How do you protect hundreds of terabytes & billions

Protection of hundreds of file systems, hundreds of terabytes and billions of files typically requires at the very least a data backup application, purpose built disk target appliances, archiving applications, secondary storage tiers, tape and offsite vaulting. In this short interview we learn of a way to manage this entire process through a single scale out object storage infrastructure developed by Igneous Systems (www.igneous.io) from Steve Pao, CMO.

Transcript:

David Littman:                    Hey Dave Littman here, Truth in IT joined by David Littman. Steve is the CMO with Igneous Systems. Steve, welcome.

Steve Pao:                              Hi Dave.

David Littman:                    Well-

Steve Pao:                              Thank you.

David Littman:                    Great to have you. Hey, thanks so much Steve. Listen, we are talking about protecting mass quantities of data. So, hundreds of Terabytes and up. So, tell us a little bit about Igneous and what makes you guys special.

Steve Pao:                              Absolutely. So, with Igneous, what we're doing is, backup in archives for massive file systems. And, you know when we talk about massive file systems, what we're really talking about is, billions of files, hundreds of files systems. You know, Petabytes are more unstructured file data.

David Littman:                    Okay, alright. So, Steve look, there are a lot of backup solutions out there. There's appliances, there's backup to disk, there's obviously tape, there's backup softwares. What is it that is lacking when somebody's trying to integrate all that stuff, to handle this kind of data?

Steve Pao:                              Yeah, absolutely. So, see you have to remember that a lot of the backup solutions in use today ... Well when enterprise data was measured in the millions of files and often, the Gigabytes or Terabytes of data and now we're in a place where there has literally been an explosion in unstructured file data. What we're talking about are images, videos, sensor data, geospatial maps, models, geological models.

                                                      Often, computer aided design and computer aided manufacturing models. And it turns out that, all of this data doesn't live in traditional databases. It doesn't live in the application server. This stuff is living on enterprise network attached storage. It's living on NetApps, it's living on EMC it's living on large enterprise NAS. And, really the issue that we're seeing is just a ray of stuff that is actually being used to protect this NAS.

                                                      So often, you'll have disk to disk replication. So, in NetApp you'll have Snapmirror and Snapvault in…You'll use Sync IQ to go off to Isilon Nearline clusters in Oracles EFS and Pyramids. You have Z Rep. And typically that, because of it's cost and management complexity isn't used for long term storage. And so, on top of that, you'll have Veritas NetBackup, you'll have Commvault, you'll have EMC Networker.

                                                      And with that, you'll have Target disk storage, and you'll have tape, and on top of that you'll have tape vaulting vendors like Iron Mountain. And so, there's a lot of stuff involved.

David Littman:                    So, is what you're saying Steve is it ... With your technology you can sort of wheel all that stuff out, and wheel Igneous in and, protect all that data?

Steve Pao:                              That's the aim. The aim is to utilize a scale out backup infrastructure to eliminate all the silos. And so, the principle is no matter what you have on the primary tier, what you can do is you can use Igneous as a scale out secondary tier with optional tiering to public cloud. And so, at the core, we offer an integrated service that integrates our software on appliances, with scale out object storage and, policy engines in replication out to the public cloud. And so, it takes all those moving parts away and replaces it with just a hybrid storage cloud architecture.

David Littman:                    Fabulous. Well, you know it sounds like a major step change in simplicity for data centers that have to deal with these type of workloads. So, would love to learn more. So Steve, we'd love to have you back and maybe take us through a white board or something. But check them out, it's Igneous.io.

Steve Pao:                              That's right.

David Littman:                    And, it's Igneous Systems. David Littman, CMO. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us today.