Transcript
Hello and welcome everyone. Today we'll be discussing about resilience against ransomware. We'll talk about the major data management challenges businesses are dealing with today and how Commvault's hyperscale family of solutions prepare you to rise up to those challenges. My name is Ketan Bansal, Senior Director of Product Management at Commvault. Joining me today are my colleague Justin Wolf, Senior Product Manager, and our customer Lee Lindstrom, Principal Infrastructure Architect at Fortune Brands. A quick overview of the agenda today. I'll be starting by covering key industry challenges and what enterprises expect out of cyber-resilient solutions. Then I'll walk you through the enhancements and innovations we have made across our hyperscale portfolio. And I'll invite Lee to share his first-hand experience with hyperscale in action. Next, Justin will introduce hyperscale edge docking for SaaS and showcase it through a demonstration. Finally, we'll wrap up with a Q&A. Let's get started. 88% of organizations experienced attempted ransomware attacks within the last 12 months. That's almost 9 out of 10. And when you are hit, every minute of your downtime is costly. Ransomware spreads quickly, stalling operations and locking you out. And in that moment, the only thing that matters is how well you're prepared. Building your backup infrastructure with a hardened operating system and immutable storage and zero-trust architecture is a critical defensive mechanism. Remote offices and branch locations are producing more data than ever and attackers know these sites are often softer targets. With so much enterprise data being created outside of these traditional data centers, protection has to move closer to where the data lives. And finally, workloads are already massive and AI is driving that explosion growth. It's not just about storing data. It's about securing it and making it available at unprecedented speeds. Managing risks across enterprises is a key concern, but equally important is the need to process data closer to the source. Real-time applications cannot wait. The closer data is processed to where it's created, the faster the results. Reducing latency means better performance, better overall user experience. Many organizations need to keep data within their own perimeter for security and control while staying agile and efficient. More than 100 countries have enforced data residency laws on how it is managed and protected. Let's be very clear. Traditional backup solutions weren't built for today's threats or tomorrow's workloads. You need a modern, cyber-resilient solution. We have offered our Hyperscale X solution, the appliance, for many years now. It's our immutable, hardened, and resilient storage solution that is trusted by thousands of customers worldwide. But the realities around distributed data, massive growth, and data close to the source are redefining how resilience must be delivered. And that's why we have expanded our Hyperscale portfolio into two purpose-built approaches, one designed for the edge and the other built for scale. At the heart of our portfolio is Hyperscale X. It's a hyper-converged scale-out platform that starts with three nodes and scales to 12 nodes, protecting petabytes of data in a single pool. It remains the foundation, and as our customers need diversified, we expanded our Hyperscale family. On my left here, on one side, we have Hyperscale Edge, which is built for retail stores, distribution centers, branch offices, and smaller organizations. These are locations with limited IT resources, yet growing data volumes. These sites are prime targets for attacks, and Edge provides the same trusted resilience in a simple, cost-optimized, single-load form, quick to deploy, and easy to manage. It ensures that the Edge data is protected as strongly as And on my right, on the other side of the spectrum, we have Hyperscale Flex. It is designed for massive, data-intensive workload. Flex offers the agility to scale, compute, and storage independently. It supports multi-petabyte capacity and delivers high-speed recovery, all while keeping the operations simple and resilient. Together, Edge, X, and Flex solutions, they create a full spectrum of protection that can satisfy the needs of any organization. No gaps, no compromises, just complete resilience everywhere your data lives. And that's made possible because security is central to the architecture of the Hyperscale family. Whether it is X, Flex, or Edge, each solution is engineered with resilience and trust in mind. Let's take a Every Hyperscale appliance we build is built on WordOS, our optimized Linux platform. It is secured and hardened by design. It provides regular security updates and has built-in firewall protection. You also need mechanisms to make data immutable and indelible for two reasons. One, the majority of ransomware has means to tamper with backups. Number two, insider threats are real. On all the Hyperscale solutions, data remains safe from tampering or deletion at different levels of the stack, even during an attack. All Hyperscale models, they follow a zero trust design, which means that no user, no device, and no process is trusted by default. Access is continuously verified to block unauthorized activity and preserve data integrity. These are the principles that make Hyperscale X, Flex, and Edge resilient by design, ready for any environment, and trusted even in the most regulated industries. To talk about how that translates into day-to-day operations, I'm thrilled to be joined here today by Lee Lindstrom, one of our Hyperscale customers. Lee is the principal architect at Fortune Brands and he's tasked with building cost-effective data management and cyber resilience solutions across the data centers in his organization. Lee has been part of our journey with Hyperscale Edge and he's here to share some first-hand experiences, learnings, and insights. Lee, welcome. It's great to have you with us. Lee, can you give us a quick background of your organization and share what specific challenges you saw in your environment that led you to explore Hyperscale, and in particular, Hyperscale Edge? Yes, at Fortune Brands Innovation, we are a leading home security and digital products company with three main divisions, water innovations, outdoor products, and security. We have several different brands, including Moen, Master Lock, Yale, Thermotru, Larson, Fiberon, and more. Basically, with a collection of business units, we were running multiple data protection software solutions. And even within a business unit itself, there could have been multiple solutions and overlap in our data protection. So, we chose Commvault as a solution to protect our overall business. One of the main hurdles that we saw initially is we did have a large disparity between our business units and their size and architecture. Moen, which was our largest enterprise, we chose Hyperscale X in our initial deployment. Hyperscale X was a great scalable solution that allowed us to grow by adding nodes to our data protection, and it was very high-performance. We also had remote sites where the remote appliance fit well with its 15-terabyte size. These sites had, you know, a small office or a small distribution center. That protection worked well. But there was a big gap in between the Hyperscale X and the remote appliances. That's where we were looking for the Edge product to help fill that gap. Awesome. That's wonderful. So, essentially, you saw a gap between your bigger core data and your remote cases, and the remote cases were not really fulfilling your requirements. You want to tap into how Edge helped fill those gaps, and what were the advantages on top of the remote appliances that you saw with respect to the broader data protection setup that you had along with HSX? So, the biggest item was sizing. To size a solution that was cost-effective for our business in that in-between range where deploying a Hyperscale, a three-node Hyperscale X system was not cost-effective for those in-between sizes. We were deploying Commvault on virtual media agents attached to NAS storage to protect it, which worked well, but it was not a hardened system, and it depended on VMware and other outside forces to do its data protection. With the Hyperscale Edge appliance, the reference architecture, we were able to size its disk storage appropriately for the workload it was protecting. Got it, got it. So, sizing was definitely one of the biggest requirements that was there and the gap that it helped close, and the other one was dependencies on other softwares like VMware. What kind of benefits you would say you would have observed in terms of cost savings, operational efficiencies, scalability, and performance overall the Hyperscale portfolio, including both X as well as Edge? It is a pre-built system, you know, even with the Edge. It's a deployed ISO image, run the setup wizard, and basically join the CommCell environment and start protecting data. It's quick, it's easy, it's reliable, and the security on top of it, puts the whole solution together. Not being able to access it via SSH unless you go into Commvault and allow and enable connectivity into it is a great security feature that we use to harden that data protection platform. Absolutely, I think that is awesome. I am so glad to hear that from you firsthand about the benefits that you are seeing across our portfolio and the security feature that we built in. My final question to you, Lee, is how has your experience been as our early adopter member? You have really helped us shape and build and give direction to Hyperscale Edge. Which features have stood out the most for you within our portfolio? Maybe, you know, you can expand beyond Hyperscale as well. Yeah, so the overall Commvault environment, we've been extremely happy with its flexibility. You know, one of the big selling points when we first purchased Commvault was the ability to write anywhere, to write your storage to, like we were, you know, a virtual media agent or a NAS device. A lot of your competitors do not allow that and have to write to their own appliance. Then with the adoption of Edge and all the Hyperscale products, it just makes that process easier. You don't have to do it, but it makes it easier to implement a data protection solution that is robust, secure, and flexible for your needs. Got it, got it. Thank you, Lee, for joining us today and sharing your valuable insights. We really appreciate your time and your perspective. With that, let's move on to the next part of our session. I'm thrilled to hand it over to Justin, who will walk us through some of the new and exciting features we have built into the Hyperscale platform. Justin, all yours. Thanks, Ketan. My name is Justin Wolf, Senior Product Manager here at Commvault. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about what's coming in the future for Hyperscale and specifically Hyperscale Edge today. Organizations deploying Hyperscale often encounter challenges that slow down time to value. The current setup process can be resource intensive, requiring physical access and time-consuming configuration steps. Not only does this extend deployment timelines, but it also increases operational costs when scaling to multiple sites. This results in avoidable delays in realizing value and greater complexity in managing your environments. With SAS for docking for Hyperscale, you can deploy faster by managing the setup through Command Center. Step-by-step guided configuration process enables consistency and cuts down on guesswork while reducing on-device tasks to only what's essential. Fanline workflows then enable configuration and deployment to run in parallel, cutting overall deployment time and delivering smoother, more predictable experience for your teams. Let's take a look at this in action. Hybrid data protection should be simple, fast, and built for the modern enterprise. SAS docking for Hyperscale combines cloud speed with enterprise reliability to streamline deployment and management across your hybrid world. At the center is Global Command Center, your single pane of glass for hybrid and cloud native data protection. From one SAS console, you can configure, monitor, and manage every site, device, and workload on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. Creating a new Hyperscale Edge configuration begins in Command Center. Guided setup walks you through each step, making configuration quick, reliable, and secure. Start by defining your system details, providing essential system configurations, including system name, serial number, and time zone information. Next, configure network information to establish connectivity to Commvault Cloud. This provides the options to deploy both a standard configuration for simpler deployments and advanced configurations when deploying in complex networking environments. Finally, configure your local system credentials for maintaining and managing your Hyperscale Edge systems locally on a device. Each step follows built-in best practices, ensuring consistent policy-driven configuration every time. Whether you're preparing a single system or several, setup is completed in just a few clicks. For larger environments, configuration can be automated at scale using the Commvault API. IT teams can add multiple edge systems across sites, automatically applying predefined configurations, including storage, network, and security settings. This eliminates manual setup and accelerates deployment across global locations. Once the device configuration is complete, power on each Hyperscale Edge system and connect it to your network. The device automatically links to Commvault SaaS, establishing a secure connection, and enter the provided authorization code in Command Center to complete activation. The system will verify connectivity, registers with the platform, and begins installation automatically. As installation begins, Command Center provides centralized monitoring for every deployment. Real-time dashboards show installation progress, system health, and status across all locations. IT teams can track each system from a single console, ensuring average deployment stays on schedule and on target. Once systems are live, Command Center provides full lifecycle management. Monitor performance, supply updates, and optimize capacity all through continuous connections from Commvault SaaS. With SaaS docking for Hyperscale, you can deploy faster, manage smarter, and protect everything from the edge to cloud-native. Accelerate and simplify cyber settings with Commvault Hyperscale, complete family of backup and recovery solutions that delivers simple, flexible data protection with built-in ransomware protection for all workloads, including AI containers, virtual, and databases. It also includes support for faster backup and recovery with on-site data storage, which can help meet compliance requirements, optimized capacity and cost to meet the needs of your organization of all sizes. And with three Hyperscale solutions to choose from, you can select the configuration, capacity, and architecture best made to your cost and capacity targets. Thank you for joining us in this introduction and overview of the Hyperscale portfolio and the new features coming in the near future. For more information on Hyperscale or how to become more cyber resilient, be our solution brief, or join us for our cyber resilience workshop, or take the cyber readiness assessment to see how your organization stacks up.
