, we would be lucky to have data available to us number one, and within three to five days. Now we are being able to turn around and operate it in another location within minutes. And your RPO, you said it was 15 minutes? Did I hear that right? Recovery point objective, so that is 15 seconds. 15 seconds? Our recovery points are every 15 seconds. Our recovery time, so the total time it takes us to come back up and running. We hope to be under 10 and we got it around four. Now that depends on a lot of different things. Every situation is not the same, so. Very tight RPO. Oh yeah, absolutely. Because you're moving money, I guess. We're moving money. Yeah, and it's very important that we stay up at all times. Obviously there's going to be a little bit of downtime but you know, we want to minimize that as much as we can. Patrick, last question before we wrap here. This is your first time at Pure Storage Accelerate. Some, a whole bunch of announcements this morning. Anything that you've heard that excites you for expanding this foundation that you have with FlashDac? You know, a lot of the stuff you talked about around automation and that kind of thing. We're definitely interested in how Pure is going to evolve to the cloud because we know y'all will be ahead of us. I say y'all, so y'all will be ahead of us whenever we do get ready and that's another big benefit for us is we know that when we get ready to transition to the cloud, you guys are going to have your ducks in a row and be ready for us to do that. Y'all is in Pure? Yeah, y'all is in Pure. So we all aren't Pure, just right here. Right, right here, you know what I mean. That's those orange guys. Yeah. We're the blue guys. Yeah. Yeah, it's really exciting to hear about automation and where they're going with the cloud and storage as a service and that type of thing is very neat. I love reading about and hearing about that stuff. We can't always be there, like I said, because of compliance issues but as we can, we will, if it makes sense for us. How important is it to you? I was asking a couple of the Pure execs what their thoughts were on staying independent. You see a lot of storage companies get bought, they get consolidated, EMC, 20 plus billion, they got acquired. How important is it to you as a customer to have a company like Pure be an independent storage company? I mean, it's enormous. And I can give you an example that we were a SimpliVity customer. So HPE bought SimpliVity. Our experience before the merger, fantastic. We would give them very high marks in every category. After the merger, not so much. Support dropped off for us after SimpliVity was bought by HPE. So for us, it's huge that Pure is now. That's not to say we know that this is a business and that things may happen but we hope that if they don't stay independent, somebody that has the same level of focus and effort and determination and support, keeps that going. Well, we hope so too. We love the competition on the Cube. We love the growth that drives innovation. And Pure seems to be leading the way. We talked about this earlier, what they're doing with NVMe, a lot of good marketing, but still they're throwing down the gauntlet, what they've done with Evergreen, obviously first with all flash or at least early on with all flash. So they're a leader. That's what you worry about too, the Evergreen type things or the things that you worry about going away. Okay, if they get bought by somebody, is that the first casualty? And that's the kind of thing that happens to companies when they get bought. So we do love the fact that they're independent but we know it's a business at the end of the day but hopefully that remains the same. We'll keep that feedback coming and for they appreciate that. And Patrick, thanks so much for stopping by the Cube and sharing the impact that you guys are making at the Mississippi Department of Revenue. Sure, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.


Welcome back, I am UX Hathay, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vulture Institute of Technology. Now this is fifth session, already in last four sessions we have studied a lot about basics of thermodynamics. Now we are studying applications and as usual before going to discuss we will see what are the outcomes, the expected outcomes of this. So at the end of this session you will be able to derive the expression for efficiency of heat engine, you will be able to analyze various statements of second law of thermodynamics and you will apply Carnot theorem. Now see the first of all let us recall what we have studied, we have seen in the first video, second video and third video onwards the heat, work which are forms of energies, the first statement of first law of thermodynamics, the conservation principle and the first law are equivalent and also we have seen that first law has got a limitation that is if you do the process in one direction there is no guarantee that process will be there in the reverse direction. Now today we are going to see the heat engine, how it operates and how to find out the efficiency of heat engine. Now let us see if I draw a PV diagram, PV diagram and let us say this is my one process say path A from 1 to 2. Now looking at this process 1 to 2, immediately the question comes to your mind that this is volume V1, this is volume V2. Now what is happening to the volume, volume is getting decreased, now decrease in volume will never be automatic, for the decrease of volume we require certain work. So we have to spend work means when I go from V1 to V2 there is a reduction in volume, there is a reduction in volume and reduction in volume requires work, it requires work means this process 1 to 2 will consume work, okay there is no problem for it but now suppose I come from process 2 to 1 by process say path B, then immediately we know that now for this process there is increase in volume, now as there is increase in volume we say that the net work done by this particular cycle, now see the world what I am using cycle is the area of the PV diagram. Now this is a loop and if this loop is existing and if I have a cycle which is in the clockwise direction see the direction I will get work output. So we have decided that clockwise is work cycle is work producing, it is work producing machine, it is work producing machine. Now when I go from 1 to 2 and I get from 2 to 3 there are two quantities which are important one is the Q1 and second is Q2, now whether I supply heat or heat is rejected that will decide how much amount of work I am going to get. Now looking at the diagram you can see that 1 to 2 is a compression this can be obtained either with the help of work or heat but you know that out of work and heat work is superior. So as far as possible if you use heat and that work can be done that particular task can be completed by heat it is well and good. If we have heat and work option but work that particular process cannot be carried out say with the help of heat then only use the work. So without say loss of generality we assume that Q1 is heat supplied, Q1 is heat supplied and Q2 is expansion so it is heat rejected, heat rejected. Now the definition of a thermal efficiency in general is work done upon heat supplied. Now what is work done Q1 minus Q2 because finally whatever amount of heat I have supplied and whatever amount of heat I am getting rejected so Q1 minus Q2 is the work done upon heat supplied is Q1. So I will get 1 minus Q2 by Q1 as the efficiency. Now this is very fundamental, now if you go to another say basic principle about the say efficiency you will find that when efficiency I write as 1 minus Q2 by Q1 if it is equal to 1 its meaning is Q2 is 0. Now if I am not rejecting heat then only I can get the conversion of entire amount of heat supplied into work which is against the first law of thermodynamics means we cannot have perpetual machine of first kind. Now this is about the heat engine. Now go to the important topic that is second law of thermodynamics, second law. See historically say first second law was developed first because it was responsible person was Karnot who was an engineer. Now the second law is important from the point of view of say visibility of a process. So there are various versions of the process that if I say that if I want to go from the point 1 to point 2, point 1 to point 2 the problem is whether this process would occur or not and if I come from 2 to 1 again so the feasibility of this cycle is judged by second law that is one thing. And second law is a common day experience that whenever heat transfers it is from high temperature to low temperature whenever there is a flow of fluid it is from high pressure to low pressure whenever there is a concentration difference then high concentration to low concentration there is a mixing means there is a potential difference what is important there is a potential difference for the process to occur and always it is from high potential to low potential. So high to low is a natural and we cannot come from low to high say without expanding energy. So looking at this particular phenomenon there are various statements given by various scientists one is a clausius statement. Now this clausius statement says that if you want to transfer heat there are two bodies one is at T1 and second is at T2 and assume that say T1 is less than T2 and if I want to transfer heat from T1 to T2 now just imagine you have two buckets in which one water is having 30 degrees another bucket water is having at what say 60 degree temperature you connect a copper rod and expect that heat is being transferred from low temperature to high temperature will it happen in nature never because we know that there is a temperature difference and it will not happen on its own. So clausius statement said that it is not possible operating in a cycle which is important word cycle in a single process it is possible that we can convert entire amount of heat into work. I give simple example if I have got an isothermal process if I have got isothermal process say isothermal expansion or isothermal compression whatever it may be now here what happens if I take isothermal expansion means I have to supply heat and expansion gives me work first law says that q-w is equal to delta u delta u is equal to 0 for isothermal so q is equal to w so a student make be confused that for an isothermal expansion I get q is equal to w means whatever amount of heat I have supplied I have convert into work then it is a violation of the clausius statement or violation of the conversion of entire amount of heat into work but remember all these laws second laws statements are specific to the cycle means if you operate anything in a cycle you will never get transfer heat from low temperature to high temperature without expenditure of energy so this is the clausius statement. Now what is the consequence of this you know that in a refrigerator in a refrigerator this is temperature say T1 this is temperature T2 T1 is less than T2 I have to transfer this heat or remove the heat from this say amount of q and transfer it to the higher temperature reservoir then for this I must spend certain amount of work now when this work is shown then it says that clausius says that it is possible because what you are doing now you are removing heat from a temperature reservoir which is at low temperature to higher temperature by consuming some amount of work so it is not against second law of thermodynamics and you are operating in a cycle similarly suppose I have got a reservoir at some temperature T1 I remove heat and say some amount of q and I can completely convert it into work so what is this this is engine so whatever amount of heat you have taken you are converted into work so this is a kelvin plank statement so kelvin plank statement says that in a cycle you cannot remove heat from a single reservoir and convert it entirely into work without rejecting it to the sink so naturally the sink is mandatory for the cycle to operate when we do this some amount of heat will be taken some amount of heat will be rejected and we will get the heat transfer now third point is the cannot cycle if you draw it on the PV diagram you will find that it consists of four cycles so this is PV is equal to constant and this is also PV is equal to constant this is PV raise to gamma is equal to constant and this is PV raise to gamma is equal to constant so this is isothermal expansion followed by adiabatic expansion isothermal compression followed by adiabatic compression and you know that isothermal and adiabatic it is a very slow process it is very fast process so coupling of slow and fast is impossible if you find out the expression for the efficiency of a cannot cycle using the same that is heat supplied upon say efficiency is equal to work done upon heat supplied you will get 1 minus T2 by T1 where T1 is greater than T2 and there is a limit that if T2 by T2 and T1 are in absolute degree and we cannot have T2 equal to T1 then efficiency 0 there is no work done if T2 is equal to 0 that is absolute 0 we can get efficiency is equal to 1 which is not possible and that is perpetual motion machine of second kind is impossible now the detail about the machine and its application will see in the next videos those who are interested in studying further they can refer to the some standard books available say references are thermodynamics by P. K. Naal and thermodynamics by Eunice Sengel thank you for patient hearing.