Transcript
Goblin: Hahaha hahaha hahaha hahaha. Hahaha hahaha hahaha. Hi Dave.Littman Truth in IT. Welcome to today's webcast. Today we are taking you to the edge, to the edge of it, and we're going to teach you how to simplify edge computing with HCI, hyper converged infrastructure, specifically software. And in just a second, I am going to be joined by our panel of guests today. I will have Todd Dorsey with me, senior storage analyst with DCG. And Todd and I will be joined by Ken Clipperton, principal storage analyst and partner at DCG. And Ken. Ken and Todd and I will be joined by Bruce Kornfeld. Bruce is Chief Marketing and Product Officer with Stormagic. And of course today's event is sponsored by Stormagic. Before we go to the panel, a few housekeeping tips. We expect today's event to go probably 35, 40, 45 minutes. And of course, we'll be taking your questions and comments in the chat room. We have staff standing by from Truth in IT to answer any questions you might have about the video or the audio or anything like that. We have staff standing by from Stormagic to answer any questions you might have about today's content. And without further ado, let's say hi to our panel. Welcome, Todd, Ken and Bruce. Ken Clipperton: Thank you, David. Good to be with you. Yes, thanks for having us. Dave Littman: All right. Great to have you guys here today. We are talking about hyper converged infrastructure at the edge. You know, whether we're talking about managing data and latency for video, for Iot, for all sorts of remote applications. But, Ken, let me let me go to you first. First, if you would, tell us a little bit about DCG, and then let's talk about how DCG defines the edge. Ken Clipperton: Great. Sure. DCIG is the Data Center Intelligence group. We provide independent analysis of stuff that goes in data centers. Especially I focus on enterprise storage. My business partner focuses on data protection technology, and we also cover hyper converged infrastructure as part of that. And as you recognize those overlap one another. We've been doing this for 17 years prior to founding DCI and all, we were in the trenches, you know, we were directors, storage managers, infrastructure managers. And so we've, you know, we've been there, we've we've lived it. And now we share the information we get from researching products with a broader audience. Dave Littman: Excellent. Excellent. Now, I know some of the stories that we've had and your past experience as a director at a university, you know, really, really I know will resonate with our audience. So let's start with the edge. You know, how do you guys define the edge? Ken Clipperton: Well, thanks for asking. Yeah, there's a lot of ambiguity around that. So some analysts and individuals insist that edge means Internet of Things, you know, harsh environments, you know, in a cell tower or something like that. Others broaden that all the way out to anything outside the data center itself, the core data center we're comfortable with in between definition, you know, fairly broad, but really and especially think about the edge as infrastructure where no staff is available. So if something goes wrong, you know it's a problem. And like think about urgent care clinics, gas stations, retail stores, convenience stores and also those harsh Internet of Things environments. So that's how we think about the edge. Dave Littman: Okay, great, great. So, Todd, let me let me switch things over to you now. In your research, you are seeing a lot of growth at the edge. And, you know, what do you see as the main drivers of that guess not only the growth of edge computing, but but the growth of the data itself as well? Todd Dorsey: Sure. Well, in many ways, the growth of data at the edge is the factor and reflects the growth of data everywhere. More devices, more applications producing, more data, use of media files and larger file sizes. But of course the edge has unique environments there video surveillance, for example, for security, and there's automation technologies and Iot and proliferation of sensors and the manufacturing and environmental situations, mobile devices and smart devices and 5G networks, you know, as a result of mobile field forces and mobile field workforces. Think of a recent example. When I was at the auto dealership, we had a leak in our vehicle and it was wasn't clear where it was coming from and it had extended warranty on it. But so we had to end up submitting a case with the warranty company for them to cover the outage. But, you know, as part of that experience, there's of course, video in the lobby and there's a case being opened and as part of. Our historical records and pictures being taken and submitted with that. And it's just a much richer environment than what it was a decade ago. And of course, there's no end in sight with the amount of data growing for those sorts of situations. Dave Littman: Okay, great. Todd Thank you. Bruce Kornfeld: David, can I can I jump in here? Yeah, Bruce. Dave Littman: Go ahead. Yeah. Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. So just to follow on to what Todd just said, I mean, what I would I would just add that think about going to an auto parts dealer just five years ago or ten years ago, none of that would have been there. So I'm you know, what we see is that because technology is as advanced so much thanks a lot to AMD and Intel and faster processors and smaller devices and faster memory. The innovation that's happening out there is driving all of this data at the edge. Companies are innovating a new ways to solve business problems and it's just generating a massive amount of processing and data coming out from the edge and that and that. And that's what we're all about here talking about today. Dave Littman: Okay, great. Bruce, Thank you. So, Ken. Ken Clipperton: Yeah, I'm going to jump into you and just point out then that the point of edge infrastructure is to capture, store and then process data as near to where it's created as possible in order to make that data actionable. Right there, you know, to support whether it's sales transactions or service that's being provided. That's what, again, service at the edge is what's driving the need for data services at the edge. Dave Littman: Okay, great. Ken, thank you. Let's build on that a little bit. Let's stay with that for a second. So, you know, basically what you're talking about to some extent is is latency, right? Todd Dorsey: So absolutely. Dave Littman: Right. And but what are some of the other challenges of of data out at the edge and the growth of the edge today? Ken Clipperton: Well, certainly one of the challenges is how do you provide technology based services in a place where you don't have technology staff? I Setting it up, keeping it running, keeping it up to date. Absolutely. A big challenge. And really, it's about uptime and availability. How do you make that happen consistently and over time? At the edge and tied to that, of course, our budget challenges. You know, organizations are wanting to accomplish more, deploy more capabilities at the edge. And there's not necessarily a concurrent rise in budgets to support every initiative that folks want to make happen. Todd Dorsey: Okay. So those are the. Ken Clipperton: Kind of the three biggies to me. But there are there more? Okay. Dave Littman: Yeah. Let me open that up to the panel. Bruce, anything you want to add there from what your clients are telling you is challenges they're seeing that they need to overcome? Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, I would say think think we hit some of them. But the biggest things that we see is, first of all, typically the edge sites, whether it's whether it's retail or manufacturing or, you know, even a law firm that has a bunch of sites out there. Cost is a huge one. They have the data. They have they have needs for running applications and storing data. But cost is paramount and they need to find ways of keeping the costs down. But high availability is critical. No one really can can afford to run on a single node anymore because technology is so much less expensive. There's got to be ways to build reliable clusters. So we're hearing about high availability and cost. And the other thing that's driving edge, I'd say this this might be a little controversial. This isn't a cloud discussion, so I'll throw it out there. But cloud is very expensive. A lot of enterprises and companies have tried to figure out, let's go cloud first. Let's put everything in the cloud. Well, guess what they're finding is that running applications in the cloud from the edge can be really, really expensive and slow, unreliable. There's a lot of movement these days to edge sites saying, you know what, I just need a little bit of kit, a little HCI solution, highly available, low cost. I'm going to run it myself at the edge because it's going to save me a lot of time and a lot of money and it's going to be highly available. Dave Littman: Okay, cool, cool. Now, Todd, I want to come to you in a second and talk about sort of software per se, as opposed to hardware and appliances. But Bruce, let me just stick with you for a second, because I know that in addition to high availability and flexibility and saving costs and, you know, dealing with lack of resources at the edge, a major concern of our audience is always about security. Can you speak a little bit, too, about the challenge of security out at the Edge? Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, that's a good one in that there's a lot that goes on from an IT perspective. Sometimes I think there's there's no way I'd want to do that job. There's a lot of pressure to figure out how do you protect your systems from bad things happening and mean. It's really impossible. Think about it. There's there's billion dollar companies that have that have outages and they have cyber attacks that they deal with. One way that we find customers worried about security, particularly at the edge, is that they have a new concern, which is they don't have physical security that you have in a data center or even an office. Edge locations can be a lot of customers there. They can be factories. They can be unsecure places where disk drives can disappear or a whole server can be stolen. Et cetera. So what we find is the lowest common denominator that we're hearing is I need to encrypt my data at the edge. And there's a lot of technologies that can do it. We can talk about Stormagic later, but encrypting data at the edge has become very, very important. Dave Littman: Okay, great, great answer. Todd Dorsey: And I just want to add on to that. Go ahead. Ken Clipperton: In terms of security things, but also as a from an IT perspective, how did a big exposure is around. Its hardware and software that has not been patched. Mean the main reason for patches coming out is to address security issues. But I've got hundreds of even 10 or 11 sites, but I've got all these sites out there. How do I deploy those patches to keep that infrastructure up to date against these known vulnerabilities? I keep seeing these reports of, yes, this was fixed 18 months ago. It says the provider, but the patch wasn't rolled out. How do I get that out there if I'm managing these? Bruce Kornfeld: That's a great that's a great point. Think about it. If you're in a data center environment and you have hundreds of servers, there are skilled technicians. That's their job. When you're at the edge, you can have hundreds. We have customers that have thousands of sites and maintaining and updating firmware and software is really hard and that's where the whole centralized management comes in and tools. But yeah, you're absolutely right. It is a bigger problem at the edge than in the data center for sure. Ken Clipperton: And of course then you have to have some kind of monitoring and reporting in place so that you know, your folks that can resolve issues know that issues are occurring. But those are all challenges about getting managing lots and lots of locations. Todd Dorsey: Yeah. Okay. Dave Littman: Great, great. Okay, cool. So let's talk a little bit and I know we're going to come back to, you know, when we talk about patching, you know, remote software or hardware, that's firmware that's located at remote locations. What a challenge it is. But let's talk about sort of the decoupling of of the hardware and the software for a second and and that vis a vis appliances. So Todd, you know, we often think of hyperconverged infrastructure as an appliance and as Dcg's lead researcher into HCI. Talk to us a little bit about HCI software, how you guys define it and you know your research into it. Speaker5: Well, the term hyperconverged infrastructure has been around for well over a decade. Think there's some debate upon who first coined the term, but traditionally it's was brought into place to help solve the problems of data center infrastructure management and managing the three pillars of compute and storage networking independently and separately, which of course introduces its own problems of complexity and cost and scalability and deployment. So we've had these appliances out for well over a decade. But over the years we've seen products introduced the market that are software only. Um, that is, they have been decoupled from the appliance themselves. And these software solutions allow companies to manage converged appliances with compute and storage and networking included. Um. So generally the software pieces have those pieces in place hypervisor, storage and network. In some cases, we see software perhaps may not have a networking piece in place because those components are already covered or it may not be as relevant to the use case. But generally speaking, software can be deployed on commodity hardware or it's available to be deployed on a select list of OEM server vendors. But the main point with software, it's it's decoupled from a specific vendor appliance. It's not limited to a single vendor, and customers have some choice over deploying their software. Dave Littman: Okay. Sounds like there's some flexibility there. Go ahead, Bruce. Todd Dorsey: Yeah, if I can. Bruce Kornfeld: Jump in here, I would say another thought process would be, um, back in the early days of HCI, appliances were needed, probably because it wasn't so easy for an IT team to build it themselves. It had to be a closed environment. It had to be okay. These specific servers, this software, this version of the hypervisor, right. So it had to be a bundled tested solution that they knew they can just plug in and work. Well, if I'm if I'm allowed to give a little bit of a magic plug here, I think I am. Which which is that, you know, we're kind of unique in the industry is that we don't require well, we don't require an appliance. That's why we're in this report as HCI software, obviously. But our software is designed to be super flexible so that our customers can use any server they want as long as it's an x86 variant. Any server they want, they can mix and match between any vendor, any model, any disk drive configuration, any memory. Um, so it just adds the ultra flexibility for our customers. The real world use case for this is there is a big movement in the industry. There are a lot of enterprises out there, organizations that have single server deployments at their edge sites because they just couldn't afford high availability. Now what they can do is they can procure a second server that doesn't have to be identical. They can load a hypervisor of their choice and store magic sand, and we don't care as long as the two servers can run the same version of the hypervisor. That's our lowest common denominator. We'll do all the storage, virtualization and high availability so that that's the way our software works. We are, you know, like I said, we work on any server. Our strongest partnership is with HP. We have a global agreement with them and they make it even easier for customers. So now any channel partner of HP's around the world sells a complete solution. It's not an appliance per se, but the channel partner integrator or take two HP servers, our software and a hypervisor and away they go. They have a bundled solution that they can deliver to their end user customers. Dave Littman: Nice. And I know Ken, I know you have a real world story I want to get to in a second. But Todd Todd, let's talk a little bit about, I guess, you know, additional flexibility and the ability to use, you know, heterogeneous hardware. Todd, talk a little bit about just some of the benefits of software solutions for the edge overall. Speaker5: Well, software by its nature is virtualization. So all the benefits of deploying virtualization software at the edge software as well, benefits from. So there's cost savings. Um, you know, companies can extend the use of existing hardware, don't have to purchase new hardware or though they can, they can deploy it on commodity hardware. There's the ability to deploy software and data center, provide data center services on in small form factors, of course, the benefits of resource pooling and utilization. There's administrative savings. Um, you know, the, the solutions are designed to be centralized, managed with by generalists and instead of people with individuals with specific training. So that helps with labor. Um, there's automation features often included with these solutions, which saves time. Um, a lot of software solutions include data security features that we were talking about earlier that helps protect, um, data from bad actors and helps organizations recover from unforeseen events that should occur. And of course there's also benefits of scalability. Companies can start really small and grow as they need to or contract if their seasonal needs. And then just the benefits of flexibility. Software can be adapted to a lot of different situations, whether that's general purpose or capacity focused or even high performance use cases. Dave Littman: Okay, great. Todd. Thank you, Ken. We were talking the other day. We had a story about a past life. It was an alien story. Tell us, because it was it really it really hit home. I think it was a. Ken Clipperton: Director at a private university. And we had standardized on HP Proliant. But as we looked at adding different elements to our environment, you know, wireless infrastructure management solutions and stuff, they were appliance based, not HP Proliant. And so they were bringing in this other server manufacturer and it just didn't fit into our network management and management and monitoring the way a proliant would have. And it just it was aggravating. We even had a competing server vendor. Give us one of their servers to try to break into our environment. And but my server manager was very hesitant about putting anything production on that server because he said, I just don't have the same monitoring tool. It just doesn't fit with the way we manage our infrastructure. And so having the flexibility which like software provides, being able to deploy to these many different uses using the same software management overhead, but also putting the hardware I wanted to put under it very advantageous. And the idea of reuse, you know, we'd have stuff in our main data center that after several years, okay, we could use more powerful servers driving our core applications. But why those servers that were three years old still could be very useful. We had 11 locations, would be very useful out at those other locations. I didn't have HCI software at the time, but we still would redeploy those as Windows servers out there. But I did have to send my staff on a round robin, you know, put installing those patches and all that stuff all over the state. Dave Littman: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. And Bruce, you must have stories that your clients tell you about, you know, real world stories, some of the success stories. I mean, if you want to relay any. If not, we can wait. Todd Dorsey: Yeah, yeah. Bruce Kornfeld: No, I've thought. Yeah. So, um, you know, we sell our solution around the world. We've, you know, we've got thousands of customers and all sorts of vertical markets. I'd say a couple that come to mind that are, you know, maybe most interesting is there's a, there's a retailer, um, quick serve retailer up in the Northeast called Sheetz. Folks that live up there know the brand But yeah, they, they went through a virtualization project where they, they were in a world where they had different applications running on different pieces of hardware, whether maybe it was a desktop here, a small server there. So they had a massive company wide initiative to virtualize the stores and we were part of it. So they and you know, they went with store magic because we were the only ones that could deliver a simple to install, simple to use and manage for the comments we were just making about management. They, they manage everything remotely obviously, but it's only two servers and that was the big thing for them is that everyone else was needing to put three servers in there. We only need two. Now's not the time to explain all the technical details of how, but it's basically a remote witness that runs anywhere and we can we have very, very high availability. We have customers that have been running for years and years and years. I was looking last night there, one of our customers telling us it's been up for eight years. Um, it just runs. It just runs in the background. So she's used our two server solution for the simplicity of it, but it gave them the high availability they needed to now virtualize all of their in-store apps, run them on two servers and they're as happy as they can be. They keep adding stores every year to our environment. So there, you know, there's one good case study in the retail space. Great. Dave Littman: Okay, Good story. Good story. So, um, keep your questions coming. We're going to take some questions at the end. I know that your questions are getting answered now through store magic, but we'll take a few on the air here, too. So let me now Todd, switch over to you. Let's talk about Dcg's top five report, your top five report in HCI software. So if you could talk to us a little bit about how you evaluated HCI software and what caused the top five winners to stand out from the others that you guys evaluated? Todd Dorsey: Sure. Speaker5: Well, the first place we start is just a survey of the marketplace, and we identified almost 50 different vendors that have operations in more than one country that have a product or solution. Most of those are appliances. But we do see vendors that have a software offering and a hardware offering. And then we have some vendors that have an solution that just is software. When we take a look at software, we want to look at solutions that are commercially available and advertised, as in HCI solution, and then it's designed to be deployed on commodity commodity hardware, on or on a select choice of OEM server platforms. Some vendors have offer software, but it's down in a white paper somewhere that you can deploy it on the on the equipment of your choosing. But we want we were looking for characteristics where it's designed to virtualize and manage server components like compute memory storage and networking. If it only did a subset of that, then it integrated with a hypervisor for a full set of capabilities. Um, the features that we evaluated for software includes the deployment capabilities. Take a look at the data protection security features, how the product is managed and how it can be optimized, and then technical support. Of course, companies will want to look at licensing and pricing options, but those four are the top four that we took a. Look at for evaluating companies. Um, we this particular report that we've made available is in our rising vendors category. So taking a look at companies that have earnings notably less than $1 billion a year in annual revenue. There's a lot of fantastic companies that enterprises should take a look at. The distinguishing characteristics that we found among our top five award winners is robust technical support. Everything from their hours of operation to online resources to self-help, to alerting mechanisms. Um, all of these vendors offered high availability or offered configurations like synchronous mirroring. They often had all of them have value added services like installation services and training services. Then as well, their reporting and management addressing that challenge that we talked about earlier, when you're managing hundreds and thousands of sites, making that simple. Dave Littman: So, okay, well, let's let's do this if we can. Let's put up, um, let's make the report available to download, if we can put that up guys. And if, you know, if, if the audience you guys want to click on that that image, you guys can download the top five report. And let's now talk a little bit about Stormagic specifically because you guys identified them as a top five HCI software award winner. So what was, I guess, some specific features or capabilities that helped Stormagic earn that distinction? Speaker5: Sure. Well, there were several of them, and attendees can of course read the report themselves and read some of the features that we highlighted, but we noted stormagic for their minimal hardware requirements, simple high availability, their simple management oversight, and their extensive partner network. And I would ask invite Bruce to comment on each of those and tell us a little bit more, as well as just some of the other reasons that companies suggest select Stormagic. Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah, that's that's awesome. Appreciate it. Mean I'll try not to, uh, I'll try not to take too much time here but yeah. So the, the example I already gave with Sheetz, you know, one thing I didn't mention is that I mean the big reason we won there is the minimal hardware requirements. Think about it's an edge location. It's a retail store. They don't have the space. But frankly it was budget is it? You know, they have hundreds of stores. I'm not going to get the number exactly right, but it's more than 600. They you know, they have hundreds of stores. And adding that extra server to every store adds up. It's a lot of money that they saved by having a single little witness that they manage in a data center somewhere that manages the cluster and the quorum and all that. We prevent split brain and all that kind of jazz. But it came down to CapEx. They saved a lot of money because of less hardware needs at each store. So there's one example there. Um, in the world of simple management, here's a much smaller environment. This is in health care. There is an end user called Saint Josephshaus. I believe it is. It's in Germany and it's a single location health care provider with one one location. So this could be health care. This could be a law firm. This could be a single retail outlet. It doesn't matter, but a single location that they were struggling with downtime on their previous solution, which was an external SAN and a couple servers there, they were struggling with downtime for a long time and they had frustrated doctors and patients and they were not delivering proper health care in their world. They replaced their older systems with two new servers and store magic built in and they able to get that high availability. But simplicity that their team didn't have to think too much about it. It just installed and run on the simplicity comment. I'll just make a side story here, which is I hear from our renewals team that when we're asking customers after three years, we typically have to contact them. If they bought a three year support contract, Hey, it's time to renew your contract. And they're like, Who's store store magic who? And it turns out they they forgot that we were installed because it just sits in the background. It's not something that the administrators have to touch every day. You set it up? Yeah. If you need to add storage, you have to go in there and monkeying around. Like we said, you have to do updates once in a while, but in general it's something that just does its job in the background. Most of our customers just say, set it, forget it. It just does its thing. Um, another example is the Amsterdam Airport. Schiphol I think it's pronounced Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Dave Littman: Dipole. Dipole, Yeah, something like that. Bruce Kornfeld: Thank you. Thank you. There you go. Yeah. So they, they use us for, for simple high availability in that they run all of their infrastructure. So we're not in the air traffic control tower. That's that's not the airport's responsibility. But they do control the baggage claim. The power generation. Um, AC heating all the, all the infrastructure is run off. Some servers and they needed again high availability. They don't want upset customers that can't get their bags or there's no heating and air conditioning etcetera. So they look to us for the high availability aspect of what we deliver. And guess one other one, you know, interesting use case that a lot of people would would more resonate around edge you know more Iot like thing which is a wind farms there's a company called RW renewables and they use us in all of their wind farms around the world where it's literally making sure that the windmills think that's what they're called are are generating the proper amount of electricity, spinning at the right rates. We're tracking all of that and they can't get parts out there. They can't fix things. If they break, they they don't have the ability to do that. It takes days to get technicians out there. So high availability was even more important for them because if something goes down, it could it could be a week before they have it back up and running. So they needed that 100% uptime high availability and the remote manageability that we deliver. So there are some good there are some good case studies that explain exactly what you were talking about. Dave Littman: Great. Great. Okay, Bruce, thanks. So why don't we do this? Let's take some questions. So, Bruce, I'm going to stick with you. Question that we've got here a couple times is how is the software licensed? Is it by server? Is it by seat? How does that work? Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. So our our typical solution is two nodes. That's all you need. You don't need that third node. We do it with the remote witness. So it's a two node solution and our software is simply licensed by the usable terabyte. So we don't get into the cores or processors or anything else. So it's a it's a flat perpetual license fee. We do offer subscription version as well, but it's just by the terabyte. We start at two terabytes as our entry level point, it goes to six, 12 and then unlimited. So that's that's a very simple licensing scheme. And of course me or anyone from our our sales team would be happy to talk to anyone about pricing. Todd Dorsey: Okay, cool, cool. Dave Littman: And when it. Bruce Kornfeld: Comes sorry, don't don't want to avoid the number though. Right. Because it's it's it's different depending where you are. But I would say that a two server solution including the servers and our software for two terabytes entry level, fairly well configured servers, three year support contracts for the whole thing can be bought, the whole solution can be purchased for under $10,000 US. So we're looking at very low aggressive price points to get an edge site up and running for high availability and high performance. Dave Littman: Okay. Okay. Strong. Okay, that's great. So cost effective, simple licensing. Another question is how difficult is it to deploy? Is this something where really they should rely on a systems, a systems integrator, or is it something that that a shop, small shop could deploy themselves? How do you see that playing out mostly yeah. Bruce Kornfeld: Mean you know I'll just I'll just say your mileage may vary because because every every every organization is different but I'll say this that if an end user is, is able to install and run a hypervisor, they're going to have no problem getting up and running. It's been designed to be super easy. It's all wizard based on the install, we make it really, really easy. I would say our our larger end users probably do it themselves. Our smaller ones have a Var or an integrator help them do it because they don't touch anything anyway. But in general, for an IT person that's familiar with server virtualization, they would have they would have no trouble getting up. And I've been told that we've won a lot of business out there. They've evaluated our competition and won't do competitive slamming. So I won't mention names, but they've evaluated our competition and compared to them, we were just the obvious choice because it was so simple to get up and going it just super easy. You don't have to worry about erasure coding and raid network raid and how many servers and where the data goes. It's just simple synchronous mirroring between two servers. It sets up and installs and it runs. Dave Littman: Okay, cool. One more question. So, Bruce, this question is, you know, is this appropriate for, you know, potentially a small company or not many locations? And then how sort of how big can it scale? Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. So the way that I like to talk about this is that the needs that we see, the pain points that we see at the edge resonate no matter how big the organization is. And I'll explain what I mean, because the lowest common denominator is that, A, that an organization needs to run some applications locally. They're not running it in the cloud. They can't depend on the cloud for whatever reason. Cost, reliability, latency. There's all sorts of reasons why they've made a decision. I've got to run some applications locally and don't. I can't spend a lot of money and it's got to be available and remotely manageable. So those are the basic things, right? So what we see with that is like I mentioned, Sheetz and you know, as a retailer, we have other retailers that have thousands of sites. Sheetz has hundreds of sites. So there's a big example for us. But but each site is its own little entity. We also have many customers that have a single site. It's a law firm, like I mentioned before, It's a law firm. It's a it's a it's a flower shop with one location. It's a local bank that has four locations. So we can really run the gamut from the SMB that has 1 or 2 sites all the way to the enterprise. But it would be the edge of the enterprise, not in the data center, not in the cloud. It's all about small locations that need to run. Just a little bit of applications at that site. Dave Littman: Okay, perfect. Okay. Let's get some final thoughts. Ken, let me go to you and then Todd can. Last words. Ken Clipperton: It was mentioned, but don't think mentioned enough flexibility. The flexibility of the store magic solution around again all kinds of hardware like even I know with HP they've got a strong relationship from the Proliant. They also run their edgeline servers and even if you seen the HP micro servers there. They're set up to run on even those little micro servers and again on many different vendors. The ability to actually not just not have to have identical hardware, but not which some solutions do require in their clusters to not just do that, but actually different vendors and different generations and some with hard drives and some with flash memory in them, you know, SSDs, that kind of flexibility. From an IT director's perspective gives me the opportunity to leverage the hardware I already own and add to it in an intelligent way that I think gives me a lot of opportunities to optimize cost. So that flexibility really stands out to me. I was going to say otherwise, a simple high availability, but that just got kept really strong. Todd Dorsey: Okay. Dave Littman: All right, Todd, let's hand it over to you. Speaker5: I laugh because Ken was going to use the word that I also agree with flexibility. I'd also add adaptability. You know, we need solutions that are adaptable, flexible, help us do more with less. And software meets that criteria and helps them not only in the present but also in the future and adapt to whatever the future may look like in the next year or two years. Three years. Dave Littman: Okay, cool. Bruce. Bruce Kornfeld: Yeah. So I would just say, you know, listen, we we have thousands of customers around the world. Um, they love us because of three things. We've talked about it. But just to summarize the simplicity of the solution it installs easily. You don't need a lot of skill to do it, a lot of training. You just you just do it. The Wizards help you do it, and it's easy to manage the flexibility bit. There's no one there's no one in the software space that can match what we do. We just say any server, any model, any brand, any year, any storage, any memory doesn't matter. Just put it together. As long as the hypervisor is the same, we're good to go. So the super flexibility is a key tenant of ours and reliability. You know, the uptime we would have. You know, our customers typically don't buy a single server. That's that's not our space. If you if you want a single server, just go do it, you know, load Windows server on there and have fun. If you need enterprise class, high availability, that's our space two servers instead of three. And it's all for a super low price point. Like I said, a whole solution, including hardware, software and services under ten grand to start. It's a it's a it's a really great solution for customers at the edge that are looking for high availability and low cost. Dave Littman: Okay, Fabulous. Great job, guys. Hey, look, if the edge is pushing you to the edge, this is how you simplify the edge. Check out door magic. Make sure you go to store magic.com. We would not have had today's event without their generosity. Many thanks to Thor, Magic to Bruce Kornfeld, Ken Clipperton and Todd Dorsey with big. Thank you all coming for coming today. We could not have had today's event without you. I'm Dave Littman at Truth in IT. Good luck with that, everyone. And we want to wish you all a great day ahead.
