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.
Speaker:That sounded a lot of like date.
Speaker:Data protection and information security.
Speaker:We also talk about how this is leading the migration to.
Speaker: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.