Transcript
Hi Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. We are here today talking with a company that I've worked with for a long time. Not to say that they're old and aging in any means, but going back into the roots of software defined storage and hyper converged infrastructure, I'm talking about StorMagic. We're going to get into some of the new things they're doing. Believe it or not, they're not only doing well, they're growing. And, uh, got some new things we want to tell you about, so hang on. Yo. Hey, Bruce, welcome to our show. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Always good to chat with you. Uh, you know, we've run into each other a couple times over our whole careers. Uh, people can go research that on LinkedIn if they want to. Uh, but, uh, it's good to see you again. Um, and, uh, StorMagic is a company, you know, there's some, some, some old storage guys, like. Oh, yeah, we've been around. We know the things, but you guys are refreshing and growing and stuff. So tell us a little bit, just briefly to our audience, what StorMagic focuses on and what how people should think about StorMagic at that high 50,000 foot view right now? Yeah, instead of old. We like to call ourselves wise Mike wise. But any rate, it's all good. So yeah, StorMagic's been around quite a while. It's almost 20 years now, and we started out in the virtual storage space, so we built highly available virtual San that worked and works beautifully with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. So people are running these big clusters or small clusters. They just need really high performance, simple, reliable virtual storage. And that's what we did for very long time. The last couple of years where we went we went with the market, which is Broadcom did their thing with VMware and opened up the door for new hypervisor companies. So we jumped on that bandwagon. We've been shipping a full stack HCI product still based on our virtual San at the core, but now we have our own hypervisor and virtual storage in one big package. That's been fun. That's our biggest, funnest thing that we've been doing for the last year and a half. All right. So we're going to dive into that a little bit because people are probably going like wait, how do you how do you fit in that landscape of other solutions that are out there as alternatives to VMware? But before we get there, I just wanted to, uh, talk a little bit more about, uh, what was going on with VMware. What do you where do you where do you see them um, going. I mean with Broadcom is that is that something that they're going to make more money on is just focusing on the enterprise side. Are they really giving up on their customers. What are they what are they doing. Well I mean first thing I'd say is, uh, hats off to Hock Tan and their, their financial team because, you know, there's, you know, financially they're pretty smart. You know, they made a big bet they bought VMware thinking they're going to hold on to, you know, the top 2000 customers where all the revenue and margin is, and not worry so much about the smaller, smaller end users. So good for them. You know, their revenue has been going up, their stock price is up. But what they've done is they've created an environment where now there's a lot of still frustrated customers saying, you know what, I got burned. They're trying to raise my prices and all that kind of jazz. So it's opened up opportunities for companies like Stormagic that have a solid reputation for delivering reliable software to come in and say, there's another way, there's an easy way. There's a way to save money and not be so complicated. So yeah I mean Broadcom has done their thing and it's a beautiful industry. Mike we've been doing this a long time. It's it's just one of those inflection points in the industry that's that I think is good for everybody. Yeah. So VMware you know I worked worked worked on VMware products and solutions and focused on VMware that ecosystem for many, many years as an analyst. And they were clearly trying to become the infrastructure of everything. Right. That was that was we were going to virtualize everything, and we're going to be the place you go and you buy infrastructure. Uh, Broadcom's definitely said, hey, you know, like you said there, there's a size of company that needs this enterprise quality stuff that we can deliver because that's who we are. Uh, and then I'm going to draw a line through it. And below that are outside that, that thing they're saying, you know, let the rest of the market handle that. Uh, some people are calling that, you know, data center versus, uh, robo or edge kind of thing, or SMB on there, wherever the line is. And we don't have to determine that right now. Um, but what what do you think sort of is the sweet spot yet for somebody who's still looking at VMware wants to stay there? And where should people start to look at themselves and go, oh, hey, you know, that's no longer a place that VMware is interested in supporting when we should be looking at other solutions. Where does that. Oh yeah. All right. So I would just start with this in that VMware and Broadcom. Now they've made some really big bets on investment. And they're investing on big. They're investing in data center and cloud and helping large companies build private clouds so they can operate like AWS and all that. And it's a it's a big stack of software. If you're in that camp, it's a great solution. You have no reason to leave. I bet your costs have even gone down over the last two years because they're bundling more features now. There's, you know, there's a finite number of companies in that bucket. What happens below there if you're an SMB or if you're a small enterprise or you're running 20 edge sites or thousands of edge sites that stack DCF is way overkill for a small site. And that's the market that we go after. Like, we don't even think about the data center. We don't, you know, we don't want our product to try to run in a cloud. We connect to the cloud. But we're not about cloud or data center. We we help customers think about how do you take the best of what we've done over the years? They've done a brilliant job, but virtualizing server isn't rocket science anymore. There's KVM that's out there. It's open source. We all use it. So we've taken KVM, we've hardened it, we've brought in the right open source packages so customers don't have to build this themselves. But we've made it super simple, super secure, and we've given just enough features for what customers need for running the smaller workloads at the edge and for SMBs. Now, I understand that that there's some descriptions of these edge cases where single node is not going to be reliable at an edge for for an organization or company, whether that's a data protection or hardware redundancy or availability or even a cybersecurity issue, whatever it is that you need. Um, and I've had disks fail even here at home. I know single servers running, running with some risk. Right. Uh, but it's. So you want this, you want some multiple node approaches? Uh, and it's very common to just have a two node situation. Tell us about why you StorMagic are considered a leader in this two node solution space. Yeah, I mean, our customer base, they're coming from a place of either, like you just said, they're running a single node and they've had issues and they're trying to figure out how do I build some redundancy. And I'm actually shocked that there are customers out there, very large ones that we all use every day. I won't name names, but they're still running on a single server in every site and it does cause problems. Some of them have the attitude like, all right, well, if this if this site goes down, there's another one five miles away. So customers will go there for a few hours until we're getting it back up and running. But that doesn't always work that way. So going from a single node to something more adds that redundancy. So if a server fails, you can keep up and running. What we do is we say you don't need three, which is typically what VMware and others do say, yeah, put three in there. Do the complicated erasure coding thing, and you're going to have a great robust solution, but that's more of a data center thing at the edge. They don't have the budgets for that. So two node is king at the edge. And that's what we do really well. So we do a nice synchronous mirror of data. 100% of data moves from server A to B and back and forth. If a server fails, the VM's know how to move over and restart, and all that happens in under 30s like it's a it's a quite robust solution, but you only really need two with I'm sorry. There's another technical thing, this remote witness. So a proper cluster needs a quorum. And the way we do it is we don't put the third node on site. We put the third node in the cloud or in a private cloud, or you can put it on a Raspberry Pi. But the thing we do with that remote witness is it can manage up to 1000 locations, 1000 clusters. So you don't need a thousand witnesses, you just need one typically. Right. All right. So that's you know, I think that's a key thing for people to grasp if they're if they're looking at this is, you know, one node is not going to be sufficient for any sort of resiliency at all and probably have a direct experience with that if they're running one node sites. But if you get to three or 4 or 5 or bigger node clusters at an edge site, you're you're pulling your hair out because that's overkill. And you don't you just you're going to spend a lot of money to even if you do manage to make it work. So there's this sweet spot of, well, you want two nodes. And that's again, Star Magic falls in that camp of square in the middle of that by design. Um, but what happens? What happens? Bruce, if you turn around, then, like you said, someone could have a thousand of these small sites. How do you manage? How do you turn around and manage a thousand small clusters? Right. This. This seems like you sort of. You you must have customers that are doing this. Yeah. Yeah. That's an area that we've gotten into in the last two years, which is we we do have a lot of customers with multiple sites, and we have customers with thousands of sites. So managing each individual site by logging into those systems remotely still is very, very clunky. And it's just not even possible to to scale that way. So we have a product. It's called edge control. It's our fleet manager from any web browser. It's a SaaS model. So you log into your SaaS instance and um, technically what we do behind the scenes is a customer would install a small piece of software that's an orchestrator. It can run on any piece of hardware in their network as long as it's on their network. And then that orchestrator communicates with the cloud. So you can see all of your sites, you can see health, you can see reporting, you can see statistics, you can do some management, you can do patching and upgrading. You can manage your virtual machines. So there's a lot of capability built in there. But without edge control, without that fleet management it would it would be a nightmare. But we do have those tools now. Like I said, our first version came out about two years ago. Okay. So there's a way to very easily control a lot of these two node clusters, because that would be what someone does if they've got a lot of sites 100%. Uh, and then how how hard or easy is it to deploy a new cluster? I mean, if I've got 1000 of these and I've got, you know, maybe I want to transition from from what I've got or I've got to, uh. So I'm gonna need some migration in there. Or maybe I just want some greenfield stuff. Is this something I need to buy the appliances for? Uh, or is this something people can install themselves? How does that work? Yeah. So the nice thing about the way that we go to market is we are software only. We do not require an appliance. So where this comes in is if an end user has multiple sites, hundreds or thousands, whatever it may be, um, leave your hardware in place. We don't care. Um, we'll help you transition from running VMware to running our product, SVC. And we actually have built a migration tools to help you move the virtual machines and the and the associated storage. Move it from your operating environment using the same hardware. Yeah, you're going to have to take a server down and fail over. There's some steps involved. Um, but it's really not that hard to do. And we've, we've, we've simplified that whole process of getting up and running, um, you know, and the thing that we see a lot of is that that two node really fits the bill because of cost. I mean, nobody wants to spend the extra 5000, $10,000, whatever it may be on a server if you don't have to. So the two node advantage really helps customers really save their CapEx budget for sure. On their, uh, I guess it's sort of a sort of one of the final sort of thoughts that I'm having on this is, um, if you have two nodes and you have a witness, you've got some decent data protection and availability going on there, but maybe you could say a little bit about, you know, how StorMagic helps someone, uh, address that part of their requirements, uh, and make sure that they. Yeah, they've got resiliency and availability. Yeah uptime reliability availability is king and that and that. And that's where we come in. If if you don't need it you're going to run a single server and you're not going to care. Right. But where we come in is we help customers architect that we have all sorts of ways of doing it. So one of them is a simple, highly available cluster is what we do. The two servers are on prem. If one fails, the witness knows how to talk to the other one and make sure everyone stays up and running. We avoid split brain, all that kind of jazz. Um, but another way that customers have done this is they they put distance between the two servers. They don't have to be in the same building. They can be on the same campus. They can be in the same city. And of course, our engineers will work with customers on distance. And as long as, um, latency is below a certain amount, it's going to be okay. But we can certainly handle a campus situation or a city situation where the two servers can be separated by distance, and that helps a little bit more with disasters. In case you have a massive power outage at one site, you can keep up and running because the other one's still going. Um, and then the last bit would be, um, some customers do not do backup at every edge site. We have large customers that have thousands of sites that have chosen to not add the expense of backup software or the, um, the IT administration burden of backing up every single site. So they have architectures that take the really important data and upload it nightly to a cloud or to a data center. But they don't. They don't worry about actual doing backups at the edge because it's easier to recover. But there's plenty of end users that say, no, I'm, I'm, I'm backing up at the edge. And, you know, we are a new hypervisor on the market. So we don't yet have those integrations with Microsoft, Hyper-V and VMware that Veeam and others have done over these years. So what we do in that case is we say use whatever backup software you've got. It's not a problem. Um, use agents, so install agents on the VMs. Ems. It's really not that hard to do. I actually just did a podcast with, uh, Mike. Uh, Michael Cade from Veeam. We were talking about this, which is agent based backup has been around forever. It works great. There are actually some advantages of doing it that way. And that way you can use any hypervisor. You don't you don't have to stay with VMware just because they have an integration with Commvault or Veeam. Just use your your agent based backups and those will be fine. We're just sort of that normal VM level anyway, which is uh, the level at which your storage can also make snapshots and things. Right. So, uh, good. Um, you mentioned you mentioned a podcast. What's that? Yeah. So that's what I would that's what I guess I would close with is, uh, StorMagic keeps growing. We're doing we're doing some fun things in the market. We're in the middle. We just launched a revamped, uh, website. So I encourage everyone to check out StorMagic. Com so you can check out our slightly revised, more customer centric messaging on our new branding. But we also a few months ago we launched a podcast called Pod Magic, and I am the lucky host of that series. And yeah, if you want to check us out, obviously StorMagic. Com but you can also go to your favorite podcast platform, whether that's Spotify or Apple, wherever you get it. And look for Pod Magic and you'll see lots of great content. I've had George Crump and bunch of other, uh, Kimberly Bates has been on another analyst in the community, so lots of interesting people from around the tech community coming on Pod Magic. So I encourage you to check it out. Yeah, yeah. And if someone wants to you mentioned the StorMagic website. It's got some pretty, pretty fresh, refreshing branding. Uh, but is there something if someone was listening to this today and said, no, you know, I have that that situation we want to get out from VMware. We've got a lot of situations that should be two node clusters. It sounds like. What would you point them at to start with on your website? Yeah, I would say poke. Around uh, StorMagic.com/svhci. That's our competitive product to VMware. And also, um, you know, what we find is, you know, websites are awesome and it's great. I used to run marketing I get it. But at the end of the day, it's just you just go try it out. You'll see the free trial button all over the website. Just download it. It's fully featured, run it on a server, play with it and see if you like it. Yeah, free trial and it's software as you said. So you can put it on anything and uh. Go away you. Go run with it. So. Well thank you for being here today, Bruce. I appreciate it very much. Uh, taking the time to catch us up to date on StorMagic. It's been a it's been a while. Uh, and, uh, come back around sooner when you got, uh, got some other things you want to share. And we will. We got a lot coming, so. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate you having me. Take care, folks. And check out StorMagic. Com with their new updated branding and free trial. Take care.
