How to put NAS storage in the cloud @SoftNAS

In this brief video learn about ways to free your NAS from your datacenter so you can take advantage of the scalability, accessibility and cost effectiveness of the public cloud.

Mike Matchet:                    Hi. I'm Mike Matchet, Small World Big Data. I'm here today with Rick Braddy, Founder, CEO and CTO of Softnas and we're going to talk a little bit about what Softnas is doing in the Cloud with their storage products. They are one of the first companies to really put a nas, a full featured enterprise nas with all the capabilities into the Cloud. They keep augmenting that and adding new things to it. So we've got some update to get to you today. Welcome to the show today Rick.

Rick Braddy:                          Thank you Mike. It's great to be here.

Mike Matchet:                    Maybe you could just start out a little bit by telling us what's been going on to motivate people to move their storage to the Cloud. What's sort of the broad brush problem?

Rick Braddy:                          You know what we see is we see customers that are ready to move mission critical apps now to the Cloud. Sometimes they're rewriting the apps. A lot of times they're moving for various reasons to the Cloud. Sometimes they want to close a DR data center they no longer want to pay for because they don't use it. Other times it's just application driven. A lot of sass applications still being developed and existing legacy apps being wrapped, turned into subscription based apps. We see a conversion for perpetual license model into subscription and the Cloud's the way that's getting delivered as an example.

Mike Matchet:                    We know that there's workloads that were built for the Cloud and there's Cloud storage by the service providers that deal with that and there's workloads that live on premise and there's plenty of traditional storage solutions that deal with that. It seems confusing though. If you've now got an application you now want to migrate to the Cloud or have live halfway and develop a hybrid situation because now you need consistent storage service across all those things. That's kind of where you fall in a little bit, right-

Rick Braddy:                          That's right. Yeah typically our customers are coming from a world where they've had a dedicated hardware based storage system, a nas of some kind file system that's dedicated. So when you move to the Cloud what you typically are getting though is multi-tenant shared storage where you don't have the same kind of dedicative performance and the amount of control over it that you were accustomed to on premise.

Rick Braddy:                          Where that really starts to be an issue is you've got an SLA you've got to deliver against and yet you're dependent upon this multi-tenant sort of variable performance storage system. So what we do is we provide to customers the same kind of dedicated private nas that they've been accustomed to on prem and give them the dedicated performance and the full spectrum of sort of SSD all the way down to object storage choices of price performance. That way they can kind of tune what they're doing to their application, their budget and all that.

Mike Matchet:                    This is really interesting in that I can't really take a tier one workload and move it directly into the Cloud the way it is and put it on an object store or a block store there for any number of reasons. You're saying if I run a softnas solution in the Cloud I get that enterprise storage services and feeling and capability and I can move my additional workloads up there and be fairly safe with it, right?

Rick Braddy:                          That's right. That's right. There's kind of two ways to move to the Cloud. You either rewrite your applications to be Cloud dative and you leverage something like S3 or what have you but you've got to rewrite the apps. Then you've got to worry about all the high availability and fail over and data protection and on and on right or you move an existing app and you leverage something like Softnas that gives you the full data protection performance tunability. That gives you across all of your apps. So that's really where we fit is helping customers move those existing apps and workloads without the full rewrite being required.

Mike Matchet:                    Looking at it talks about too is the idea of multi Cloud and if you talk to your service provider about storage you're going to end up using their storage. Really even though you think you're unlocking yourself into the Cloud, you're really locking yourself into yet one more level of vendors particular storage solution. You can help free that as well right?

Rick Braddy:                          Yeah. We see that multi-Cloud's really manifesting itself more with sass providers. So think of I've got an enterprise customer that wants my sass application. Well some of them may have a predisposition for Microsoft if they're an existing Microsoft customer. Others may not care and maybe they prefer AWS or what have you. We have customers where they support both because they've got customers that have preferences for a given Cloud platform for whatever reason. So we're seeing multi-Cloud increasingly a big part of our business, especially on the sass front.

Mike Matchet:                    Then if I'm putting some of my key data into a multi-Cloud kind of situation and trying to get it there to start with, now one of my major problems is data migration right?

Rick Braddy:                          That's right.

Mike Matchet:                    You've now got something newer coming out that's going to help address that.

Rick Braddy:                          We do. Customers call that lift and shift, migrating the apps and the data to the Cloud. We've developed over the past couple years a way to make that migration more painless. One of the problems is you can move the data today but it's sort of with a swing device where you have to take the data offline on something like a snowmobile if you want to roll one of those big things in or ... big truck. A lot of customers want to live migrate also. So they've got data that's live in production. They need to migrate it. They can't do a content freeze. They can't stop production obviously but they need to get their data up there and keep it live updated so they can make a reasonable low risk transition into the Cloud. So we help with that with the lift and shift as part of our new product line.

Mike Matchet:                    I probably should end here, but there's one more thing I just wanted to cover because it struck me while we were talking earlier. That is if I'm putting Softnas over say an object store in a public service provider that we all know and love, you were telling me you can actually deliver a lower price point for enterprise storage that way than if someone was to say go to a service provider and get their primary storage directly.

Rick Braddy:                          That's right. We just introduced a new capability called Smart Tiers. What Smart Tiers lets you do is it auto tiers your file storage from let's say SSD to lower cost object storage to even lower cost cool storage. The data automatically migrates back and forth to give you the best blend of price performance. Typically saving a customer up to 2/3 on their Cloud storage cost. Giving on the performance that they expect.

Mike Matchet:                    We all know everyone is just being shocked by their Cloud storage bill. So just the idea that I could insert another layer of enterprise storage but actually reduce my bill because it's more functional in doing great things for me is a wonderful thing.

Rick Braddy:                          That's right.

Mike Matchet:                    Where does someone go to find out more information on this?

Rick Braddy:                          Www.softnas.com. S-O-F-T-N-A-S.

Mike Matchet:                    Thank you Rick for being here today and updating us on that. I'm Mike Matchet with Small World Big Data and hope to talk to you again soon.

Rick Braddy:                          Thanks Mike.

Mike Matchet:                    All right.

Rick Braddy:                          Take care.