Mike Matchett: [00:00:00] Hi, Mike Matchett. Small World Big Data and we are here talking with Store one, I have the illustrious George Crump with us today to explain what's going on in store one. It turns out that backup is all the rage still, and they've got some new solutions to help you protect your data from things like ransomware and other bad actors and bit rot and all sorts of things. So let's find out why a a cutting edge software defined higher performance storage system is getting into the backup space. Curious, right? Hi, George. Welcome.
George Crump: [00:00:31] Hey, Mike, thanks for having me.
Mike Matchett: [00:00:32] All right, so you heard my question there. Store one. You've got a lot of cool things in store one. You've got a lot of use cases. You cover a lot of places where you can be applied as a software defined solution. Save people lots of money. Consolidate lots of any kind of storage. Why get into the backup space? What's going on there?
George Crump: [00:00:50] Well, Mike, you know what we what we've learned is we kind of went through this consolidation journey with customers, right? Is there their estate now is probably more fragmented from a number of vendors than it's ever been? And so the more fragmented it becomes, the harder it is to consolidate. And what we have always done is said, let's let's wedge our way into one particular use case where the system is coming off of maintenance or it's a lot of pain there or something like that. Well, and we had different ones, VMware, NetApp, things like that. But the one that kept coming up most often was backup, which we were curious about as well. And so we started to look into it. We saw that there was some specific things that we do in that space that are unique to other vendors. And we could actually, other than just lower costs, we could also add a lot of value to some of the capabilities that you see in modern backup software applications today.
Mike Matchett: [00:01:46] All right. And because it's a software defined storage, really, you can add in whatever features you'd like. This isn't the limitation anymore of having a specific array or specific engineered infrastructure, so be agile that way. It's that. Ok, but does this does this? I mean, does this take the place of, you know, someone's backup software? Then are you replacing the Veeams and the Rubriks and stuff or?
George Crump: [00:02:09] Actually, what we're we're complementing them, actually. So what we're hoping to do is actually they've all brought great features to market, like the ability to do instant recoveries. They've done some nice things around ransomware. They've done some great stuff around long term data retention. And what we're trying to do is enhance all that with what we see repeatedly is that legacy storage hardware, because it also has legacy storage software, doesn't have the capabilities or power to really fully exploit some of the features that those guys are bringing to market.
Mike Matchett: [00:02:44] All right. So if I've invested in, you know, Commvault or whatever else and it's got some of these cool new features, and I go and try to use it with my old storage, target my old backups off my old backup storage. It's going to still just run like a dog or maybe not work at all for that.
George Crump: [00:02:57] Yeah. So it's like a great example is you take like the install recovery or live mount, whatever the vendor will call it, the ability to essentially instantiate a Veeam's data or an application's data on the back of appliance. Well, if you're a backup appliance is hard drive based, doing deduplication, doing compression probably doesn't have a great network access. That's not going to be a good experience for anybody, especially if you consider that most production storage today. More than likely is either all flash or at least hybrid flash assisted. So the night and day difference in performance is going to be too dramatic and your users are just going to complain. And so what we've done is made it so that experience is identical to the production experience.
Mike Matchett: [00:03:42] All right. So you take in production quality storage and you're converging it with the backup storage target functionality. What did you have to add? What did you have to bring to the product in order to handle the backup case?
George Crump: [00:03:52] So we took our enterprise storage platform and we did some very specific optimizations to make sure that we're able to really add value to that, that space number one. We have a backup optimized flash tier, so we always have a tier of flash in these backup solutions. It can be different sizes depending on the customer use case, but that tier serves two purposes number one to handle many, many simultaneous ingest jobs so you can do backups as frequently as your application will allow you to now. And we won't become the bottleneck and the number two, when you start getting into things like block level incrementals and things like that, you run into a consolidation problem where you're trying to merge these things to create another new full. And so we do that very fast. And then the most important thing, as I mentioned before, is this instant recovery. So a lot of capabilities here. The other thing we did is we enhanced our snapshot software to provide, you know, essentially real time immutability of inbound backup jobs so that in case of a ransomware attack, you can't change the backup data, right? It can't get to the backup data to. To alter it, and essentially you're always 30 seconds out of step, so if a ransomware hits, you can roll back to 30 seconds before the ransomware attack and be back to where you were.
Mike Matchett: [00:05:11] All right, there's a couple of things to unpack there. You're creating immutable storage out of you by using the software that you have some clever ways. So once that snap the backup is taken, turn into an internal snap or hover, you're doing it. It can't be changed. It's it's a function of the system where those sorts. Right, right. So we get that. We get that immutability. You are converging primary and secondary storage in some clever ways here. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, obviously, you've had to add features to become backup storage, which I don't think most people would think. The other way, I'd have to add features to become primary storage. But you actually it's kind of clever thinking there. And part of that is instant recovery. So just unpack that a little bit more for me. What are you talking about when you say instant recovery on the backup storage?
George Crump: [00:05:57] Yeah, so well, what most of the software applications can do today is they can essentially, I used to call it recover in place. So the ability to restore on the back of appliance, which saves you having to traverse back across the wire. Right. And so what? But the problem is, again, you're restoring typically to not only hard drives, but hard drives with anchors on them because they're usually running Hadoop. and compression and things like that in our world, we have it set. So instant recoveries always occur to our flash. To now our flash tier is, I call it small but mighty, right? But it is a tier of storage. It's usually somewhere between four to eight to 12 drives, and we get full performance out of DRaaS. So we'll deliver hundreds of thousands of IOPS just out of those fusion few drives. And so when you restore, you're restoring to essentially high performance, very high performance storage. But it's also very, very affordable because we've got to stay in that backup price band. Right. And so then once that happens, you point your application at that data and you're running a full speed.
Mike Matchett: [00:06:59] All right. So your recovery, you can recover from your backup StorageCraft, into your performance storage because the same storage and be off and running. And I understand that you've had some folks do that and find that they get better performance on their on the store one and they get on their original primary storage, right?
George Crump: [00:07:16] Yeah, we've had that happen a number of times where you'll you'll do a recovery and, you know, great real quick story. I had a guy, cio he was. He did this and he was a little nervous about it. And the application owner came in said, What did you do to my VM? And he started to, he said, You know, I was thinking of a great excuse to tell him and before I could come up with anything, the guy said, I don't care what it was, whatever you did, just keep doing it. It's never performed so well, right? Well, what he did is an instant recovery to us, and that's that's what happened. So yeah, we see it a lot.
Mike Matchett: [00:07:51] All right. All right. So there's definitely a challenge out there to folks to say, Hey, try recovering and are you getting better performance than you started with? You're doing a good thing. You've also make this case about TCO with with S-1 and how you can really reduce the overall costs, especially in capacity. And part of that argument is you can make use of the latest and greatest disks, whatever the manufacturers out there making both the flash sizes are densities are going up in the hard drive is going up. But doesn't that introduce some vulnerabilities to start buying these bigger and bigger disks with these single points of failure as you as you grow the systems?
George Crump: [00:08:27] Well, it certainly brings up concern because most people have been through a rate rebuild with even eight terabyte drives, and it has not been a good day for them, right? Or days. And so with with our technology, we have a technology called vRAID that's included in S1:Backup. And what it does is it delivers the highest rate rebuilds in the industry. And so we've and you can go to our website and you can see a rebuild in real time. We actually split it up because we didn't think people would actually stare at the whole thing. But we can do a complete rebuild of these high density drives 14, 16, 18, even 20 terabyte drives in less than two hours.
Mike Matchett: [00:09:08] All right, OK, so someone can really take advantage of these high density drives, especially in the capacity case for backup.
George Crump: [00:09:13] Right? Yeah. When we talk to customers about using 18 or the now coming 20 terabyte drives, they there's always, always this kind of frees because they they've had this previous bad experience, almost like SSDs, right, where it's like, I know I'm not going to do that. And then once we explain to them how the technology works, then they can understand. And so it's, you know, it's easy to say I support 18 terabyte drives is a different thing to make them practical. And what we've done is make them practical. The other thing we do with those drives and all of our drives is we can run a 90 percent capacity utilization without performance impact and so you can fill them. You know, it's nice to have 20 terabytes, but if you can only put 10 terabytes on it, not so much. And so we can fill it all the way up to the top.
Mike Matchett: [00:09:57] All right. I know we previously had. And we talked about the performance of Star one, I'd encourage people to go back and look at that because you're not getting you're not losing anything here, you're only gaining backup features. Have we covered everything, George? Here's something else you want to mention.
George Crump: [00:10:10] Yeah, I mean, I think we've hit all the buttons, OK?
Mike Matchett: [00:10:14] If someone wants to to try this out or find out more information about it, what would you have them go look at?
George Crump: [00:10:20] Yeah. The simplest thing to do is go to store one backup and you'll have a complete rundown of everything. There's a white paper there, all kinds of different assets you can download as well.
Mike Matchett: [00:10:33] All right, folks, it's software defined. You've got a great TCO here. You can take advantage of the latest and greatest discs you can. You can put it on your own infrastructure if you want, I understand and take a take a look at this. It's incredibly, increasingly interesting to see how you converge. Storage use cases George again, and you're going to go eventually. I think from the high to the low here in one product, which is which is going to be fascinating journey for a lot of folks. So congratulations on that. Thank you. Appreciate it. Check it out, folks at store one. Take care. Bye.
