Transcript
Hi, Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and I'm here today talking about data management or really more specifically, we're going to find out just data. The world of storage is definitely coming up. It's it's evolving. It's gaining features and things and becoming I don't want to say simpler, but it's becoming something that's providing more and more value than just simply storing bits and bytes to the point it can augment your business globally. We have Arcitecta today here to talk to us about what they're doing with data management and really global data. How do you use it, how do you get it there, and what's becoming of that? So stay tuned. Hey Eric, welcome to our show today. Well thank you, Mike. Glad to be here. Uh, so let's just let's just step back a little bit before we, you know, we've had Arcitecta on here before. If those people want to go back and get, like a review, if you're watching, feel free. Uh, but we just want to talk today a little bit about where we are. Current state of the art with with data and data. Explosions and files and stuff. What? What do you see are some of the biggest things that need attention today in an enterprise that's got data spread everywhere? Yeah, it's exactly that. It's data being spread everywhere. And a lot of it, um, just the the amount of data that's being generated as frame rates are getting better camera phones. I mean, people in their pocket have the ability to shoot 4K video. It's insane how fast data is growing. And then how do you manage that? Hold it, keep it, and actually be able to use it in the future? That's one of the hardest things that people are trying to to come up with is using that data. And, you know, storage. You know, I talked to a lot of storage companies and they all talk about how they're making it, you know, more automatic. They're raising the bar. There's some other companies out there saying, hey, you know, we have to unify the storage. We have to bring in multiple protocols. But none of them are really saying we have a truly global way of dealing with all of our files. And as the enterprise grows larger, the number of files grows larger. What are the challenges in actually unifying something that that large and disparate? Yeah. So size and quantity, that's obviously one big one. How much data do they have? How many files do they have. But also where is it physically located. How far apart is it? Um, so you can only move data at the speed of light. You can only go so fast. And you can't break the laws of physics. So how do you handle latency? How do you handle distance? Um, and that's one of the things that we really prided ourselves on is, is being able to create a, a single place to look at all your data, regardless of where it's physically located and how far the data actually needs to go. So this is so when you talk about Arcitecta and specific, then and you are an expert in Arcitecta and media flux, which is the product here we say global namespace. Does that really mean that I can sit anywhere in the world and access any file from anywhere. Exactly. That's exactly what it means. You. And you don't actually have to move that data to your location either. That's one of the misconceptions of a single namespace is when I open it, all that data needs to move to me and do all that. You can actually open it, depending on where you're at, and access the data from the source of where it's actually being stored at, which doesn't have to be in the same physical location of where you're you're located and accessing the data from. All right. So, so just, just, you know, drawing the mental whiteboard picture, I've got all my different locations. I've got all my different storage arrays. I'm assuming, uh, you know, this includes the arrays I've had for a long time. Arrays that are I've just bought, you know, new flash based devices, things with different tiers and speeds to them. Right. Does this go all the way back to tape, by the way? Oh yeah. So we cover everything. We're completely storage and protocol agnostic as far as flash disk tape cloud. We can make those previously complex tape libraries that were a lot of manual handling just appear as storage. Any kind of storage. All right, so I virtualized I basically virtualizing my entire storage environment and bringing it together. Uh, so maybe I'll just give you a chance to explain. Tell us then what? What in your mind, how how you would describe media flux to somebody. Like what what what does media what media flux do for them? Yeah. So imagine taking all of your data, um, regardless of where it's at and actually being able to know what's in it, like pull up a Google search browser and search your all your data like it was a Google search engine. That's pretty much what we be able to provide. And, uh, in the past we hear about data silos like this is something that a lot of people always have. My my data siloed over here. It's over here. I, I can't understand where all of it is. We can break down all those silo walls and just make a giant, um, lake of data, so to speak. Uh, with everything in it and all the data that you can just access and then search on it, that's one of the big keys again, is how do you search on it? How do you use the data? So think of a giant search engine for all of your data all over the world. And we want to we want to be able to help people use their data. Obviously creating the data is not enough if you're not using it. Uh, I just I mean, it just comes to mind a couple of concerns. Like one of them security, one of them is performance, one of them's availability. Could you just touch on those really briefly for us how Arcitecta approaches those things. Yeah. So security I'll go with first because that is incredibly important. Um, we do have multi-factor authentication and authorization. So we handle a lot of that as well as integrating with Active Directory and Ldap and different permissions and security providers. So um, that is one of the paramount things that we really pride ourselves on is, is our security aspects. Um, and so for the second part of that, with performance we highly parallelize. It's multi-threaded. Um, it's really an approach to get the most out of the available bandwidth and line that you have connected. So, um, highly parallelized multithreaded performance. Um, there's actually some data mover challenges that we've, um, succeeded in one in most complete Arcitectaure. Just to to show how it works on a variety of different networks. Just how big can this get? I mean, a billion files, what's our size? So there is no theoretical limit with, uh, we built everything in-house, homegrown. Um, we do have a customer that has just pushed us past the trillion object mark, so. Okay, um, but there is no theoretical limit. So we we wait for a customer to push our limits, and we we ride that wave with them. So we're over a trillion objects right now and growing. And you and you say you say objects. Uh, so the things in Arcitectaure that it's that it's indexing and finding the global namespace for what what all does it unify. Just run, run down the list for us. Um, and it's everything. So it's CIFs, NFS, S3, uh, SMB you can do anything, any kind of data. Um, Dicom. Even so, any data format, any protocol down to any storage type. So we integrate with all the different storage interfaces as well. This sounds like something that if I get it implemented and it's now knows where all my data is, and it's looking at all these protocols, that frees me up a little bit. If I'm trying to transition my storage Arcitectaure from one thing to another under the hood, rather than pulling it away from a customer and taking it offline and giving it back to them. Like this sounds like something I can use to really help modernize and keep my infrastructure modern going forward. Yeah, background migrations, completely transparent. Non-disruptive. That is exactly what we can shine in. So if you've got technology that's going end of life, you can go ahead and get that data over to a newer, fresher system. Um, as well as we touched on tape, generations of tape technology, you can migrate in the background. So you can always be on your latest and greatest generation of tape technology, um, reducing your, your footprint and things like that. So, um, all that can happen transparently in the background and can be done through policies and things like that as well. I talked to a lot of people who are kind of in this cloud transition journey where they have on premise storage and different in different areas, and they talk about cloud storage, and they get to this hybrid kind of Arcitectaure. But this is kind of an alternative to that, where you can say, no, you can just have one place for all users to go get their data from. And the storage is a secondary concern based maybe on cost, price, availability, that type of thing. Yeah. And if you wanted to integrate cloud into that so that you had the ability to be a little bit more elastic with your storage where it can, um, surge at different periods of time. We can integrate that too. So, yeah, it just, um, we try to make all the storage look identical, regardless of where it is, so that it's just a it's just storage. We don't even care about the SLA or the time to, to access it. It could be in glacier versus S3 versus Flashdisk. It doesn't matter to us. So you can you can pull on top of that. Well that's that's pretty interesting. Um, and a trillion a trillion files, by the way, is pretty, pretty large, uh, deployment, uh, on there. But a lot of people are moving that direction pretty fast. Uh, tell me a little bit then about just just quickly if I'm inserting this into my environment, if I'm trying to integrate this, is this a big lift? Is this a strategic thing I have to do over the next couple of years? How fast does it take me to sort of get onboarded? Yeah, and we're willing to work with any customer to fit the time frame that they need. It's really about the availability of data. So how fast can we get the data into the Arcitecta to media flux ecosystem and we ingest it. We pull all the metadata. We'll scrape things out so that we can build your your profile, look at what your organization is, understand users and permissions and everything like that. So um, it's really a matter of getting the data in, which is just going to be whatever your your current infrastructure allows. Um, and again, we can highly parallelize multi-thread so that we can get data in as quickly as you can provide it to us. All right, all right. Uh, one of the newer things, uh, Eric, that, uh, you reason maybe we're talking here today is because you guys are also now treating. How do I say this streaming video as if it were a file that just keeps growing? Uh, can you explain what what that even is and why people might be seeing that more and more? Yeah. It's a it's a great solution that we came up with for the, the live broadcast, um, live sports video content. Because as the file is continuing to grow and be recorded, it can actually be be pushed up to the editing software so that you can open up a file in real time, um, and continue to have everything else go in the background, increasing efficiencies, making faster time to a deliverable product. You can have, uh, highlights and clips be produced as the file is continuing to grow, and then share it out and save it and have, uh, actionable deliverables that you can publish and realize faster than previously known before. Now Brock has a pretty sophisticated they must be already streaming video and coming up with ways to edit pieces of that. How does how does this represent a new opportunity for them? Yeah. So a lot of the previous solutions were very point to point and kind of custom made, where you were limited to how many streams you could share out. You're sharing directly with one another. Um, and also having to wait for things to complete render, uh, before you were actually able to view those. What media flux real time is able to do is actually multiply the data out as it passes through so you can, um, distribute it out to more than a single point. So multiple different locations. Yeah, a one to many distribution. Uh, as well as providing, you know, that ability to keep growing as it's being used and edited. And then same thing on the back end when you have a finished product that comes out that can then be distributed out, um, to the many different locations and editors and finished product production places. I think it's probably worth, worth, worth emphasizing here is that we're not dealing with a lot of custom made streaming bits. We're dealing with a file. So now a media producer such as our good friends at, say, Truth in IT could could work on files instead of having to set up custom streaming situations and then do all the good things they do with files anyway. So all the stuff that's in play already for storage management would also now still apply to that, or still could be applied to that. So really democratizing video for a lot of people as well. Yeah. Coming up with a universal way to deal with all of it. So it's no longer have to worry about codecs and formats and frame rates. It's just it's just data to us. Um, and then we can put it all back together in the end. Oh, that's very, very cool. Uh, and, uh, it's, um, uh, you know, is, is that sort of video stuff becoming more useful and more popular to people? Do you see more people asking you to saying, hey, can you handle multimedia? Can you handle streaming video? Can you handle this? Uh, or is the growth, uh, all over the place? Yeah. I mean, we see it all over the place, but definitely the the streaming people, the content, the video is improving. There's more of it, as we said earlier. People with phones in their pockets with cameras and 4K. So video is everywhere. We also see it in the likes of like a smart city and video surveillance and things like that, where, um, it's more of a monitoring and a safety thing and, um, tracking on traffic and different things like that. So a lot of different real world applications besides just the broadcast industry. Yeah. I think you're going to help Commoditize if that's the right word in economics, what video objects are, uh, and really democratize them, which is going to actually create increased demand if we follow our economic principles. Right. Uh, so once you can get out there and say, hey, you no longer have to have this custom streaming stuff that we do on the back end today for TV production or whatever else. It's just files that a lot more people can say, hey, that's that's something I can make use of and build products off of too. So. Yeah. All right. 111 sort of, uh, final question here for you, Eric. If if someone is looking at this and saying, okay, so I recognize some of these challenges. We've got lots of files, we've got lots of disparate silos of storage. We've got lots of different places where we store corporate data. We're not leveraging it. We've got tiers of storage and no one really knows. You know how to use data that's not in primary storage. But I've got all this cold storage. Uh, where would you recommend they start sort of researching how to take use of something like media flux? Like what? What steps would you recommend they take as an expert? Yeah, I think one of the great places to go is our website, Arcitecta.com. Um, we've got tons of valuable information that can speak to the different features and functionality that Media Flux has. Um, we tried to take a challenge approach to this. So looking at it from your perspective, what are the challenges that you're facing? What are the issues that that make your job hard, and then trying to find a way that we can explain how our product can really solve those. So, um, when you search our website, you'll see that, and then, um, there's plenty of places to contact us on there. And we would love to have a one on one conversation with you about the challenges that you're facing with your data. Um, how we can see a path to a great future for you, your data, and being able to leverage it for all that you can out of it for good. All right. All right. Well, thanks for being here today, Eric. I would suggest that if you've got storage, particularly lots and lots of large storage, uh, out there in many different protocols that you start to think about how you're going to evolve into the future, how are you going to become global with that? How are you going to find it all? How are you going to leverage it? Here's a here's a solution that Arcitecta has for you to consider. Check it out. Media flux. Thank you, Eric, for being here today again. Thank you Mike I appreciate it. All right take care folks.
