Video: Picking The Right Azure Strategy for File-Based Workloads | Duration: 5324s | Summary: Picking The Right Azure Strategy for File-Based Workloads

Transcript for "Picking The Right Azure Strategy for File-Based Workloads": Thank you everybody for joining us today. I'm very happy to have some incredible customers and an incredible partner join us today. So I'd like to introduce Mohammed from Microsoft, Michael and Andy to the stage. Come on up. Mohammed, maybe quick minute on what you do for a living? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you, Nasuni for having me here. It's a real pleasure and honor to be, in front of you guys today. So Mohammed Jain, I'm a what we call it, I'm a director of Microsoft, you know, digital sales organization. So I'm responsible for a team of cloud solution architects, helping customers across the world, deploying and implementing solutions that are based on the Microsoft platform, specifically Azure. Right? I've been at Microsoft for 9 years. I've been working with NetSuite for the last 2 of them. So, you know, great. So customer success stories around, you know, team customer utilizing the the next unit, technologies. So I'm super happy to be here today and share the series, these amazing customers. Excellent. Thank you for being a great partner, and thank you for being here today. Michael, how about a quick introduction? No. Thank you. Thank you, Usumi for having me here. I'm the director IT at Geovera. We've been a Musumi customer for almost 4 years and, about 450 terabyte of data there. We've been really happy with the solution. Kinda happy to talk about it already over the next few months. Great. Thank you, Andy. My name is Andy Kimura. I'm the director of IT, for infrastructure for a company called Kleinfeld. We're an AEC firm, an architecture engineering construction firm. We have about a 100 offices over North America and Australia. I've been with the SUNY for about 2 years now and, happy to be here talking about SUNY. Great. We'll have a seat. We'll get started. The point purpose of today is to help you determine the best file storage approach and the best cloud approach. As you all know, unstructured data or file data is exploding. Gartner Group and other analysts will say it's going to grow 3, 4, 5 x over the next 3 to 5 years. And it is the largest data source in the enterprise. It counts for about 80% of all data in the enterprise, whereas blocked data and structured data is typically about 20 to 30%. So you can imagine that it probably can get difficult to try and understand the best way to manage all this explosion of data. So that's what we're here to talk about. We're here to help guide you on the journey of the move from legacy on prem network attached storage and file servers and backup to a cloud model. And so I thought with that, I'd start with, our customers and just think a little bit about what was life before Nasuni on Azure? What was your file infrastructure like? I'll start with you, Michael, if that's Yeah. Go ahead, Michael. Yeah. Originally, we were probably like a lot of traditional organizations where you'd have a lot of file servers, scattered across physical locations. You'd have, NAS devices scattered across, different locations. And it was okay to manage, but you'd still have to have a large team to manage it. You still have to have your traditional backup 3, 2, 1 type of rule for your backups, and you would always continuously grow. So, in in space. So, the storage requirements always seem to be something that was growing at unknown rates sometimes. And if it's through an acquisition or a large project, you start just to accumulate data, and, it became a little tricky to to manage. So at the time, I I didn't even know anything about global file systems. And I was saying earlier, I actually came across it through an AAC Magazine. And that's how I started my journey with Nasuni. But before, it was it was tricky. It's tricky to manage. Yep. Thank you for that. Andy, anything to add? Yeah. I mean, you know, I've been with Cloud Foundry for about 5 years. When I first started 5 years ago, we were traditional server like, basically servers in offices that weren't backed by the cloud. So what that means is that all of the data was on the local servers and it was kind of one of a kind. Right? Now backups were occurring to the cloud using a third party service that wasn't that wasn't Azure. But nonetheless, the data was on the server. So if the server failed, your data all of a sudden was inaccessible. And as an IT manager and ultimately responsible if we have to completely rebuild the server? Okay. Well, we'll rebuild the server but we'll rebuild the server. But What if we have to completely rebuild the server? Okay. Well, we'll rebuild the server, but we'll restore the data. Now coming the data coming from the cloud back to the server will take days. Basically, the office is down for multiple days. And as an IT manager ultimately responsible for that data, I was really, really worried that maybe the maybe the backup isn't good. So we moved from traditional file servers to Azure files and Azure file sync. And that essentially changed the game for me, even as a custodian of that data. Right? Because now I didn't necessarily have to worry about the data not being backed up, because the data was always in the cloud. And these filers, or these servers, ultimately became just caching appliances. So we were with Azure File Sync for for several years. And then now we're with Nasuni because Nasuni now offered a new level of, of capability with with the global file locking and that sort of stuff, which I'll talk about a little bit later. But, but that that was my journey. But ultimately, as an IT manager, it allowed me to sleep better at night knowing that the data was secure. And then if my if if any one of my filers were to fail, I'd be able to recover instantly. I hope my team back, at headquarters just got that line because, yesterday, we launched our new brand. If you see, we changed our logo and our whole look and feel. And one of the buttons they were giving out was, we help IT sleep better at night. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You just you just nailed it. Oh, good. Glad to hear that. Thank you for that, Andy. And listen, very similar to what we see across our customers and prospective customers is a traditional hardware based approach on the primary storage with a secondary based approach, whether on prem or in the cloud for backup. And then that distributed, especially gets more difficult as it gets distributed across multiple locations, tens, sometimes hundreds of locations. We have customers trying to do this primary backup, synchronization across 5, 6, 700 sites. It gets really difficult, especially with the data growth. So, Mohammed, similar question, but what do you see when you see customers? What are they what are they typically coming to you with what from a file infrastructure, and what do they wanna do differently? Yeah. So, what we tend to say is, customers no. Basically, business continued disaster recovery is the main use case that we see. Customers coming to us from a, you know, file, cloud cloud file storage system, type of, you know, products. Right? So we have customers that come to us because to to to end this point, right, they have a local backup into into their systems. But, you know, what what does that business continuity and disaster recovery strategy look like? Right? So and that's where we start having this conversation with them and take them through the whole process of leveraging the cloud and utilizing all the benefits that the cloud provide to to customers. Right? So we talk about scalability, flexibility, and even now more importantly, and I think we'll talk about it later, security as well. Right? So what what, additional level of security can the cloud provide to our customers. Right? So working with them, as I was telling them earlier, every customer comes with their own use case. Right? What we try to do is make sure that we provide them with the right solution based on their use case. You know, Azure file system, Azure file sync is not the the the the right use case for every single customer. So for some customers, actually, what Nasuni provides as solution is is what's better for them, and then we'll guide towards Nasuni. And since we have this great relationship, well, I mean, we would just loop them into the conversation and then Nasuni would take it over from there and show them the value of Nasuni, leveraging Azure as as a solution. Excellent. You teed up my second question beautifully because I was gonna ask, Michael and Andy. I'll start with Michael again. Sure. So why did you change? So you're coming from a traditional NAS plus backup. What drove it? Was there a was there a compelling event that happened 4 years ago? Yeah. What was the reason why you had to change to the cloud? I was chatting with Mohammed earlier, and through the the formation of Geovera, we came from 2 large legacy organizations. One organization would have your traditional on prem file storage and the other, would be more of a cloud solution, but we would still have to collaborate together. So I was saying to Mohammed, we used SharePoint online, We used OneDrive. We used Azure file shares. We used almost a full suite of tools. We also used Azure, data boxes to to move data from another data center into our final destination. And all of this, we've kind of, just found that journey to be a little tricky to see what exactly we needed. And as we found out about the the global file systems through the AAC Magazine, we we were unaware of how this would work in our environment. And we, listened to the team, we went through that, the migration steps, and and and started ingesting data. And at at certain points, we were we were almost like, this sounds too good to be true. This is gonna really make it a lot easier for us to handle. And after looking at the type of data that was ingested and seeing how it performed, we were we were pleasantly surprised. We all these things that Andy was saying about with your backup environment, you could sleep better at night. It's a completely different way of doing your backups now. Right. And it is something that allowed us to kind of look at different or focus our energies on different areas to improve while we had another, file server or or it's an Asumi system that was stable enough for us to to shift our resources around. So, yeah. It's a pretty typical journey. What we see is, one of the challenges with file data and file data infrastructure is that siloed Yeah. You know, sprawl that has happened over 30 years. And then you get business units that might go out and decide to sign up for an online SharePoint or another product, like a box or a Dropbox. And then they they get themselves in a situation where it almost looks as siloed as what it used to look like Yeah. With NAS. Right now, you got 4 or 5 different cloud offerings. So, clearly, one of the key benefits that customers see with Nasuni on Azure is that consolidation of 1 single pane of glass. You know, Andy, anything you'd add differently? Like, what caused you to go out and look initially at, I guess, Azure files and then on to to the So for us, again, we were a normal Windows shop with Windows servers and then we went to Azure files. Now I have to admit, with Azure files, that's when I was able to sleep better at night because the data was making it to the cloud and I didn't have to worry so much about backups. Our story changed once we acquired a company, a new company. Because we acquired a company, it was about 600 employees, And the way in which they worked was that they worked distributedly. So, Kleinfelder, prior to that, we had a lot of offices, but most of the people were working kind of in their own offices, so they just needed access to their local file servers and Azure files was fine with that. But as soon as we acquired this new company and they worked distributively, we needed a way to be able to distribute the data for them and we didn't have a technology for that. And what that meant was that people needed to be able to access their data on multiple servers on the same file. So that's where global file locking, that capability within Nasuni became really, really important. And that's why we decided to use NuSUNY. It was specifically for that purpose. And as a result of that and that being successful, we've decided as a company as a whole to roll out Nasuni to all of our offices because we wanna be able to enable that capability with everybody, not just as acquisition. Interesting that you say that. You know, when you think about the foundation of Nasuni and how we were founded, we were founded by engineers that came from storage. So, Iceland, EMC backgrounds, but then another team that was also responsible for some early days of Akamai. And when you think about what Andy just said is the power of what Nasuni does is we combine the gold copy and the durability of object storage with this edge, intelligent edge. And that intelligent edge does things like global file locking. It also does synchronization. It knows globally who's working on what, and then it it tells it caches the data for performance reasons. So it feels like a local like experience. We have about 98% cache hit rate on those caches. So for the most part, customers are actually users are actually hitting the cache versus the, object storage. So it's a key part of our architecture. So happy to hear that that kind of combination of all the power of what Object and Azure brings with that performance at the local level of syncing, global file locking, and high high performance is is paying off. Mohammad, I just realized that we jumped right in. We're here to talk about the differences between or picking the right Azure file storage. Is it Azure Files, or is it Misuni on Azure? And we didn't even say talk about what the two things are. So you've you've had a lot of experience now. You've worked with us for almost 3 years. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about what is Azure Files, and then what is, in your opinion, the differences of as soon as on Azure? I I always go back to, as I said, to the customer, use case. What does a customer need? Right? So Azure Files is a global, you know, cloud based file, storage, file storage, service that Microsoft provides, right, for our customers. So if you have, you know, different teams working in, you know, different regions that have to access, you know, the same files, you can, you know, upload them to the cloud and have them, collaborating, utilizing the same file that don't need to be on premise. Right? So they just connect to Azure, and then all use the same files. Right? So that's basically, in a nutshell, what Azure files provide in terms of value to customers. So Nasuni comes with an added IP, which I think makes it makes it super, you know, useful for customers, right, in terms of use case. Nasuni, in their IP, they're able to, you know, have different, so in in the files, so in other files you have to upload the whole file every single time. What is able to do is they're able to fragment the files and then you would only upload the the delta. Right? Versus uploading the whole file, which from an Azure perspective would be more costly from a customer. So leveraging the SUNY can help you decrease your cost from that perspective if, you know, you have different teams in the global, you know, global workforce, distributed workforce, different different people working on the same files. You know, to to to to your point earlier where you're thinking about, you know, the caching that happens where customers use utilize the cache more than the actual file themselves. Right? So Nasuni is able to break down the files and have different versions, and only the, you know, the, delta will be uploaded. Right? So which would be great from a customer perspective because not only you get you get, you know, benefits from an efficiency perspective, but also from a cost saving perspective with regards to the to the, to the data that you're saving to the cloud. Right? So I think those are, I would say, the main differences, but obviously there's the, additional protection that NestGenie would would provide you with that same technology around, you know, from a security perspective. Right? Because you're if you get any, you know, you know, breaches or or any ransomware challenges with your with your data, I mean, it's less costly to get your data back and, that takes less time as well to get your data back since it's only the delta that's being saved to the to the to the cloud. Wow. You know you're a good partner when you can do a pitch better than I could. I mean, that was great. Thank you for that. Michael, Andy, I think you've both looked at Azure files. Anything you'd add? I think you have some experience in looking at it and then deciding that, you know what? The right solution for our organization is Nasuni on Azure. Yeah. That'd be something something you'd add? I think, what Andy and Mohammed and you guys were saying earlier, Dave, the the performance was one thing that we really need, really needed. We needed our files to sync quickly. A lot of times when you have these type of, cloud providers, the syncing between collaboration between physical distances of offices, it doesn't happen quickly. So we would notice our teams would be waiting for the files after someone in another office has completed. We'd have to wait hours. And sometimes days because there's too much being synced across, different, between different offices. So we were originally very, very, concerned. Can Nasuni do this? Can Nasuni provide that type of collaboration syncing? And it and it could. And what's happening with what Mohammed was saying is that metadata and that kind of change between, the change of a file, that's what's being synced. So we specifically asked to go, okay, so if we modify this one file, it's 1 gig, and there's only a meg or 2 in change, you're only doing the meg or 2? And and they're like, yeah. This is how it works. And we tested that theory out, and it worked out pretty well. So a lot of our networks are, at the time, MPLS technology, older and older, but a little slower for for the cost. So we changed all our networks over in preparation for using Nasuni. So a lot of broadband technology allowing us to to upload and use that. And it was a a pretty good fit in in that need. Originally, SharePoint online was something that we used. But we kind of almost grew out of it really quickly. So, for for our use case, we needed something even bigger. And, we we did all sorts of things to try to get access to the files really quickly, like through web dev or other tools. And we found after we've implemented Nasuni, as the files were getting ingested in, it was really easy for people to collaborate. And that type of speed was almost near instant. And on top of that, Nasuni added global file acceleration, which allowed our syncing between offices to occur even quicker. So we didn't believe it. And then I think, we had Masuni's team go into it to show us. And they gave us a report and showing, hey, this is what your speeds are gonna look like. And actually, when we put it in, it was it was what it was. So, yeah, we're really happy with that. So thank you for that. Andy, I think you did. You you actually tried Azure files, it seems, and you're happy with it for a while till you hit scale limits, it sounds like. Yeah. So, yeah, we basically hit scale limits capability limits and scale limits with, with Azure Files. Again, we actually had a need for global file locking. And I know Microsoft was working on global file locking but it's something that they stopped development on. So we realized, okay, if we really want true global file logging across multiple filer servers and geographies, we needed a different technology. And that's why that's where Asuni came in. And this is what makes a great partnership. It's pretty impressive, as you can all see, that we have somebody from Microsoft sitting here knowing where the right swim lanes are and the right solutions for their customers, not trying to say our solution our native solution is the only solution for our customers. We really have a tight partnership. We we we benefit a lot from Azure's innovations. You heard, Mohammed talk about it. We are constantly looking at their road map and adjusting our tech to take advantage of things like colder tiers of storage so that we can deliver even more cost efficient storage back to our customers. So it's definitely a very, nice partnership. Why don't we pivot a little bit, and talk a little bit about what I hear is one of the number one reasons why people don't move their file infrastructure to the cloud, and that's the fear of migration or as we like to call FOMO, a different kind of FOMO, fear of migration. Obviously, no, IT professionals ever loved moving data. You know, why don't we start? I'll go down the other end, Andy put you back on the seat. Was that a fair for you? Like, was migration the thing that you thought was gonna be and then how did how did it go? So migration was, we had a lot of data to move, about 400 terabytes of data. So, we it took unfortunately, it took a while. Right? Regardless of the technology, you still have to get the data from a to b. So you have to do a copy of it. So the copy does just take a while. And you're able to optimize that by putting multiple servers, doing multiple copies, putting filers next to each other so the source and the destination distances are very low. But nonetheless, we got through it. And on top of that, we had a lot of help from Nasuni as well. We're using consulting services from you guys and we had a great, person helping us helping us out on how to get that done correctly and and, and timely. So, I mean, for the most part, we got it done. Okay. Kathy, and Lee would Yeah. At GeoVera, we we got our data sprawled across multiple locations. So I was saying to to Mohammed, we we use data boxes. We use all sorts of data to move data from different data centers to one location where there is a filer. And our team at Geovera, they started using their traditional copy mechanisms to put the data in. And there wasn't really a big issue. Sometimes we were putting data in too much or it was going in too quickly. And if we were to go live, you would start seeing some issues with the syncing. But it was just how we were ingesting. We're just going too much at once. So, when we were able to, as Dandy was saying, to speak to the support team, they were really able to guide us in what we should be doing at what rate. And it's actually pretty seamless. It was pretty good. Because the easiest decision is obviously status quo. All the All the For sure. Yeah. But in order to replatform and get all the benefits of the cloud, you know, you gotta take that leap. Is that something you see with your clients, and how is Microsoft helping? So so the thing is, let me first talk about what we love about working with Nasuni. And this is not just me. It's my team. The teams are working with the fact that Nasuni have their own professional service. Right? So if we come in and we talk about Nasuni as a solution for our customers, we can involve them, and they would take the customer from point a to point b with their own professional services. So and, I mean, you guys have been doing this for a while now, and you you know your solution, and you've been through different customer, you know, scenarios, different customer challenges which allow you now to be super efficient in helping customers move. Migrations are never easy. Right? So, and you know if someone comes to tell you it's gonna be quick and easy, run away because it's never easy. So you gotta make sure that you're working with professionals and people who know migrations and how to take you from point a to point b. Right? Whether it be Microsoft, you're going to straight from on prem to to to Azure cloud or with Nasuni Professional Services if you adopt Nasuni Technology. Thank you for that. Just so everyone's clear, we we recognized pretty early on that this was an area that we need to invest as a company. So we have a team that helps our customers go from point a to point b using a variety of tools and different technologies. On the migration. We're constantly on the road map, investing in new areas and new ways to try and speed that up. But as you said, at the end of the day, you gotta move the data, but we all believe that the benefits much outweigh the the cost and the the time it takes to do the migration. But that's for all of you to determine on your own, and we hope you walk through that decision making process as well. One of the things that's come up a lot, which I'm always amazed, I guess I shouldn't be, with our solution is backup. And what you you you said about not having to do backups anymore, not having to worry about backups. I spent some time at a backup company prior to coming into SUNY 5 years ago, so I know that space. It sometimes gets confusing though because people say, well, you don't replace all backup, do you? And yes, you do for NAS and for file workloads, but not necessarily for all the other things. Not for all the other things like applications and virtual machines and whatnot. But one of the benefits of moving to the Cloud is that you do get this, built in backup. The ability to roll back in time, to seconds, minutes, hours versus days, weeks, and and, even longer sometimes. And one of the things that we mentioned about migrations is that data just takes time to copy. Well, if you think about the traditional backup approach, if you're copying a backup of file structure data, it takes a long time, and that's just not, doesn't fit most people's business continuity. We will start there. How are you seeing ransomware drive this kind of shift towards, I gotta get away from legacy to cloud? Is it one of the big drivers, ransomware and BC in general, business continuity? Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, ransomware is a topic that we hear about regularly, at Microsoft. Obviously, I cannot share customer names, but we've seen a lot of customers being hit, and unfortunately, again, customers tend to be, you know, reactive to ransomware where our posture is always to be how can you guys be more proactive and have a, you know, strategy, security strategy in place so that, you know, whenever it hits, it's not that it doesn't damage your business that much. Because as you know, when it hits, we see customers that are prevented to work from days to weeks and that's a lot of money lost. Right? And being reactive is always more costly than being proactive. Right? So we push a lot of awareness around building a strong security strategy. And one of the options involves having a proper, you know, disaster recovery and business community strategy where you can leverage, you know, Azure files or whatever, you know, solution works for you. But Nasuni has it built in in their solutions where, you know, as I was telling earlier, since they're always, saving the the the delta of whatever change you made to your data, it's super easy to go back to the latest version that wasn't corrupt. Right? So and when customers have that type of strategy, when they're hit with ransomware, I mean, they they can get back to their feet within a couple of hours, not, you know, a couple of minutes. Right? So, but unfortunately, people see that as a as a cost, versus, some customers, the old customers, thankfully, see that as a customer, seeing it as an investment and to protect them from whatever the damage may be if they're reactive. So that's what we see. We try to, you know, raise the awareness around having, as I said, a proactive security strategy. But, yeah, still a lot of work to do there. Yeah. Obviously, I understand that talking about this stuff is sensitive. So maybe just in general, you know, Michael, how did the business continuity disaster recovery, play into what it can move to the cloud and how is it different now than what it was prior? I think before, where you would have your traditional file servers, your your NAS is spread across areas. Ransomware hits those hard because it's they're they're easy to to hit those systems in quickly. And as an infrastructure person, as my my background is in infrastructure, you'd always have to see, okay, I gotta back that up in a certain way. I gotta back that up in a certain way. I gotta back that up in a certain way. And the more you do that, it becomes just, not that it's difficult, but it's just time consuming to have teams manage it all. And then you add ransomware on top of that. You add, okay, if something even if it wasn't a ransom, I need to recover a full server. How fast can I do it? It's limited by my network as well. So adding on top of all these items, gave us an opportunity to have immutable backups. So you write once, you read many, that WER model. You you're able to have continuous file versioning. And that's where we we didn't understand that part initially. This sounds too good. And, it is that. It's that continuous file versioning and those multiple points to go back in time. So as a IT leader, you had to have certain RPO and RTO times that you're you're responsible for. And, we found moving to drastically decreased our times and confidently, gave us the ability to recover. Because a lot of times, can you recover it? A lot of times, is it was it stable? And when can I go back to? So all those are more predictable within, the Nasuni model. And something to that I didn't bring up earlier was going this route, you're you're removing a lot of going the SUNY route, you're removing a lot of the complexities and systems in your on prem environment or your data center. It was one of the main drivers for us to actually move towards the cloud, move towards Azure. So that's like, something that you have to look within your team and say, hey, if I were removing all this complexity, why do I even have my data center? Why do I even have on prem? It really shifts the way that you think of how you build your infrastructure. A lot of customers that come to us, a a big a big driver or a big reason they come to us is that someone has said told them to stop building real estate, stop building a data set. There isn't you know, they they look at moving their apps. They look at moving some of our user applications to to Azure. And they go, what about the NAS devices and what about all the backup? So, I'm not surprised there. Andy, similar question. Was BCDR and ransomware protection, was that a key part of why you want to move to the cloud? Yeah. Absolutely. Without talking too much about ransomware events within our company, we unfortunately can't talk too much about that, but one of the really cool things about Nasuni and the platform, compared to Azure Files, for example, is that the Nasuni platform actually knows when ransomware event is actually happening. Right? So it's intelligent enough to know something funky is going on. You're having a lot of write activity going on to your directories. It's aware of that. So you could tell it to stop doing what it's doing. You can basically black hole the source IP that's initiating it so that it stops. It creates a record saying that it's occurred and at that point you could do something with it. You could preserve the data for evidence. You could, right click on it and have it roll back. So I guess it's really cool being able to recover from something like that. And on top of that, it's nice to know understanding, like, how the Nasuni platform works. You know, basically, these are filers with a storage account on the back end. Every change is a snapshot, and you can refer back that snapshot. So it's not really doing a restore, but basically pointing your data back to the file before it was modified. So being able I guess having the confidence to know being able to restore, go back to a point in time is really comforting because then you could just go back when it when you need to. Now you might have an outage because you need to deal with the incident, but that's because you're dealing with the incident, not because you're having to do a restore. You know what I mean? So, yeah. So that's I think that's very, very cool. What you said about it not being a backup per se, that's one of the hardest things for people to get a a grasp on when we say you don't when I hear customers say, you don't need to do backup anymore for your network attached storage or for your file servers. It's not even backup. It's just a totally different way of solving the problem, of being able to get back fast. It's one of the benefits of the platform is that we decided early, we were gonna build our file system for the cloud, and specifically for object storage. And because of that decision we made, and we're the only, vendor that has made that decision, is that it gives us that immutability, the durability of the cloud, the cost advantages, and that's what really, drives a lot of these different differences. Obviously, one of the things we like to say is once you get your data under control, you consolidate it, you you do everything that you've said you've done now, you get a gold copy in the cloud. I'm assuming you wanna now derive value from that data. Unstructured data, as I said, is 80% of most enterprise data. There's gotta be a lot of rich insights in there. And we like to use the term, you know, take file storage from, like, a liability or an expense item to an asset. Is that something you're seeing if you wanted to get more analytics out of their unstructured data? Or is that one of the drivers as well, the move to the cloud, I'm assuming? Like, other data lakes? So so, before taking over this role, 4 years ago, I was the lead for our data analytics, team in, in Canada. So I moved to Dallas, Texas 2 years ago. So for Eastern Canada and Three Canadians on there. So 1, 2, 3. Sorry. And and, we've we're seeing customers that had a lot of data on premise. Right? And they knew that they could do a lot with the data. There's a lot of insights from that data they could get, but didn't have the tools, or it was too costly to do it with utilizing deep on premise tools. Right? So a lot of customers, their first steps into the cloud was to leverage the data they had. Right? We had a term saying data is a new goal. Right? So, so so learning analytics, the power of the cloud. Right? Having huge, you know, computers in the cloud that can, you know, go and and scan your data and come up with insights. Right? So and, you know, when you have the solution now, where where it's able to, you know, have a centralized deposit for real data. Right? And this is able also to go and analyze the data that you have and bring your insights. Right? So, you know, tying those 2 worlds together, leveraging Nest Unity and Nest Unity solution as well is something that we see customers seeing value in it. Right? So, it's a great story. I love talking about data. We can talk about data the whole day. That's that's all my passion, but but I'll stop there. Alright. Thank you. Michael, how about you? Are you looking at driving insights out of that data now? For sure. I think what Mohammed was saying is it's being on we're as a new organization, Givera has only been, about 4 years old. I'd say we were infants with the understanding of our data. And this is what Nasuni does. You get insight in your data to know what you wanna do with it and put it in different areas. So, Nasuni IQ, we're excited. We're prepped up our filers to be prepared to see that unstructured data. What what is it? Like what what are we doing with duplicate data? What are we doing with the types of data that people are putting on there? And and what insights are we gonna gather from that. And also, a lot of times when we have a lot of history, even though we're only 4 years old, we come from really rich historic, organizations. We have a lot of projects that we don't know what to maybe sometimes do with. So being able to understand that and potentially put it in different area areas to see it spatially, like if it's in an Esri product, or or to do things differently that you would see, like, see your data differently, not just the not just the file structure, but to do things differently with it is something that we're starting to do now. And we're really, really excited there. And, yeah, I think this is just the beginning of kind of our journey and us knowing our data. That was the most exciting thing that Nasuni has given us is that capability to understand our data better. And thanks for bringing that up. I didn't touch on a recent new addition to the product is a feature called Nasuni IQ, which is analytics into your data, how the data is being used, different patterns. And, you know, we like to think of it as a journey. Consolidate it first, get all those NAS and file servers and backup consolidated to the gold copy in the cloud, then protect it better so that the the BC and the Doctor capabilities we talked about earlier, and then let's run analytics and our own tools, Nasuni IQ, but, of course, there's tons of Microsoft offerings that we integrate with to also do deeper analysis. And then one thing, Dave, it and I'm always always about business value. It's included. We're like, is this gonna cost us more money? This is included. And we're like, so yeah. Should that be do we want? That feature is becoming live. Could we push GA now? K. Is this a direct net or something like StealthQuits by all No. I mean, it's not a competitor. It does probably the 80 20 rule of some of those types of tools, but, of course, purpose built tools will always have capabilities and features above and beyond, so we'd have to work through exactly what you're trying to accomplish. But, it does offer some of those capabilities. Yes. Same question. Are you looking to drive insights out of your data? Yes. So Nucynt IQ is a relatively new product, so we haven't implemented it yet. But we are looking forward to it because we have seen demos and basically gives you information about what's considered hot data, what's considered cold data, you know, what's what's used a lot, what type of data is used a lot, that sort of stuff. The product manager is in the audience, by the way. I'm sorry? The product manager is in the audience, end. Of course. But, yeah, I think that's just the beginning in terms of gleaning information from your data. Right? Because, I mean, I think we'll start we'll probably talk about AI next. But, you know, everybody wants to be able to chat gbt, you know, using large language models against your data. That's ultimately what everybody wants. So I'm hoping that we'll be able to eventually get to there by being able to use platforms such as using AIQ to be able to figure out what data to to index and such. So, so, yeah, we are looking forward to that. Well, you teed it up. So I apologize. Okay. Here's the AI word. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Right? There's an event around our office right now that isn't saying they're an AI company. Although we we're not, we empower we hopefully help you get AI ready storage, consolidated. But there's a lot of hype, so maybe we spend a few minutes to kinda dismissing the hype from the reality. I mean, everything seems to be AI enabled right now. I mean, I'm glad the plane I was on this morning wasn't. I don't think we're we're there yet, but everything seems to be, AI ready. What are you seeing when it comes to unstructured data? What's Microsoft doing? I know you have lots of great things like Copilot and Azure AI search. Like, what are you seeing around unstructured data and AI and be able to leverage it? So so there's a lot of of interest around AI right now. Right? So it's been, nope. A lot of, almost like a buzzword, used a lot recently. Right? So everything is powered by AI. Right? So, I don't know if you watched Build recently, which is the Microsoft developers conference, where Microsoft kinda, now shared more news about our, AI road map in terms of solutions for our customers. So we basically, our perspective at Microsoft is to move from, you know, building AI for people to use to pushing AI for their pushing AI to people for them to build their own AI solutions. Right? So the same way that Nasuni is building the copilot. That's Sunni copilot. Right? Internally. Right? So our goal is to, you know, equip our customers and our partners to be able to use utilize AI, internally with their own use cases. Right? So and that's that's our goal idea. Right? So we have a lot of different AI tools, different copilot of co GitHub copilot, you know, copilot for, Windows, copilot for, micro 365, copilot for 5. So our solution, we included, Copilot with it to make it a bit more interactive for customers. So everyone would have, like, almost like a a a smart virtual agent working and guiding them with whatever tool they're utilizing from Microsoft Suite perspective. But at the end, we also go further and have those AI tools in your hands, and hopefully provide you with enough training and and awareness to be able to utilize it internally and build your own AI tools, right, based on your data. Right? So that's where we wanna get with our customers, versus just us building tools and solutions, and to them having customers build their own tools and solution, leveraging the Microsoft platform. It's working. We were able to release our AI copilot, reference architecture, I think about a month ago now. So we're able to do that pretty quick when you consider it hasn't been around that long in the whole scheme of things. So appreciate what you've done to enable vendors like us to be able to let our customers take advantage of that. Maybe I'll start with you, Michael. Thoughts on AI when it comes to this world? I know we could spend all day on this topic, but unstructured data, I think we just got turned off. Did we do that? Yeah. I turned the turned the lights off. Just because I disparaged it. But, yeah, AI is it's, definitely a buzzword, and and you always wanna as a leader in IT, you wanna see what tools can take you to that next level, what tools can make things easier for you to to do from a day to day. And as Mohammed said, that live assistant or if it's within your application, I I feel, like, Esri products, Autodesk products, they're gonna have a live assistant for you. They will. And if they haven't already, it's coming. I I think for for civil 3 d, they have some it's not there yet, but I know they will get there. And as an organization copilot, yeah, copilot's it's interesting. If you add the right, copilot and functions within teams that we've been testing, we're able to have meetings and have auto transcribing meeting notes of of our meetings, which is just incredible. Especially if you're doing training, and you're doing training and you wanna summarize training, that is that's amazing. So a lot of a a a I tools there, even for camera security, like, a lot of, our our head office security systems, they're leveraging, AI to have less false positives, more detect better detection essentially, and also RFPs. Everyone RFPs, you can you can build a huge crazy content library and have, proposals and things, leveraging AI to give you a better, faster responses, more accurate responses. So, yeah, it can go on for for a bit. There's just so much right now. It's hard to keep up. Right? Yeah. For sure. Yeah. So I I maybe I have a little story to tell. So in in my company, we've been we've been toying with AI, for for for a bit for about a year now. So internally so we're an an architecture engineering construction firm. Right? We employ engineers, geologists, and, you know, and just scientists and such. We have about 3,000 employees, and we have people everywhere. So what we built using AI using open Azure Open AI and large language models is that we now have the capability, and we've rolled this out to all of our users. We have a portal that allows any person in our company to be able to use natural language and and find out, for example, in our Bowling Green office in Ohio, who there has design who has experience in designing a bridge. We can actually put that in there. And it'll say so and so has this so and so employee and so and so employee. And we built this out based on using open AI again, Azure open AI, and act and and against our resume database. And it's a resume database, so so it ends up being structured data. So we had to build this such so that we could, employ open AI and use natural language to be able to query that. Right? And it'll give us a response. I guess when it comes to Nasuni, I'd love to be able to get to a point where we could do that against the unstructured data that we have in Nasuni because we have a lot more data there. So I think that's the next sort of frontier, I guess, if you can call it that. But, we are really interested in being able to glean more information of all the information that all the data we have in in the SUNY as unstructured, if that makes sense. It does. So that's that's what we're really hoping for. I see we see that. We see more advanced customers that move to the cloud. They consolidated it, protected it. They've now started doing some analytics against it. And now it's okay. Now I need a pipeline for the AI systems, because in structured data, for most of you, is probably where a lot of your IP resides. There's probably a lot of gold in that data that's when it's consolidated in legacy on prem systems, good luck getting access to that data. So having it consolidated in Azure, managed by Nasuni goes a long way. I wanna leave some time for, some q and a from the audience, but how about I end with, and I'll go, right over to Andy and come back. If someone's on their cloud journey, they probably if they sign up for today's session, right, how to choose the right Azure, file offering, They're probably starting their journey. What advice would you give? You've gone through it. What advice would you give? Okay. My advice would be and this is based on experience. So say that you're you have on prem, like, Windows hardware, right, with just regular servers, and you're not you're not using, like, a Nasuni or Azure Files. You might be asking yourself, if the data is being cached off to the cloud, will my applications that needs those files, will it work? And I guess I could confidently say yes. What I mean by that is because a lot of people are worried that if there is an underlying server like Nasuni or Azure Files sync, is that's caching the files off, that somehow that there's gonna be a performance problem. I guess confidently we could say, because we've implemented everywhere, that you don't have to necessarily worry about, at least for the type of workloads that we do, which is, you know, the the AutoCADs and the, and the the GIS type workloads. So if there's anybody on the fence about, like, moving on to a a cloud based system that that sends data off to the cloud and effectively turns your Windows Server into a caching server or an Assignee filer, I would say that it does work and then that, you should move forward. Because ultimately, as a as a steward of the data, being responsible for that data, again, you're gonna be able to sleep better at responsible for that data, again, you're gonna be able to sleep better at night knowing that data is in the cloud, and you don't have to worry about a tape backup or some kind of a local backup. Thank you for that. One of the things that I didn't mention about the Nasuni on Azure, solution is that we took a very different approach. We took a hub and spoke model, meaning we are tearing data off to the cloud. We're actually the goal copy sits in the cloud. But it's getting pushed it's getting pushed down from the cloud to those edge intelligent edges. They can be virtual they're a virtual, but they can be in the cloud, they can be in Azure, or they can be an on prem if you want really close to the application, like Andy said, for performance reasons. But that hub and spoke is really a big difference when you're looking at other cloud based solutions. Most other cloud based solutions are all in the cloud, so they don't have that performance caching, Or they're mainly on prem caching, pushing back to the cloud, tearing to the cloud. That's a very different model because if you're tearing to the cloud, you're not getting all the benefits of Azure Object Storage, that I mentioned earlier. But, Michael, how begin with your parting advice for moving to the cloud? Similar to to Andy's is know your applications. If if you know your applications and your data, you can kind of understand and know if it's performing well, if things are happening oddly. That's one thing. Number 2, don't from us, we built our filers way too big. We we thought we needed an insane amount of horsepower, and we only used a fraction of of what we purchased from from a hardware vendor. And, yeah, I think just go go honest and and be open with Nasuni, with your environment, and you're in good hands. They they they kind of eased my concerns when I went through it. So, those are kind of my 3 learning lessons. Bob, anything you'd like to add? When you see you've worked with some of our customers? Advice you'd give for someone starting out from day 1? So so, you know, I've been at Microsoft for 9 years now. In my early years and the early, you know, cloud Azure days, right, we spent a lot of time trying to convince customers to move into the cloud. Right? And and and kinda derisking that whole moving to the cloud process. But recently, we kinda flipped the conversation. We're asking the customers to convince us why they should stay on prem. Right? It's like, what value do you see on prem? Want to learn, for us to learn and figure out, okay, whether but still keeping some customers on on on on on on premise. And second as well to, you know, just try to figure out how can we help them solve those challenges. But I'll just leave with 2 main messages. I'm a big sports fan. I would say 1, a what I would call more of a defensive move, for customers. Think about your security posture and your security strategy. Right? And and make sure that you take the time regularly to assess that. If not, you know, quarterly, as close to quarterly as possible because, you know, there is some threats out there, like rents were rents were whether we talked about that can really damage your your your customer your your reputation with your own customers or even your your just your, you know, business continuity. Right? And second one would be more of a, you know, offensive move on, you know, leveraging, AI. Right? We see a bunch of our customers coming with amazing use cases on how they leverage AI, whether to internally empower their own employees to be more productive or externally to increase their customer, satisfaction as well. Right? So I would say just those 2 use cases, and I'll think about, you know, moving to the cloud, and, you know, leveraging solutions like Nasuni to help you in the in the way. Excellent. I think we'll end there, and we're gonna turn it over now to the live audience, as well as online, for some questions. Yes. That was fantastic. Thank you guys so much. We have a lot of questions online, but for the sake of time, we're gonna select a few. I'll kick it off with a softball question. Mohammed, probably. Can I use Azure or Microsoft credits for my purchase of Nasuni? Does it help my Mac decrement? So you you can use your ad credits to to, consume, Azure services from this unit. Right? So that's that's something that that's very doable. And even easier, you can leverage the Azure marketplace to get Nessuni as a solution. Right? So that's, yeah. That's super easy to do. Yep. Great. Not a surprise, but a question on AI. This one came in early in the conversation, so I think you guys might have addressed it, but maybe circle back around to this. What are some benefits that Nasuni and Azure can provide for a company that is about to embark on AI integration? Maybe I can take that one, if that's okay. So what we do is we allow you to consolidate your data, first step. We believe that's the first step to embracing AI. If you don't have data consolidated, it's sitting on silos across dozens or hundreds of servers. It makes it very difficult. So you gotta, first of all, consolidate. Second thing we hear from our customers is they're worried about the permissions that they're granting to that those AI services. How do I know those AI services are gonna be asking have permission to access data, unstructured data? It could be anything from your CEO's salary or an offer letter. So by being a file system, you inherently have all the same permissions that you had before, so it knows what it can and can't be analyzing. So that's a critical part, of the AI. So I would say the consolidation, the permissions, the security side of it, and then having that pipeline, into that data is really how we help. Great. I got another one. This one's probably more for, Andy and Michael. What was the biggest surprise or something that you didn't anticipate when you moved to Nasuni? Maybe start with Andy first. Well, one of the surprises for us when we went to Nisuny is that, our office servers, we were running, spinning disks. And unfortunately, we had we had performance issues with, with running, NuCine Filers on with servers that have spinning disks. So that was one thing that we just realized, oh, you know, these the we just need more IOPS. So we ultimately just replaced the spinning disk with with SSDs, and the problem went away. But that was, something that we didn't anticipate in the beginning. Once we realized that, we're like, okay. Well, we need SSDs. We put SSDs, and we were fine. And, in Hawaii, get a lot. Egress data coming from a chair. And from ensuring, that I'm on budget, I'm like, well, what is the egress charges gonna look like? And I was shocked that it it's so low. And even to this, I look at it, and I look at the line item because unfortunately in Azure you got a there's a lot of line items that you look at. And egress is one of the lowest. So, yeah, that was I respect that. Hub and spoke model. So the caching, the 98% cache hit rates for intelligent caching has it sitting local on those, flash drives or in Azure. So that's what saves a lot of that egress charge, that architecture. Great. Thank you. One more. Do you have a sense of how long ROI kicked in after moving to Nasuni? First question. It's an interesting new phrase. Question. As part of every Yeah. New customer, we've walked them through just so everybody is aware. If you're working with Nasuni, you're gonna work with your team on a business case, and we're going to compare exactly the line that you're spending today on network attached storage and backup to what you will pay over a period of time. As soon as part of our process of deciding whether this is right for you, but I'd love if you if you have some thoughts here, I'd love to get your take on how it's panned out for you. Reach 5 year forecast. And, based off of kind of the cost of building something on prem again, and the cost of going into the cloud. Everyone told me it's gonna be more expensive. Everyone said it'd be more expensive no matter what. But when we added things up with the amount of data that we needed and the amount of, proper backup for that, the cost was actually a little bit cheaper to to go with Nasuni and to fully go into to the cloud. Great. We didn't really have ROI study, so I couldn't really speak to that. It's just that for us, it was about being able to have more capability. That was that was our goal. That was the ultimate thing. More, more capabilities, being able to do just different and do different stuff, and, and the protections that's built into just being able to That's a softer ROI. Yeah. It's a softer ROI. I guess we can't really it's hard to quantify. But then again, I know I sleep better at night. That's a good ROI there. Yeah. That's a huge ROI. And I'll say, just summarize there, on average, you know, we have about 850 large enterprise customers, midsize customers. On average, our customers save between 30 to 50% off of what they are spending today. It's a key difference of moving to the cloud. I just encourage you to work with your team, and see for yourself how it would compare. We're very honest. We sit down, look exactly line by line on what you're spending today, and we compare it, we we will be shocked if we weren't significantly less expensive because of the economics of Azure, object storage, and our ability to leverage that in the back end. I think that's it for questions. Is it right? Yeah. That's it for online. Well, I wanna finish up with one thing as a cloud company, one thing that you'll find that's very different with Nasuni over traditional storage vendors is we have to earn your business every year. We are you can decide to leave us and go somewhere else. It's not like you're buying a lot of hardware upfront and advertising that over 5 years. So, I don't take this lightly when I say we're extremely focused on our customer success. We have incredibly high NPS scores. Speak look for yourself. Go out and look at Gartner peer reviews. Go out and look at other peer review sites. We're always up in 4.84.9 out of 5 ratings. I think testament is having Andy and Michael up on stage here willing to talk with us. I just wanna, again, thank you very much for taking time out of your day to come and talk about the benefits of moving to the club. Mohammed, thank you for being a great partner. And, I really appreciate you spending time with us today, and hopefully it was very helpful for everybody out there. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.