Speaker:

Have you noticed a merging of the data protection and

Speaker:

information security worlds.

Speaker:

I know.

Speaker:

I have.

Speaker:

Backup people increasingly need to understand the world.

Speaker:

World of information security.

Speaker:

And then information security people definitely need.

Speaker:

Need to learn about a lot about backup.

Speaker:

Hi, I'm Debbie Curtis precedent.

Speaker:

AKA Mr.

Speaker:

Backup, I've been specializing.

Speaker:

In backup and disaster recovery since the early nineties.

Speaker:

And I'm the.

Speaker:

Host of this podcast.

Speaker:

It's purpose is to turn under appreciated.

Speaker:

Backup admins and to cyber recovery.

Speaker:

The heroes.

Speaker:

This episode features two representatives of cov data.

Speaker:

Data protection.

Speaker:

And we talked to them about two merging worlds.

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That sounded a lot of like date.

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Data protection and information security.

Speaker:

We also talk about how this is leading the migration to.

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A sas based data.

Speaker:

data protection services Because This episode.

Speaker:

episode is full of great.

Speaker:

great lessons for anyone in backup Yup.

Speaker:

And date of protection I hope you enjoy it

Curtis:

hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore It All podcast.

Curtis:

I'm your host, W.

Curtis:

Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.

Curtis:

Backup, and I have with me a guy who I am now calling coach, Prasanna Malaiyandi.

Curtis:

How's it going, Prasanna?

Pras:

I'm good, Curtis.

Pras:

I'm happy to be your coach, but wasn't I your coach before?

Pras:

Like your financial coach?

Pras:

Your

Curtis:

you were my non, my financial non advisor.

Curtis:

That's what you were before, financial non

Pras:

also your medical, er, doctor, non doctor, and your non legal

Curtis:

But now you are my non physical, non professional, yeah.

Curtis:

So I've started calling you coach to my wife.

Curtis:

like I'll be like, coach is calling coach is calling for our daily walk.

Curtis:

I gotta go.

Curtis:

so here's the thing.

Curtis:

So why am I calling you coach Prasanna?

Pras:

Because every day we go on walks together, and when we're on

Pras:

our walks, we talk to each other.

Pras:

And so I've actually gotten to, so I've been going on walks

Pras:

regularly for the last, two, three months, multiple times a day.

Pras:

And I was like, hey, Curtis, you should start walking too.

Pras:

It'll be good for you.

Pras:

And so the one way to do that is, is like, Hey, Curtis, let's go on a walk.

Pras:

And so we talk on the phone all the time while we're both walking in different

Curtis:

Yeah.

Curtis:

We go on a walk

Pras:

About 500 miles apart.

Curtis:

and, we'll see how that goes.

Curtis:

today is a special day.

Curtis:

We have two guests today from Enable, a company with backup data

Curtis:

protection and security systems that they say will make Groot.

Curtis:

nable1-chris: Oh, Curtis, hello Prasanna.

Curtis:

Thanks for having me.

Curtis:

I

Curtis:

Glad to have you.

Curtis:

I also want to welcome the VP of Product Management for the Cove Data

Curtis:

Protection Products, Stefan Voss.

Stefan:

Hey, Curtis.

Stefan:

Hi, Prasanna.

Stefan:

It's nice to see you again.

Pras:

Yeah, been a while.

Pras:

Good to see you joining the cloud data protection space and

Curtis:

so you, you've had the pleasure of working with Prasanna in years past?

Stefan:

I have.

Stefan:

It was a long time ago, but one of those storage, Boston based

Stefan:

storage companies, Prasanna?

Stefan:

BMC, right?

Curtis:

I think the first question that I want to ask, and I think I'll ask this

Curtis:

of you, Chris, is why don't you just give us a little bit more information

Curtis:

about, maybe a summary about enable and where you think you fit in the market

Curtis:

nable1-chris: Yeah, sure.

Curtis:

Thanks, Curtis.

Curtis:

Enable really is an organization that is focused on the needs of managed

Curtis:

service providers to deliver excellent service out to all the small, medium

Curtis:

sized businesses that exist out there.

Curtis:

So often, the backup vendors were often thinking about the Fortune 500 and how

Curtis:

we're going to service them and so on.

Curtis:

Where we play is what I call the fortune 5 million.

Curtis:

So we're talking, 20 employees up to 2000 employees, but certainly as you go down,

Curtis:

like closer to a hundred employees, that's where a lot of, our, industry and our, our

Curtis:

economy runs on is those small businesses.

Curtis:

That's primarily where, managed service providers tend to play, and have the

Curtis:

most, impact in terms of customers.

Curtis:

And that's where, from a data protection play, that's where Cove data protection

Curtis:

really lives, focused on the needs of, that, that service provider and how they

Curtis:

can deliver essentially enterprise level.

Curtis:

Service to many small businesses that are, distributed in different industries.

Pras:

just a quick follow up to that, Chris.

Pras:

So unlike a lot of other backup products, which really focus on like a backup

Pras:

admin, I'm sure with enable and what you're doing with code data protection,

Pras:

it's really about how do you enable the MSP to scale and manage the solutions

Pras:

across tens, hundreds of customers that they might have, is that right?

Pras:

nable1-chris: you're exactly right.

Pras:

So it starts with, first of all, it needs to have the right level RTO, RPO,

Pras:

service levels that, is a non negotiable.

Pras:

It's got to be secure, non negotiable, but then once you got those out of the way.

Pras:

How do you, essentially add more and more organizations to your service

Pras:

offering without adding more and more people every time you do that.

Pras:

And so having that ability to run it, highly efficiently in terms of that

Pras:

labor score, our personal mandate is, if you're spending a hundred hours

Pras:

on backup, we'll take you down to less than 10, like really having that

Pras:

level of service level of efficiency.

Pras:

Centralized console, multi tenancy, so that you can just, um, you know,

Pras:

rock and roll as you, as you start to, you know, build out customers,

Pras:

and add more and more workloads without adding more and more labor.

Curtis:

yeah.

Curtis:

I've been in backup now for over 30 years and backup was always sort of

Curtis:

the, you know, back of the bus, right?

Curtis:

and one of the things that people.

Curtis:

Often would say was like, how hard can it be to just copy stuff, from A to B, right?

Curtis:

And, the answer is, not that hard, except they keep changing the A and

Curtis:

they keep changing the B, right?

Curtis:

it's we're going to use tape.

Curtis:

We're going to use disk.

Curtis:

We're going to use cloud.

Curtis:

We're going to use.

Curtis:

We're going to, we're going to go from Linux.

Curtis:

We're going to go to Windows.

Curtis:

we want much more frequent backups, right?

Curtis:

instead of just the daily, nightly backups, we want maybe

Curtis:

something more frequent than that.

Curtis:

Oh, and by the way, we're just going to take all the computers and we're just

Curtis:

going to scatter them to the world.

Curtis:

data center, what's a data center, right?

Curtis:

and then we're not even going to have servers anymore.

Curtis:

Let's do this thing called containers.

Curtis:

And, uh, right.

Curtis:

And so it's just, it's just a mess.

Curtis:

Uh, but I think what's really happened and I'm just curious, what you guys

Curtis:

think about this, what has happened?

Curtis:

It's always been the back of the bus, but what's happened in the last,

Curtis:

say, five years or so has been the massive increase in cyber attacks.

Curtis:

against both the primary and, now, especially against the secondary

Curtis:

systems, the backup systems.

Curtis:

I think that backup, and I speak very broadly when I say backup, right?

Curtis:

basically anything that's, keeping the data safe, basically.

Curtis:

that it's finally coming into its own.

Curtis:

And I'll start with you, Chris.

Curtis:

what do you think about that idea?

Curtis:

nable1-chris: I think you're absolutely right in terms of the awareness.

Curtis:

Like it was always important, but the feeling of risk.

Curtis:

Was never that high.

Curtis:

It was just more like paying an insurance policy.

Curtis:

Now the risk feels much more imminent, in terms of most people know a

Curtis:

friend who know a friend that have experienced some sort of, cyber

Curtis:

incident and it becomes very personal.

Curtis:

And when things like that become personal, the risk seems much more real.

Curtis:

And, certainly that's been a, it's changed, the value of what's going

Curtis:

on, but also it's, yeah, because it's been monetized so greatly, right?

Curtis:

And it's the profit motive that is different than the, the weather that,

Curtis:

might, you know, cause the need for your backups to be, super important to you.

Curtis:

yeah.

Curtis:

I like what you said.

Curtis:

You changed the value.

Curtis:

I would argue that the value is the same, but the perceived

Curtis:

value has gone up, right?

Curtis:

you've always needed a good backup system.

Curtis:

Or, some would call it a recovery system.

Curtis:

And, I'm fine with that.

Curtis:

but I think, like you said, it's like with COVID, right?

Curtis:

When COVID happened, once it...

Curtis:

Came to the point where you knew somebody, right?

Curtis:

It became much more real, right?

Curtis:

Especially if you knew somebody that died, right?

Curtis:

I knew people that died of COVID and that made it much more real I think

Curtis:

you said like a friend of a friend or something I think you know, I think

Curtis:

most of us might even know just one person like meaning that like we know

Curtis:

someone directly That got impacted.

Curtis:

You know for me I remember Years ago, like at the very beginning of ransomware, what

Curtis:

we now think of a ransomware has actually been around a long time, but the modern

Curtis:

era ransomware for me started around 2014.

Curtis:

And that's when I got my first call from my dad who had a business partner.

Curtis:

Who had been, who had his entire business operation, which was on a

Curtis:

computer and he had been asked for, you remember these days, 400, right?

Curtis:

He'd been asked for 400 to get his entire company back and

Curtis:

the guy didn't have backup.

Curtis:

And, he really had no choice but to pay 400.

Curtis:

We have come a long way since that.

Curtis:

But even since those early days, for me personally, I felt a

Curtis:

much closer connection to it.

Curtis:

Stefan, how about you?

Curtis:

what do you think,

Stefan:

it's interesting because I was still in technical marketing in 2005.

Stefan:

I didn't really care about backup, right?

Stefan:

I was in another BU and EMC storage and all that.

Stefan:

You're laughing, Prasanna, it's true.

Stefan:

And then, my boss came to me and said, Hey, the Sony attack happened

Stefan:

and, we have customers that are freaking out and they want to know.

Stefan:

And what can they do in terms of, making it, Possible and more likely

Stefan:

that they can actually recover.

Stefan:

And it's mind boggling because EMC has always done well with replication,

Stefan:

storage based replication and blah, blah, blah, backup products, so many

Stefan:

technical solutions, but yet they weren't necessarily architected properly.

Stefan:

And I remember we had a mystery.

Stefan:

Federal customer that did some really crafty stuff with air gapping, actually

Stefan:

pulling cables and why that is, is because the ransomware at the time wasn't

Stefan:

a thing, but brute force, wiperware, you name it, was actually already

Stefan:

targeting the backup infrastructure.

Stefan:

So it's fascinating.

Stefan:

And that was, for me, eye opening for one, but also really exciting because

Stefan:

it puts this aspect of recovery, on the map also for security people.

Stefan:

So that now means, we can actually sell stuff to people who are

Stefan:

CISOs and they have big budgets, but we also have to design it.

Stefan:

So it's really an engineering dream if you think about it.

Stefan:

So they're different requirements, same technology.

Stefan:

And yeah, that, that kind of led me down the path of, data.

Stefan:

data protection, but also being a PM.

Stefan:

And, we came up with this thing called cyber recovery at the time.

Stefan:

yeah, it's just confusing.

Stefan:

it's fascinating.

Stefan:

And, my boss then Beth said, look, you can see that the worlds of

Stefan:

security and data protection or backup, That they're really merging.

Stefan:

they're discrete swim lanes.

Stefan:

Don't get me wrong, but they're merging.

Stefan:

I was able to also see this at the first RSA conference I went to and I tried

Stefan:

to do my thing, pitch a little bit.

Stefan:

Hey, there's backup.

Stefan:

And they're like, yeah, go away.

Stefan:

500 vendors on the floor about, left of breach, anomaly

Stefan:

detection, backup, whatever.

Stefan:

And then the second year, the very next year, it was already much more of a thing.

Stefan:

We got a keynote or those are more panel discussions, but it's very interesting

Stefan:

how fast it actually became also a thing in the context of security.

Pras:

Just going back to one of the things Curtis touched

Pras:

upon, like the shifting, right?

Pras:

For, I know he talked about going from tape to disc to cloud, right?

Pras:

Decentralized versus your data center.

Pras:

so I know there's been and we've talked about it on the podcast

Pras:

before, this notion that, Hey, once I put my data in the cloud, I don't

Pras:

really have to worry about it, right?

Pras:

It's secure.

Pras:

Or if I use like a SaaS service, I don't need to worry about it.

Pras:

It's protected, right?

Pras:

How do you see customers evolving in terms of their comfort with those

Pras:

types of false statements, if you will?

Pras:

And maybe Chris, I'll start with you on that.

Pras:

nable1-chris: specifically, you're talking SaaS first, because there has

Pras:

been this shift, if we go back 20, 10, 8 years ago, everyone had their exchange

Pras:

server, everyone had their file server, that sort of, and that's all, we've seen

Pras:

this migration that, the train has left the station with Microsoft 365, clearly.

Pras:

But, the second train, the backup train was a little slower to leave the

Pras:

station in terms of people's mindsets.

Pras:

and yeah, if you had this conversation in, 2018, I would say eight out

Pras:

of 10 people would say backup.

Pras:

Why would you back up?

Pras:

That's not a thing.

Pras:

fast forward to today.

Pras:

it's not, if it's who are you going to use, right?

Pras:

It's more of the question.

Pras:

So we've seen that, change in mindset.

Pras:

even in the last two years, it's really accelerated.

Pras:

So now it's de facto, I haven't met someone in the last six months

Pras:

that didn't agree that this was a priority, or that it was like a, an

Pras:

unnecessary conversation, let's say.

Pras:

So after, the Microsoft 365 backups as an example, in addition, what

Pras:

we've noticed in terms of the change in mindset, over the last eight years

Pras:

has really been the idea of needing to really own and touch that local storage.

Pras:

For other primary systems.

Pras:

So that's a secondary, mindset that we've seen, especially in our, like the market

Pras:

where we typically play the most, we've seen that, there was a very conservative

Pras:

mindset, need to touch it, to today it's whatever gets me the outcome, that's

Pras:

what, that's how I want to get there.

Curtis:

Yeah, I Agree that I think there was definitely a long moment, right?

Curtis:

where there was this sort of fight against backups that I don't control.

Curtis:

and then I think that all the other IT systems, people found out, no

Curtis:

one, for example, no one misses their exchange server, right?

Curtis:

No one is wow, I really wish I had my exchange server on prem.

Curtis:

and I don't think anyone misses their backup server, right?

Curtis:

those that have gone to SaaS backup, I remember like all these

Curtis:

things I used to do to manage the

Curtis:

physical.

Curtis:

So, well, yeah, well, I was just thinking of like, like, I remember,

Curtis:

does anybody remember a Sun E450, you guys remember these things?

Curtis:

The Sun E450, I loved it as a backup server.

Curtis:

Why?

Curtis:

Not because it was the most powerful server for computing infrastructure, but

Curtis:

because it had the most PCI slots, right?

Curtis:

And I could put all this hardware and I could do all this, IO throughput.

Curtis:

It was about IO throughput.

Curtis:

That was a lot of work designing those systems for the perfect, right?

Curtis:

And man, I do not miss that world, right?

Curtis:

That's what I'm saying.

Curtis:

I think you're right, Chris, that basically it's, we

Curtis:

are making that same shift.

Curtis:

The shift that happened with 365 and, exchange that we're making that

Curtis:

same shift with backup, That there were a lot of people I remember,

Curtis:

when I used to work with my previous employer, that again, this was what,

Curtis:

six years ago now that I had to say, okay, so, you know, exchange, right.

Curtis:

And you know, like 365 and how like 365 is like a service.

Curtis:

But it's like exchange and they're like, yeah, I'm like, this is

Curtis:

like that, but backup, right?

Curtis:

It was like a new idea, right?

Curtis:

It's like that's how I do explain it.

Curtis:

Cause, for two reasons.

Curtis:

One was that it was a relatively new concept and it was somewhat

Curtis:

like breaking the mold.

Curtis:

But the other was that there are products in the world that are advertised as SaaS.

Curtis:

that aren't really SaaS.

Curtis:

I'd say my perfect example is the entire Adobe suite, right?

Curtis:

that is subscription based pricing, but they call it SaaS.

Curtis:

And I'm like, that's not SaaS.

Curtis:

That's subscription based pricing.

Curtis:

Yes.

Curtis:

I understand you're giving software via a service, but it's not SaaS.

Curtis:

so that was the other reason I had to do that.

Curtis:

so we always did things in a certain way back in the day.

Curtis:

And then suddenly there is this SaaSification of the backup world.

Curtis:

why do you think we did that?

Stefan:

Great question.

Stefan:

I know we did these, QBRs, in my previous employers, and we always

Stefan:

wondered, where are the backup admins?

Stefan:

Where are they?

Stefan:

You know what I mean?

Stefan:

It was like a smaller and smaller, it's a shrinking buyer base.

Stefan:

And I think it has a lot to do with, yeah, it's pretty expensive,

Stefan:

spending a lot of time, you mentioned the example of Exchange.

Stefan:

I remember we had a team and we produced 200 page best practice

Stefan:

documents to how to set up the DAGs and do this, the storage tuning.

Stefan:

And you like that DAG that I remembered?

Stefan:

And how do you set it up?

Stefan:

And the LUN distribution, blah, blah, blah.

Stefan:

None of this you have to do, right?

Stefan:

So why is backup any different?

Stefan:

Is what it's mind boggling, right?

Stefan:

That we have such a resistance.

Stefan:

But backup is an application.

Stefan:

Like exchange, right?

Stefan:

So you would think that the same principles apply, especially in our

Stefan:

segment that, like as Chris highlights, it's also a bit different when you

Stefan:

move down market, honestly, you can't really, continue to afford, having

Stefan:

to patch, maintain, procurement cycle, that's got to be fun.

Stefan:

Just coming out of COVID, just buying a stupid server.

Stefan:

gosh.

Stefan:

And We just think about this openness as an age.

Stefan:

I think that was one of the nasty vulnerabilities that went around.

Stefan:

And I think, Curtis, you did a nice sort of write up on the topic, even if you

Stefan:

run into something like that, and then you have to do a vendor coordination

Stefan:

and you got to get a maintenance window, you got to get the payload and then

Stefan:

hopefully you Oh gosh, you have the upgrade actually works and then you can

Stefan:

resume your backups the next day, right?

Stefan:

Isn't it nice to not have to worry about, right?

Stefan:

worry about storage management, disk expansion.

Stefan:

I know it's a thing and it might make people feel good,

Stefan:

but is it really smart, right?

Stefan:

You just mentioned the threat landscape, right?

Stefan:

And you have 10 hours that you have to invest.

Stefan:

Wouldn't you rather invest nine hours learning about Azure or learning about

Stefan:

the threat landscape as opposed to.

Stefan:

swapping drives and things like that, right?

Stefan:

So that, that's kind of

Pras:

I think Curtis might like swapping drives, honestly,

Stefan:

I like

Curtis:

I, I miss, I miss swapping

Stefan:

But I...

Curtis:

You know, uh, Stefan, I, I think we've always, if somebody

Curtis:

could make this problem go away.

Curtis:

'cause it's a giant pain in the butt, right?

Curtis:

If somebody could make the backup problem go away, then I think there were a lot

Curtis:

of people that would have done that.

Curtis:

And the, you alluded to, one of the problems is that the

Curtis:

backup admin is a dying breed.

Curtis:

There's, there, there's no, you can't go get a, master's degree in backup ship.

Curtis:

you can't get a, you can't get a bachelor's degree in it, right?

Curtis:

and, but there's three technologies, I think, that have enabled this

Curtis:

solution, the SaaS based backup.

Curtis:

The first would be obviously just the cloud, right?

Curtis:

this seemingly unlimited amount of infrastructure that someone

Curtis:

can call upon when they need it.

Curtis:

The second would be deduplication.

Curtis:

the fact that once we get that first backup, which we often

Curtis:

call the seed and we can do that often via, Sneakernet, right?

Curtis:

Do that first backup via Sneakernet once we get that first backup,

Curtis:

because, I'll digress for a second.

Curtis:

One of the problems that you said, it's just like an application.

Curtis:

It is, but it's got a unique problem and that is it's got all the stuff, right?

Curtis:

Physics has always been the enemy of backup, right?

Curtis:

It's just literally, I've spent my entire career fighting physics.

Curtis:

but dedu.

Curtis:

This idea of actually slicing things all the way down to their, subcomponents

Curtis:

and then figuring out which ones are redundant, which ones are new and

Curtis:

only sending those new things that made it much more bandwidth friendly.

Curtis:

and then I think really the golden goose here is object storage, because what

Curtis:

that does is it solves all that stuff.

Curtis:

That's what made me think about when you were talking about all this, the disk

Curtis:

swapping and the disk management that we used to have to do back in the day.

Curtis:

even more so is the volume management, right?

Curtis:

you had to constantly manage the capacity, of your disk storage, but now you don't.

Curtis:

It's just magic, right?

Stefan:

Unlimited!

Curtis:

yeah.

Curtis:

Yeah.

Curtis:

I always say seemingly unlimited, right?

Curtis:

Because Yeah.

Curtis:

Yeah.

Curtis:

It, yeah.

Curtis:

Thanks.

Curtis:

Thanks.

Curtis:

was that efan that said that?

Stefan:

Yeah, I thought I'd say something, profound here.

Curtis:

Yeah.

Curtis:

, no,

Stefan:

for granted, right?

Curtis:

that's the other thing about object storage is that it built

Curtis:

into it is the idea of redundancy.

Curtis:

and immutability and constant checking that the data that we put on it, Three

Curtis:

months ago is still the data that's there.

Curtis:

we never did that with tape, right?

Curtis:

We never did it with regular disk.

Pras:

Yeah, so I know we were talking previously about sort of SaaS and backup.

Pras:

And one of the things, um, that I've seen in the past is sort of a lot of

Pras:

companies when they're like, Oh, companies are shifting to like Microsoft 365.

Pras:

They would produce these solutions, which.

Pras:

didn't really solve the problem, Stefan, that you were talking about, making

Pras:

it simple and easy to do the backups.

Pras:

And they would sort of do like lift and shift, where it's like, hey, you

Pras:

still manage your server, you still manage everything else, even though

Pras:

you're doing like Microsoft 365 backups.

Pras:

And so, Chris, I guess a question for you is sort of, what got, uh, enabled

Pras:

into sort of the space of, okay, let's now try to offer or start to offer

Pras:

a cloud data protection solution?

Pras:

nable1-chris: so the origin story is truly, uh, a backup administrator

Pras:

that got angry one day and said, there must be a better way, um, but

Pras:

that's going really far back in time.

Pras:

Um, and, but it really was the origins were sort of in that period where.

Pras:

The internet was rising, you know, disk storage was rising.

Pras:

There was, uh, you know, this from tape, you know, this is going back a long time,

Pras:

but like the, the shifts were happening and just recognizing that, um, you

Pras:

could in theory, you know, protect, you know, data that is residing anywhere.

Pras:

And bring it to one central location or many locations, depending on the, the

Pras:

target, um, and do that in such a way that it just simplifies the process.

Pras:

And so from day one, the architecture of Cove was really

Pras:

designed about solving for.

Pras:

Which, especially, you know, 10, 15 years ago was a bigger problem,

Pras:

which was that you needed to drive essentially a Mack truck through a

Pras:

garden hose and ideally do, ideally do that like several times per day, right?

Pras:

And that is a physics problem that I think Curtis would, uh, you

Pras:

know, mentioned he agreed with.

Pras:

And, uh, and so the question was really, how do you solve that problem?

Pras:

And so.

Pras:

If you start from day zero on solving for that problem, then that's sort of like

Pras:

solving all the rest of your problems.

Pras:

So that's the origin story.

Pras:

And, and really those early decisions in terms of the right architectural,

Pras:

uh, uh, uh, decisions, the also just the focus on, on solving kind of the

Pras:

root physics problem that had to be overcome at the time of, uh, Moving

Pras:

large amounts of data over small pipes on a very consistent, reliable basis,

Pras:

um, and being able to monitor that across, you know, many locations, et

Pras:

cetera, that those core, uh, you know, focusing on solving for that particular

Pras:

problem, um, has led to, you know, that, you know, the, the outcomes that.

Pras:

Overcame some of those early fears of customers of transitioning from just

Pras:

that traditional way of running backups, where you always had to land it locally.

Pras:

And then if you wanted to get offsite, you had to do a secondary process,

Pras:

whether you use the internet or the sneaker net or however you did it.

Pras:

Um, that mindset, um, it really, it did take some time for the world

Pras:

to accept that that was a viable.

Pras:

Means of data protection.

Pras:

So I was actually going to bounce over to Stefan, I know in our past, right?

Pras:

We've worked on deduplicated appliances, right?

Pras:

Dedup's been around for quite a while.

Pras:

What were some of the challenges that needed to be solved in order

Pras:

to, like Chris said, take a Mack truck worth of data and send

Pras:

it over a garden hose, right?

Pras:

So what are some of the things that Cove does differently?

Pras:

That allows for that to happen or to be supported.

Stefan:

Yeah, the short answer is this cool architecture.

Stefan:

There's two levels of architecture.

Stefan:

One is The topology, right?

Stefan:

We're moving data from the edge to the cloud, right?

Stefan:

and, if you have 160, 000 customers, they're small, they're

Stefan:

all over the place, right?

Stefan:

They probably have a really small pipe.

Stefan:

that's not even a garden hose, right?

Stefan:

How do you get the data that central location?

Stefan:

so I think that's the short answer.

Stefan:

and yes, to your point, there are some.

Stefan:

Thank you.

Stefan:

Products that just do it very well.

Stefan:

Remember Avamar?

Stefan:

that was like one of those cool like source side deduplication,

Stefan:

other words.

Stefan:

So conceptually, this is similar, but better.

Stefan:

so we do an ingest and think of it as a content level.

Stefan:

Backup.

Stefan:

So we don't worry about putting the whole file and have to do change

Stefan:

block tracking regardless of whether the content change or not, right?

Stefan:

It always produces a arguably higher change rate and more that has to

Stefan:

be picked up by the scan, right?

Stefan:

We don't worry about that.

Stefan:

We operate one level above in the stack.

Stefan:

But the cool thing is we can do an image level restore.

Stefan:

You just have to assemble the right files and that gives you that image level.

Stefan:

So it's just architecturally.

Stefan:

Different and, fascinating way ahead of its time, right?

Stefan:

when you believe in, yeah, there's a move to the cloud.

Stefan:

There's exponential growth of data and then more and more

Stefan:

distributed environments.

Stefan:

this, architecture is really coming into its own.

Stefan:

what we can then do is we only have to really worry about if you have a

Stefan:

thousand files or 100, 000 files, we only really have to worry about the ones

Stefan:

that were, there were any changes at all.

Stefan:

And that seems to be, it always typically is a small number.

Stefan:

and then within that, when we pick up the hash, we go through and

Stefan:

we really only select the 256K blocks or segments, package them

Stefan:

up and move those over the wire.

Stefan:

So you don't really have to worry about, Oh, I did a defrag.

Stefan:

So my, my, I nodes are all, all over the place again, or I move

Stefan:

the file from here to here, same file, but the block disk layout

Pras:

a logical level, right?

Pras:

That you're looking at the data rather than at the lower level.

Pras:

Gotcha.

Pras:

So, okay.

Pras:

So, and I know one of the questions that sometimes people

Pras:

get concerned with about the cloud.

Pras:

I know you talked about, okay, now I can actually move the data via

Pras:

the garden nodes into the cloud.

Pras:

One challenge that some people bring up is when it comes to

Pras:

the restores and the recoveries.

Pras:

even if I can efficiently move the data to the cloud, if I need to, say, restore

Pras:

an application that is local, how do I do that in an efficient fashion, right?

Pras:

Because I am still, once again, going to be limited a little by physics, right?

Pras:

are there things that you offer that help alleviate that concern?

Stefan:

Yes, and it's nice that you call out that not one architecture

Stefan:

is perfect in every aspect that you could possibly imagine, right?

Stefan:

So clearly, when you're moving things from far away from the edge into

Stefan:

the cloud, and you have to go the other way, laws of physics apply, and

Stefan:

that is Difficult to solve, right?

Stefan:

So the efficiency is one layer.

Stefan:

and so I think that TrueDelta, I was going to get into the benefits.

Stefan:

I talked about the how, but obviously when you do that, the

Stefan:

backup frequency can be very,

Stefan:

small, right?

Stefan:

We can often get away with an hourly backup, right?

Stefan:

So it's not quite CDP, but it's nice.

Stefan:

But on the restore, whenever you move data, it will help you as well.

Stefan:

you still might have to live with it.

Stefan:

A couple of hours depending on the data set to do the restore

Stefan:

because you're pulling the bits.

Stefan:

So just for the record, we can actually put a copy, a second copy on

Stefan:

the local, on a local share, right?

Stefan:

so we can accommodate.

Stefan:

We just go to the cloud first.

Stefan:

So that's number one, but we have this nifty thing called the standby image.

Stefan:

So you, let's say you have a Hyper V server at Azure VM.

Stefan:

What we do is we take a backup and then we need immediately do a continuous restore.

Stefan:

We can have it ready either on your server or a NAS or an Azure instance.

Stefan:

So it's actually a quite effective way to keep that copy ready.

Stefan:

And then, of course, your recovery time objective is really

Stefan:

contracted, goes down in minutes.

Stefan:

Right.

Pras:

Because it's basically just spinning up from that copy, right?

Stefan:

correct.

Stefan:

It's already spun up.

Stefan:

It does it proactively.

Stefan:

So it's a continuous.

Stefan:

So I, that's actually a nifty way to do it.

Stefan:

And I love this Azure because, who wants to build a DR site, that you hope

Stefan:

you'll never, ever have to use size it.

Stefan:

Remember the catalog, all this stuff.

Stefan:

And here you can use resources that are there.

Stefan:

You have a cloud formation template and then, yeah, you

Stefan:

have to pay for the storage.

Stefan:

But you really only have to pay for the compute when you light up the VM, right?

Stefan:

Do your sandbox testing and so forth.

Stefan:

It's got

Stefan:

some nice benefits.

Curtis:

I've often been fan of this idea of the pre restore, right?

Curtis:

Because, the fastest restore that ever is ever gonna be is one that's

Curtis:

already done when you need it.

Curtis:

I like that.

Curtis:

I like that a lot.

Curtis:

So if you support that for what workloads?

Stefan:

So we do it.

Stefan:

So it really mostly makes sense for servers, right?

Stefan:

Because that

Stefan:

those are typically the critical.

Stefan:

I mean, we can talk about desktop laptop, but really, or, you know, like, M365,

Stefan:

so it's really a server thing, right?

Stefan:

Where RTO is.

Stefan:

tends to be critical.

Stefan:

and, Hyper V, let's face it, in our segment, this is important

Stefan:

also to understand because I know the podcast also covers a lot of

Stefan:

enterprise vendors, but Microsoft ecosystem is like the 90 plus percent

Stefan:

ecosystem our partners live in, right?

Stefan:

So Hyper V, Azure, VMs, right?

Stefan:

Those would be The main culprits and, we are going to obviously add that for

Stefan:

other hypervisors, like, I don't know, um, VMware, right?

Curtis:

So today you support it for Hyper V and also for physical

Curtis:

servers or just for Hyper V?

Curtis:

nable1-chris: physical virtual servers living like in, in a

Curtis:

hypervisor or in a hyperscaler.

Curtis:

So they the, like they can be in a w s or

Curtis:

Oh, so you, you support this for, for Hyperscalers as well.

Curtis:

Okay, cool.

Curtis:

nable1-chris: key is that we're in the guest, so we don't care

Curtis:

about the hypervisor level.

Curtis:

And that gives us a, the efficiency of moving a lot less data.

Curtis:

And, and then secondly, it gives us that, that horizontal coverage

Curtis:

of basically it doesn't matter where that computing happens.

Curtis:

So that is interesting.

Curtis:

So what I'm hearing you say is that even for the likes of AWS and Azure,

Curtis:

you're still doing a guest level backup.

Curtis:

and what you're doing is you're creating an image that you

Curtis:

can then restore anywhere.

Curtis:

Is that, that accurate?

Curtis:

nable1-chris: You nailed it.

Curtis:

because, as you know, what most people are doing is they're

Curtis:

doing snapshots in AWS and Azure, and then they can copy those and

Curtis:

restore those to other places.

Curtis:

But that requires additional, Work, would be the nicest way.

Pras:

So Stefan, I know you talked about the DR aspects and having this standby

Pras:

copy, but are there other use cases that this can be beneficial other than

Pras:

Hey, I need to quickly restore my data.

Stefan:

yeah, one thing Cove does really well is an item level restore.

Stefan:

It's just in the nature of being that file content level.

Stefan:

But the other primary one that we get all the time is how do I recover

Stefan:

from a destructive cyber attack?

Stefan:

I don't even want to just limit it to a ransomware attack, right?

Stefan:

and that's our sweet spot, I think, because we have what I just described,

Stefan:

a lot of flexibility, right?

Stefan:

Whether you do a standby image or a one time.

Stefan:

On demand restore, the ability to put it either on a server, in your

Stefan:

co location center, on a NAS, or in Azure gives you a lot of flexibility.

Stefan:

So what does that mean?

Stefan:

you can premeditate.

Stefan:

What does the restore look like?

Stefan:

Typically you go in the sandbox first, then run some scans, you

Stefan:

do a password rotation, and then you bring it back into production.

Stefan:

And sometimes when you're hardwired, when you're limited to an array to

Stefan:

array replication, it's great for site to site failover, natural disasters.

Stefan:

Probably preferable.

Stefan:

But when it comes to ransomware tech, you have a lot of flexibility

Stefan:

with Colt because I can just spin it up in Azure and have my

Stefan:

Sentinel 1 instance running already.

Stefan:

Yes, it can be used as a sandbox, and then I can restore it back into production.

Stefan:

I don't want to trivialize the steps, right?

Stefan:

As you can see, a lot of it is actually processed.

Stefan:

But, the technology stack.

Stefan:

Afford that high degree of flexibility that you're probably going to

Stefan:

need right in that restore flow because every customer, every MSP

Stefan:

managed service provider will have a different sort of, data center

Stefan:

under contract and so forth, right?

Curtis:

Well, I appreciate that.

Curtis:

It's been a good conversation.

Curtis:

I, when I'm talking with companies, I always try to find, what is if

Curtis:

there's at least one thing that, really makes them different.

Curtis:

And I think the biggest thing that I've picked up in this particular, discussion

Curtis:

is this idea that you're protecting.

Curtis:

Physical, on prem virtual, and virtual workloads in the cloud, all the same

Curtis:

way, meaning that you're running an agent, which is definitely different,

Curtis:

and it comes with some distinct advantages when you have this DR,

Curtis:

this pre restored DR capability.

Curtis:

I think that's a fascinating, way to do things.

Curtis:

I would certainly like to hear when you add that, that other, uh, hypervisor

Curtis:

that's out there, but I get that you're very focused on the Microsoft, world

Curtis:

and there's nothing wrong with that.

Curtis:

I wanted to thank both of you for, for taking the time to talk with us, Chris.

Curtis:

I will thank, your Canadian self, first.

Curtis:

nable1-chris: thank you for having us, man.

Curtis:

It was great to be here.

Curtis:

Glad to have you.

Curtis:

And Stephan, also, thanks for being on.

Stefan:

Yeah, thanks Curtis.

Stefan:

It's awesome to see you again.

Stefan:

Be well.

Stefan:

Great.

Stefan:

Yeah.

Stefan:

Great podcast.

Stefan:

Thank you.

Curtis:

Always happy to reunite, old friends.

Curtis:

And, speaking of old friends, thanks for listening, folks.

Curtis:

we'd be nothing without you.

Curtis:

Remember to subscribe so that you can restore it all.