[Music] so welcome i'm adam dirt i am the senior manager of unstructured data solutions at dell technologies in the uk i'm here with simon major sam is the commercial director at chrome technologies who are key platinum partners of ours okay so back in 2020 between lockdowns i had the pleasure of meeting sam and members of his team and we're here today to talk to you about a solution called store up so as something storage is something has immediately obviously created something unique it offers significant value to our clients across multiple industry verticals so today today we're here to talk about the solution the use cases it has and how it can deliver for our clients so firstly sam why don't you tell us where the idea came from certainly thank you adam i guess the idea came from the fact that a customer asked me if i could solve a problem for them and as any sales person would say i said yes and then we had to work out whether we could which was the interesting part because the customer had gone to market looking for a solution and you know check gartner and all the standard places and realized that there wasn't actually a solution that existed that could do you know what they needed to do so we were involved uh in a bit of poc and had to design from the ground up a solution to ingest 9 000 dat tapes that had 450 million call recordings that may or may not have contained what they call the pan and sad data people in finance will be aware the credit card the long number and you know the number on the back etc and we had to bring those into our solution which is a cloud-based solution hosted off-site give their users access to it without caching the call they're listening to locally to keep it all pci compliant and then also to put a purge engine in so that after a certain date those calls were purged from the system so again nothing existed that could do that from the ground up that's where we you know we we coded rope programmed etcetera and developed uh store arc and if you fast forward you know eight years down the line uh and eight years of development we now have a solution that not as a voice that does video does mainframe does any file format you can think of we've yet to find one that we can't manage and does the full retrieval redaction process so for things like compliance amazing for helping people remove legacy architecture to be honest a lot of customers our customers your customers will have boxes that are sat there spinning their disks just because because from a compliance reason they have to have them and we offer the ability to turn that off but retain access to the data so from an audit and compliance perspective they're absolutely protected well that's fantastic sam and i understand you've got a video you can show us which will give us an overview of the offering absolutely we do so it's well worth investing two and a half minutes to watch the video it very concisely sums up what storack does and how it does it uh i can tell you adam but this uh this recording will be about three hours long so if we play the video uh let the viewers you know use that to understand uh better know the context of this call and then i guess we can we can knife and fork through some of the detail uh once we've watched the video so i guess play the tape the data world is constantly changing for businesses keeping on top of the data you manage and the responsibilities you have to keep it readily available and safe is complex and expensive gdpr has revolutionized the landscape of corporate data practices and made significant waves in compliance standards add to that the rising tide of organizational complexity and the eruption of strategic restructuring activity it's clear that there's a need to simplify operational access to data in a way that is intuitive efficient and doesn't cost the earth store arc is a secure digital storage archive and retrieval solution hosted on-site or in the cloud with it you can create a secure environment where your structured and unstructured data can live and you can navigate around this environment to search retrieve redact and display the information you need at a moment's notice all your data is available online with controlled access via a web browser provided to your team based on their role everything is easily searchable to view or download through a secure portal with your entire data footprint centralized in one harmonious ecosystem you can decommission costly legacy systems enabling your organization to reduce its physical footprint and simplify your data landscape [Music] storack helps businesses to work in harmony with the real world too by supporting a paperless document workflow storack is compliant with pci dss security standards as well as iso 9001 quality standards your data is protected with backup and disaster recovery solutions to meet your needs and fully support your business continuity plans [Music] with gdpr in mind you can rest easy with full audit trails for data access and usage [Music] and the ability to undertake targeted data purging at the end of its retention life cycle [Music] to find out how store art can help your business achieve regulatory compliance improve operational efficiency and reduce costs get in touch with us today to arrange a demonstration [Music] so sam fantastic video look that gives us a fantastic overview of of the strength of the storack offering i'd just like to now dig into some of the key salient points in it and probably the first one i like to raise we talk to a lot of our customers around the legacy systems the cost of aged and technical debt can you tell us a little bit more about what you do in terms of saving that cost for your customers absolutely and you are right it's a huge amount of investment goes into let's call it keeping the lights on um you know you and i and people watching this video no doubt have walked around a lot of data centers and seen a lot of very beige looking equipment uh you know as it used to be that many moons ago and there's a reason for that you know the technical architects were told at the time build a solution to take care of this problem and they've done that and that's fantastic but not everyone has an eye on what could happen in 15 20 25 years time so we unintentionally build these technology cul-de-sacs and they become more and more costly every year in the maintenance of the hardware in the foot space they take up in a data center you know go back 15 20 years and you'd be lucky to get 250 gig of space in iraq you know it's obviously very different these days add to that the cost of extended support on things like microsoft you know i won't name names but i have a customer who is paying a multi-million pound bill for extended support microsoft and that is not unusual and it's simply because they're stuck on proprietary systems with no real easy way to get out of there but a very real world requirement to have access to that data for the regulators and for things that we touched on like gdpr and etc etc so what we do is we enable them to remove and cut that tie to that legacy architecture we retain the data but without the requirement for having the being tied to the legacy application and we consolidate so we can take you know lots of disparate systems and bring them into one place we have a customer right now uh who has collapsed 30 separate systems into one with a road map to take them easily out to 60. now that's if you imagine a system is a rack that 60 racks have disappeared into one so just from heat and power that's a huge saving then we factor in the operational savings of actually accessing that data so you know we'll probably talk a bit more about compliance in a minute but you know people have to access the data that's why they retain it and that's very difficult when you have lots of disparate legacy systems that don't talk to each other whereas when you if you bring these into store arc we can search all that data for a singular uh interface and it is very simple imagine i know you've seen it so i'm i'll describe it to you anyway but it's like a google page as you know it couldn't be any simpler to actually access that data once we've collapsed it um into store and reduced uh your your footprint in the data center hugely um so yeah you know obviously legacy architecture and the removal of is massive and to give you a number uh we have yet to undertake uh you know to build a business case for a customer where we've not been able to show at least a 75 cost saving on doing what they're doing today versus transitioning to store arc so there's hundreds of different reasons to do this compliance and and operational efficiency etc but if any business isn't interested in you know savings of 75 or more questions should be asked well no absolutely i know you saved hundreds of thousands and many many millions of uh pounds for your customers as well i have to go back to i'm not sure you're old enough to remember racks that had 250 gig of data in it but uh i believe sadly i do so so look again we see it we share we share the value unstructured data we're all around consolidating workloads so again it resonates with us um i also you talked about well you probably alluded to ease of management there as well my understanding is you deliver this as a full managed service so in fact for training and the the the um the expertise need from the customer is relatively small indeed yeah so we offer in a few different ways so we're not completely prescriptive as in you must have it this way but when you get into the business case with a customer uh it just is more efficient when you look at the different options for them to give it to us and for us to deliver it as a managed service the whole thing with storack is uh taking away the legacy data problem so the management thereof uh you know where you host it and is it patched fed watered all that sort of stuff if you can outsource it make someone else's problem kind of why wouldn't you so yeah most of the solutions we do are as a managed service absolutely that is um that's definitely the way to go from what we're seeing and you can do that on-prem or you can host it out of a chrome data center am i correct and saying that you're absolutely correct so we can host that in our data center we can do that in the likes of azure and aws and whatnot in ecs obviously but it is much easier to have our full service wrapper around the solution and we should talk about actually um the ease of use of the solution you know a lot of these systems that people are trying to to push legacy data into and whatnot there is still a huge demand on it so wherever the data resides there's a request to i t i need file x y and zed it's many years old it relates to case whatever it might be i t have to intervene at some point and there's an overhead on it to manage this legacy data in this legacy platform with store arc it's self-service from the people that require the data so it could be for example call center users trying to find a call that's in question they can go into the system themselves search by whatever metadata we've created uh and by the way if the information we gather from a customer is light on metadata we have ways that we can actually help them create the metadata for the system so it's not a problem if someone's system is like a metadata they can then search buyers say in a call center it could be by time date customer number line id etc etc and find that piece of information redact that piece of information and recall that piece of information based on user access based um let's get it wrong sorry user access controls so you know we define who is allowed to do what obviously but that entire process can happen without any intervention from it and when you look at the operational savings of that they can be huge uh and i will give you one example actually of a good savings so we have a customer which manage um data subject access requests so that's when you're calling into a bank an insurer whoever it might be and you as ad and jewett are requesting all the information they hold pertaining to you this particular customer um it was a two-week process and the reason it was two-week process was lots of disparate legacy systems to access to try and find information that related to you to then and this is not a joke literally print it off and then the redaction process was a tip x or a sharpie and then they would staple that together and that could then be sent to the customer that process was a two-week end-to-end process a manual process that is now a sub 30 minute process um by using storack we've calculated the savings for that half a million pounds per annum just on one process in their business which is now simplified via the application of storack as a product wow it's unbelievable to think people still do that in this day and age isn't it so so in terms of saving money in total cost of ownership we retire legacy applications we consolidate into a really small 75 saving into a into a repository i mean look i echo that from the isilon file system or the ecs object store again we kind of work with you with one uh it can be a small solution that scales up in a really simple to manage set forget ways so again we just complement the savings you add into this as well so total cost of ownership is fantastic and that example as well of the users just doing that in sort of 30 minutes is just just outrageously different from where they were the the simplicity absolutely of things like isilon the way that you guys scale uh and the simplicity of doing so i i i think yeah that's why it works so well what we do they're two very uh if you look under the bonnet they're very complex uh what they do is exceedingly clever on the face of it it looks rather simple and the fact that the ease of the way you guys can scale uh when you need to is brilliant you know no interruption to service always on all that sort of good stuff which works great for what we're trying to achieve here with store arc you know as people bring stuff into store arc it it's what we see very often is we go in to address point number one and we put a a solution in place and then the compliance or records people go um you know we could use it for this and this and this and and you know it feels uh so having a a back end if you like that can grow easily without service interruption it is vitally important for the way we manage our product and obviously hence the the synergy between us and and and uds and we see lots of customers who did exactly what you say they think of a use case they do something if they don't get the plumbing right which will scale with them at the time whether it be 10 terabytes up to how many petabytes if they don't get there right up front they end up doing it doing it again and again they end up in that technical cul-de-sac again so what about things like encryption and ransomware and things like that this is gdpr compliance i'm assuming there's we can cover ransomware from a isilon and ecs perspective but i'm assuming you've got encryption and other features in there to apps and make complaints everything you'd expect so yeah it's already fully encrypted we're protected behind layer seven application firewalls we have zero day threat uh agents on all the technology so as you can imagine you know the data that we're storing for our customers um is very sensitive this is financial data this can be healthcare records uh this is not the sort of thing that can get out to the public domain without there being some severe consequences so you know by working with your team at dell uh you know it's security by design so the way we've built store arc fundamentally that has to be a secure repository or let's be honest it's dead in the market before we even move and then you know you you layer that if you like with the dell technologies and that just enhances what we're able to offer so collaboratively we know we have a solution which is a safe place to you know for this and let's be honest some of it is very sensitive data to reside yep excellent you're looking after my credit card and healthcare records so i'm delighted with that sam thank you very much to talk talking of industries you mentioned healthcare and finance verticals is there a limit to the scale or potential of what verticals this would reside in or is it ubiquitous yeah there really is no limit um because ultimately everyone has this same problem you know data grows exponentially day by day i don't know the statistic off the top of my head but you know whenever you look at well how much data have we created today versus last week versus and it's this huge curve like this we create data at no time in history well that ultimately has to go somewhere at some point it lives in your production systems today and six months you know 12 months whatever at some point it needs to come off those systems and and you know be archived so this requirement for archive is going nowhere so we have to have a solution which is is almost limitless in scale uh and we know from our system that we can have at the moment i'm going to say limitless amount of data sets simply because we haven't found an amount what that we've fallen over at um you know we haven't found a breaking point as yet and then if you look at where you guys go with isilon that is a pretty much limitless uh scalability there so someone would have to come along uh with a huge and vast data lake to cause a headache to us but so far we've yet to find anyone that can trouble uh either our application or or the underpinning architecture from dell technologies great and i i can probably help you with some numbers i mean about 80 of data in the world is unstructured and that's growing about 50 to 80 year on year um and actually you've touched on some interesting points there because historically some of this sort of data gravity might have pushed it onto tape but keeping these repositories online people start realizing there's a lot of value of data over time so whilst a lot what you're doing is making sure data gets deleted there's also the value of that data when people are coming in requesting that kind of stuff or maybe they're going to run some analytics keeping it in that online repository understanding where the data is and that kind of stuff again that's that's a huge industry trend of keeping your data online being able to do something with that absolutely i had a conversation uh with a customer a little while back and they'd done a rather large archiving project uh it wasn't recently it was a few years back to be fair to them but they'd used um god do you remember the old kind of big discs the plasmon yeah yeah yeah okay yeah there you go so they they had you know boxes upon boxes of these things i said okay it's an interesting uh take on archiving um i said what happens when you need to call that data back okay well we call it was iron mountain or one of those type of people said brilliant and then the process for getting it back and the penny dropped on the guide went oh we don't actually have the the players anymore anything crikey and now we see this we've seen this before where people have audio tapes in the likes of an iron mountain and so on which is that's what they do they're great doing that and they but they've you know they've upgraded their core recording technology three or four times and they're only backward compatible so far so whilst tape is a great medium for storing data if you can't bring it back into your environment and replay it then at that point it becomes worthless um you know and using our solution like you said it's always on uh and you know compliance and regulation is getting stiffer and tougher all the time to give you an idea of how quickly we can find that data so put in a request in the old-fashioned way go to our mountain get your box of tapes uh or plasma discs whatever it might be back try and find the right one try and find the right device to play it in play it back hope that it's not corrupt and it may be in there somewhere that's quite lengthy process uh you know we uh had a solution as i said before over 450 million records well over a petabyte of data that had a search time of sub three seconds and a hundred percent accuracy so when you start looking again at operational efficiencies versus tape and other you know different ways of trying to solve the archive problem uh we are leagues ahead of where anybody else is and from i guess from a function perspective you know there are people out there that do a bit of what we do so some people can do the voice some people can do file um there isn't another product out there that can do unstructured structured voice video mainframe etc etc from one solution so if you want to do this anywhere else you pick your four or five different products and you try and weave them together hopefully successfully uh you know to solve a problem uh whereas in a very in a very elegant way we've done this with one solution do you have any other sort of use cases around compliance you might want to share with us yeah absolutely i mean and there are there are many okay and i will start by just confirming to you that i am not the compliance expert within store up by by any stretch imagination but you learn a bit from you know sitting around these meetings to listen these people talk and you've got things obviously pci yes clearly there's one gdpr there's another the freedom information act and that covers you know covering all public bodies companies act uh you know for access to corporate financial records uh pharmaceuticals things like hipaa uh you know and on and on and on actually we have a slide that we share with customers where we you know we put up a non-exhaustive list on a power point and you you literally can't fit them on there's just too many but it all pertains to the same thing it's proving that you have this data being able to access it in a timely fashion proving that it's uh you know that it's um in the state that it was when you recorded it it's not been manipulated in any way and actually in the process that we undertake with store storack when we take a piece of data and redact it and then bring back a cleansed copy to site the original piece of data is um as was so that could be submitted as evidence in a court of law and we have we've proven that we actually passed a report of compliance a rock that's a financial industry um term but it just shows you that what we're doing proves that i guess everything is 400 better by putting it above board we're doing what we say we can do and the data is in its original format and untouched um and vitally important if you're getting into things like medical records and all these different governance and compliance acts so again if people are interested in learning more about specific verticals and the use cases and how we address those then we have a lot of very intelligent people working in store arc that know about those industries and the use cases for stroke and how we solve those problems i think you're reminding me a little bit more about my light bulb moment again i'm thinking about all the conversation i have all of the industries the light states are keeping a chain of custody being out of of the data being able to um present it in the court of law it's just there's so many use cases out there so uh yeah that light bulb moments just resonated with me again absolutely and again it was the same thing of you know when you think about all these different verticals again they have the same problems they have to retain this data think about pharmaceutical uh i guess that's pretty spot on right now you know all the different stuffs going on with covid vaccinations etc etc there's lots of data that has to be recorded and as been recorded for an awfully long time because if we ever have to refer back to it we need to be able to refer back to it very quickly and know that data is as was and untouched something on the flip side of that mortgage data for instance you know i wasn't aware to start getting into this that the your mortgage company keeps your mortgage on record for the life of the mortgage so that could be 25 30 years depending what sort of mortgage you've gone for plus seven years to life now that's a huge amount of time to keep a piece of data and like i said before someone built a solution at a point in time that was fit for purpose it's not their fault that the world span ahead 20 years and things changed and now the company's stuck with that legacy piece of technology so we a resolve it by retiring that retiring the costs moving into store arc greatly improving the operational efficiency but keeping this data i guess you know uh sacred but you know presentable in courts of law or that's that is vitally important that we can prove that because it just adds validity uh to the credibility of our solution perfect i mean fantastic examples i think another part of compliance is also to delete data at the right time and i'm pretty comfortable confident that the store arc solution provides that as well yeah and that's a very interesting point now actually thanks for raising that that is uh i should call out that store arc is not a uh you know it's not an off the shelf box so it's not a case of how much storage do you need this is your part code ship it to site there's a good piece of engagement we have to do with a customer up front and that is understand what data they have where it is uh etc etc as well you can imagine with the differing types of data people have across multiple different systems the heavy lifting if you like at the front end of the project ensures success throughout the process and part that is understanding purge cycles so what um you know rate three compliance pertains to your vertical how long do you have to retain data for and prove that you've retained it for that but as important when you purge data you have to show and keep a record to prove that you have purged it so we actually work our customers again non-prescriptively to work with them to design a purge engine around each individual data set because they're different and we we cannot be prescriptive in that otherwise we've we're not a useful application or useful solution at that point in time so the team work very closely with our customers to understand what the purge cycle has to look like and then how we evidence that we've done that perfect well thank you for that and we're talking around life cycle management as well and if we're talking around people keeping stuff for up to 99 years for example how do we how do we keep the debt we talked about uh old tape et cetera and so that's one of the things from an islamist perspective it's kind of an evolution of a cluster evolution of an object store so you'll never have to do a full data migration that kind of stuff again staying on those technologies so we keep the chain of custody the the compliance from an application we keep it from a platform and the plumbing underneath it so again we're providing a complete solution so we're great in the sum of our parts in that respect absolutely i think that's a good point you know we've worked very closely uh with i say we my technical contingent of work very close to your technical attention uh looking at you know our code your technology to ensure that you know uh that we work over time what i mean by that is your customer will invest in a platform today and they may have let's call it a seven to ten year refresh cycle on on that installation they need to know that if you know in ten years time the store arc will still work on the next iteration and that's why we work exclusively i'll put my teeth back in exclusively with dell as our underpinning architecture because we need to know that as we develop our product that will work with the next generation of products that you bring out because you have a customer roadmap you know they need to know they're investing in you today and then we talk again about technology coldy sacs that they're investing with something that can change and evolve over time and they're not stuck well we did that with store up so we make sure that we're aligned with your road map and that we will work with the next generation and iteration of dell technologies so at no point do we hit a crossroads where suddenly we don't work together anymore we have to give them that reassurance any investment in dell and store arc is fit for purpose for the duration okay so sam it's been brilliant learning even more about this fantastic offering you've got sam i'd like to personally thank you for your time today the dedication to dell technologies and this and discuss the innovative solution with us team and i look forward to continuing working with you and your team and really looking forward to some successful engagements going forward thank you very much thank you
2021-03-19