Are You Overpaying for Your Storage Stack?

How flexible is your storage infrastructure and how resilient is it under pressure?

In this episode, we speak David Cayla from DataCore about the role of software-defined storage (SDS) in modern enterprise environments.

Want to know more? Contact us today: https://www.fortunadata.com/contact-us/

We explore how SANsymphony enables organizations to virtualize storage across mixed hardware platforms, improve performance, and build high-availability infrastructure without being locked into proprietary systems.

Key discussion points include:

• What software-defined storage actually means in practice
• Storage virtualization across hybrid environments
• High availability and failover architecture
• Performance optimization and intelligent tiering
• Reducing hardware dependency and extending asset lifespan
• Comparing SDS to hyperconverged infrastructure models

For CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and infrastructure leaders overseeing complex storage estates, this episode provides strategic insight into how DataCore helps enterprises modernize without disruption.

Follow the podcast for more conversations shaping the future of enterprise storage and IT infrastructure.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Storage prices are volatile. AMI demand is accelerating. Some lows are multipling. What if you could use any hardware and still unify everything? Lump, object, fun, Kubernetes, one platform. Be smaller. Reuse what you have. Scale when you need. No vendor lock-in. No compromise on performance. This is software-defined storage built for control. Let's dive into the conversation.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Welcome. My name is Ray Cortramini from Smarter Strategic Thinking. Today we have David Kayler from Datacore. David, nice to meet you. Thank you. First off, how long have you been in the IT industry?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Started a long time ago. I would say about 40 years ago. Wow. 37. Let's say 40.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

What was your interest at that time in terms of getting into the industry?

SPEAKER_01 0:56

For the one who knows, because they have my age, they understand that at the time IT was quite an important new technology. And people were starting to have like the personal computer access. Yes. So there were quite a lot of demand, interest, and requests from the field, consumer, resellers, distributors, about this new technology. And IT at the time was mainly for Excel word, I would say. And then little bit by little bit we understood that we could do a bit more. So accountant could use it, industry could use it, and then data centers to store this data could use IT in the I would say highest level or technology point of view. So there were so many jobs, opportunity, and so many interesting things to do. So that's why I joined the IT world. Wow. On my cursors. So it was a cursor where I focused more on sales, because that's my profile, and uh IT because it was the market. A bit like today, if someone looks for a job, why not looking in AI? Yeah. Because that's that's a good that's a good topic. Very large, there will be more and more AI. So why not? Why not to be the follow the curve, yeah, instead of uh um the the ship on AI? Yeah. Well that's my position. When did you join Data Core? So I joined Datacore, uh funny enough, 17 years ago. I worked with them for about two years, and then I left for another company, and they called me back about uh eight months, nine months ago now, uh asking me if I was free to join the uh UK team.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

And uh it was a good time for me to change and uh agree for this new challenge. Wow. So I joined about nine months ago now. And uh what's your official job title in the UK? So my official uh job title is uh regional sales director, which makes me in charge of the uh revenue growth in the UK, Ireland, Malta, and Cyprus. Oh wow, so I'm quite lucky to have uh these two southern uh region.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

Oh, it's it's better than the weather today, eh? Interesting, yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Historically speaking, interesting to go there and to see what is what is what, and on the IT point of view as well, they are growing and they have they have different, or I would say, opportunities for data core there for different reasons, but that's not the topic of today's, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

For those that don't know, and the people watching this video, what does datacore do? From my point of view, data core is like an umbrella name, and then you have many pieces of software that do different things underneath. So, do you want to just explain to our viewers?

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Of course, yes. So, about 27 years ago, data core has been created exactly at the same time as VMware. And the idea at the time was to do a bit what VMware has have done for the uh servers, so virtualization of the server for VMware, and for data core it was virtualization of the storage. So it did make sense at the time to have the bundle data core VMware all together and to move together. And little bit by little bit, data core has been more considered as a storage provider, virtual storage provider. So software-defined storage or storage defined software, depends how you want to say it. But that that was the the the the the first step of data core in the IT world. And it did work well with two products, Sand Symphony and Sand Melody, which were uh focusing on the block storage, which what we call as well sand storage. And uh DataCore evolved since obviously, and decided to grow the the market by acquiring new technologies instead of developing. So they bought different technologies and different companies, and uh there's a few uh companies who have been uh bought quite recently. So one is Tarwin, another Sun, yeah, as well as theatral storage solution. Uh Pixit Media, which is more in the media industry, rich media industry, always in the storage, and as well more software than hardware. And uh the the other solution is uh uh Swarm, who was caringo in the past, which is an object storage and the same software. So we kept the concept of providing software solutions completely detached from the hardware, and that's where we are very strong, and that's the I would say the the main advantage of uh data core in the IT industry is we are software solutions completely agnostic from the hardware. Yes. So we are different to a lot of other people in the industry and other vendors in the industry. We run on any kind of hardware, and that's always been the uh I would say the the strategy of data core to acquire software. So today we have different portfolios, entry level for uh SAN, which is Starwind. Then we have SAN Symphony, so SAN Melody disappeared for Starwind, obviously. Sun Symphony is the uh I would say second level and premium level, the different variation, and then we have uh Swarm, which is the object storage for the archive, for the uh backup archiving uh concept. So it's purely when you want to keep your data on a cheap storage where you don't need to have very fast access. And then we have acquired Pixit Media, and within Pixit Media, you have a technology named Pixar. Pixar is high performance computing, so it's a very high performance solution to have access to your data onto this storage. So we provide this technology, which is software technology, we can read and write excessively fast on disk. So there's there's more than purely a software, there's like architect, there's like audit, there's like a full package when you when you buy Pixit Media. And we took this knowledge to create what we call now Nexus, which is a bundle between Pixtor, so the HPC solution, Swarm, which is the object storage, the cheap storage solution, and Engina, which is a software concept, I would say an orchestrator to migrate the data quickly from an expensive tier to an unexpensive tier. And you can make it completely autonomous, so it can be completely automated, or it can be manual depending on what you want, or it can be as well managed by scripts. So that's Nexus, and then we have as well another technology which we call Pulse 8, and Pulse 8 is storage for Kubernetes. So Kubernetes is services, yeah, intelligent services when you can just to simplify. So you create a service, and this service is I would say um not permanent. As soon as the service does not run, it just disappears. So there's no uh permanent storage, there are no there's no security uh on the storage point of view with Kubernetes as it is. So you plug different technology, but it's not the best. So we have uh acquired the EBS Pro concept, which is uh uh source free source uh uh technology, and we have bundled support and development to provide a consistent storage for Kubernetes and consistent, secure, ultra-fast, and ultra protected. So it's always storage for different services for different needs, and that's what makes data core, uh we say today effectively as you introduce it, as a company who has different options, but always for storage. So file, block, object, Kubernetes. So that's where we are.

SPEAKER_02 9:31

And and you also have uh another company that you didn't mean, object matrix.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Object matrix is uh one of the uh other object storage we have acquired because it came with Pixit Media.

SPEAKER_02 9:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

So when we bought Pixit Media, Object Matrix was part of the deal. So we acquired uh Object Matrix as a continuity within Pixit Media. So Pixit Media is a kind of independent company, owned on a capital point of view by DataCore, but Pixit Media is acting as an independent uh company in the uh um in the media industry. So to manage uh I would say rich media, and they they didn't have Swarm at the time, they had objects uh storage through uh this uh this uh technology, and this technology was very much specific for media. So with connectors, with MAM, DAM. Yeah, and that was the the object matrix was very much like an integrated archive solution with uh the for the media industry. Well, swarm is very much like any kind of vertical. You can be in the media, you can be in an in the industry, in the banking, it doesn't matter, it's purely object storage, so it's kind of I would say to simplify is a bit like uh storage in the cloud, AWS or Azure or Google Cloud, but on-premise, yes, it's what it is. So that's a comparison.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

Product I'm quite familiar with is obviously SAN Symphony. So basically, with Sans Symphony, you you can load up on any server and it virtualizes the servers as one, and you share the resources across those servers and then provide them out over the network.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Yeah, that that's the concept. So when we say server, we think more uh storage. Yeah. So effectively, what we can do, we can take any kind of storage coming from a server or coming from a rack of disk, yeah, could be a gbot, or it could be an add-on. So any add-on you can put into a rack could be uh rack of storage or internally to the server. And what we do, we show this area as the storage for anyone who's using a specific solution, for example. And for this solution, the storage is accessible, and that's that's the only thing we have to keep in mind when you think of data core. So if you need a block storage and you want to be uh able to use any kind of physical storage, data core is a very good option because effectively it will virtualize the storage into a big cloud, local cloud, and it will just give any uh application access to unlimited storage because the solution thinks it's unlimited. That's that's what we are providing. So theme provisioning is one of the technology we are using, we have we have developed, which is to make uh um the access to the data unlimited. So the the the solution thing there's always space, and in fact, behind there's an intelligence stating to the IT platform manager uh that effectively it will need more disks where where wherever the disks are coming from, whatever kind of disk, it doesn't matter. Then then we can play with that. We can play with the tier, we can play with the speed, we can play with whatever they are giving us. So the concept of virtual storage into like a big cloud of storage. That's what data called Sensymphony is providing.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

And and you also accelerate the rights using the memory in the machine as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yep, correct. So Sansymphony has a lot of big, strong features, and uh one of them is to uh accelerate the access, read and write to the data. Why? Um for different reasons, but I would say the main reason is because we are writing into the cache of this storage cloud, and this cache is provided by servers, and all the memory into the server will be where we will first write the data, and that's why we are providing high availability real-time synchronous because everything is so fast, it can write on different parts of on two nodes, for example, of the company or different parts of the LAM at exactly the same time in the RAM, and then it's pushed to the storage to the physical storage itself. And we accelerate as well the writing to the storage because we see the disk itself. We don't go through all the operating system access, we go directly to the disk, and we write directly physically to the disk. So that's why we are agnostic, hardware agnostic, because in hardware there's mainly two kinds of disk manufacturer, which is Western Digital or Seagate, and we are compatible with both. So any van door we use Western Digital or C gate, so it's compatible with us. And so very fast write and read because it's in the cache, but it's as well on the storage at the same time, and that's explain why it's so fast and it's a real high BT with no downtime.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

And you also um support immutability, yeah, that's correct.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

So uh we in the past we did support it uh in a specific way, uh, and we have currently uh uh upgraded, so we have a new patch this quarter to uh include snapshot immutable immutability as well. So that's another level. So we increase this concept of uh full protection of the data to avoid anyone to delete by mistake the content, and knowing that within the license, so when you buy Sound Symphony for block storage, you have access to a lot of features per default. You don't need to buy extra license, you can have high availability on two nodes, you can have disaster recovery on a third node, and you have as well continuous data protection on a fourth storage separated node. So it means that all of the data will be protected to be modified, to be deleted, will be protected in case of a disaster recovery or a ransom activity or hacking. It will be completely protected because you have the CDP and because you you have the DR, which is uh asynchronous as well. Yes, so all this is within the same license. So when you buy the license, you buy all the features, so you buy all the security plus the performances, and that's what makes us even more different to any other vendor.

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you also you're fully NIST to compliance, aren't you?

SPEAKER_01 16:57

That's correct, yes. We are NIST. I won't go into the details of NIST compliances, but yes, that's that's part of what we are providing because we are obviously uh looking by uh different uh verticals like the bank, yeah, and some industry where they they need to have a certain level of compliance.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

So we we we we have this this level of so uh NIST for the viewers watching this, it it outlines a framework where you need to have is it three copies of your data?

SPEAKER_01 17:29

It's three copies minimum, yes.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

Yeah, so when you do a backup, it goes to locally, remote, and remote. So if anything gets hacked, you can and you can just bring it back.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

So that's why I explained. So you have the two nodes, plus you have the disaster recovery, and on top of that, you have a continuous data protection. So if you are you can have like four uh places for your data, the CDP is usually limited to 15 days of data. You can do more, but obviously you increase the cost of your infrastructure, hardware infrastructure. You don't need it. Two weeks is usually compliant with the regulation, so that's enough. And then in this instance, you have different ways to protect your data against different uh I would say uh attack, yeah, whatever the attack is or virus. So you you really like cyber uh resilient and cyber proof as well with our solution, and some people on top of that are adding a backup solution, which is different because it's it's related to a specific regulation. So some regulation oblige you internally to have a backup which is a different format. So we just take your data and it will write it into a different form and it will put it into a different storage. Yeah, but this form has to be read by uh uh what we call the reader forever. So they they have the backup solution who's taking the data, put it into a protected form format somewhere on the on the on the storage, and they have the reader which is free, and you can read the content of your backup at any time. So that's there's even another level of security. So we are on this, but if you want to go even further, you add backup because you have no choice or because you want to protect your data, and you can even go further with the backup solution with disaster recovery and business continuity.

SPEAKER_02 19:34

Uh you from your perspective, you can have, and and this is maybe people are not aware of this, but you can have a del EMC array, you can have a Fujitsu Eternus, you could have an IBM flash system, and and you virtualize all of those components. So it doesn't matter what the brand is, you treat them as as components, and then you make and then you can tier within that. So you might have some flash, you might have some an NDME, you might have some hard disks, and you you just virtualize all of that in one layer.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

Yeah, that's correct. That's that's what I explained just before, but in a very simple way. We are agnostic hardware and agnostic because, in fact, how many uh real manufacturers, storage manufacturers exist on the planet? There's two. Most of the people we say, oh, there's like NetApp, there's Kantum, there's HP. They are not, they are integrators who are providing the rack, the storage rack, Western digital and Seagate. That's the main manufacturer, and we are compatible with them. So, whatever label you put on top, it's just a marketing label. Obviously, there's some I would say level of software and intelligence uh with the choice of the CPU, the card, whatever you you put into your your appliance. But at the end of the day, it's West Digital and Seagate, that's it. So, whatever label we don't mind, we are writing directly to the disk. So that's that's where we are very clever. And when you speak to uh companies, and more and more companies to today are merging because the economy is a bit difficult. So there's a lot of companies who are disappearing, and some opportunistic companies who are buying these kind of dying companies uh for strategic reason, growth, or whatever. And when they buy these other companies, they buy like uh it could be Synergy, it could be Quantum, it could be Dell, it could be AMC, and then they have multi-silos, and then they have a problem. Okay, how I can manage all these silos with all this knowledge, how many engineer trained, certified I need to have? Because I can't put everything on the shoulder of one guy. It's impossible. And if the guy is on ill or whatever, I need to have at least a second guy. So I need to have two nodes as well, two node concepts. But it's not enough because it's multi-sided, so it means that I need to have all this knowledge, all the technology, all the maintenance, all the update. But we look at this uh IT manager and we tell him that's that's okay with you. You can use all you have, and we will take care of it. We will just take Cantoon, for example, and then we will do HA with both of them. And it's like, What? Can you do that? Yeah, and we are as a DR, we can put a synology if you want. So we are completely agnostic. So whatever you have, whatever you bought you bought, and you you just use, we will fit and we will optimize your cost.

SPEAKER_02 22:47

And then one of the other things that you can do is you can migrate from legacy systems to more modern systems transparently. Yeah, completely. And then you can switch off the legacy and carry on. So there is no, so you don't actually physically have to move the data from your old system to your new system, your system handles that migration.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Yes, so clearly in the backstage, yes, there will be a migration eventually if you want to go from SATA to uh new technology disk, whatever new technology disk you you choose. That if you want to do that for different reasons, you you can. Yeah, but you can use both as well, and we can use what we call the the concept of tiering. So you can use the SATA for uh the uh low tier, the data while steel block, but we do not need to have excessive fast access. Yeah, so you can keep it. But if you for any reason want to change it or it's read the commission, it's very old, and you want to migrate, we have the beauty of being agnostic, so we can create like a virtual storage, and it will take all the data out of your legacy storage and it will move it to this new cloud, and it will do that in the back end, and there will be no downtime. No, and it's completely transparent for any user, and they won't see it happening, and when it's finished, you can just unplug your old legacy system and do whatever you want with that.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

Thank you for covering that. I I think Sand Symphony is a fascinating product, it is, yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I've used it as I said myself, but it's quite it's quite interesting conceptually how it works, and I don't think I've come across any use cases that it isn't suitable for because you can also provide file and block, smb, nfs, and people that want it as well. So it's it's a it's a really great product, in my opinion. Using your software, where do you see the fastest growth today? And do you want to touch on some of the customers that are actually using your products?

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah, which is kind of funny. Most of our existing customers are customers since decades. So when we signed a customer 27 years ago, we are still having this customer with us. Why? Because we just evolve and because it works very well, and it's one license for everything. And because it's hardware agnostic, he can buy the hardware at the cheaper price. Yes, he doesn't need to listen to someone saying, sorry, but you have to buy two of these appliances at this price with this GPU. No, he can build whatever you want, and we will take care of the performance ourselves. So that's why when you start to use Sensophony, you really like it and you stay with us.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Obviously, you will buy other vendors for all the needs, but most of the case they stay with us. So you have these legacy customers who are very loyal because they really love the solution, try secure, they are comfortable.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

And then when they merge with other companies, they can add the storage from the other company very easily. So that's the first thing. The other thing is this uh there are people who are uh the the new customer, the prospect are considering um the uh IT hardware market very volatile, a bit like what we are living with Trump today in the global economy. We don't know what will happen. One day it's this price, the other day it's that price, that day it's this tax, the other day it's well, there's no more tax. So the hardware market is extremely difficult to understand. You have to provision as an IT director, you have to provision a budget, and you have to stick to this budget because it's it's what it is. You can have an extra this and extra, but you can't really double it or triple it. And that's what is happening today. So the faster growth is is on the fact that I would say anyone who wants to grow his storage has an issue today. And to solve this issue, there's a few vendors, and data call is one of them, with 27 years of experience providing a very solid solution, completely agnostic and very easy to put in place. So that's where we say the big the bigger growth will come from modernizing your IT or when you have multi-silo and you want to centralize in one single uh pan of glass.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

Yes, and you know, with the with the drive towards AI happening at a colossal rate, there are already mega shortages of storage. Yes, DRAM prices I read this morning have have more than tripled in the last six months. Yeah, it's ridiculous. And and this this storage drought, as I call it, is gonna last potentially for five years. Um and one of the things that I think data core could help that is if you were considering to buy an SSD array or whatever it is, because the way you write into memory, you get accelerated rights anyway. Yeah, so you could buy a smaller array, save yourself whatever the price is, and still get the performance of what you would have bought originally. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

Yes, that's that's exactly a very fair point to say that luckily for us, we are very well placed because we are the alternative, but we are now the solution to solve your problems, and your problems is okay, how can I match my budget I provisioned last year? Because usually a budget is provisioned earlier, and how can I live in this world where I don't know how much we cost this this hardware or this piece of memory or whatever disk because I don't I don't know with us? You don't you don't look like this, you don't read the market like this. You say, okay, what is the cheapest option? Can I just buy that and then grow nicely? Yes, you can. You can do what you want with what you have, so you're suddenly becoming an owner of your platform, you're not vendor lock-in, you're completely free. Yeah, so you have all the freedom, hence our new, I would say, marketing concept, which is we are offering freedom of choice for your IT infrastructure. And we have a new reseller program we name Freedom 360, because it's completely freedom in whatever you want. And even for a reseller or CSP, so cloud server provider, or an ISP, uh, ISV, all these companies who are providing services, storage as on demand or whatever SaaS solution, they need storage, and they need to optimize their costs, otherwise, the end user will pay double, triple, quadruple. And with us, if they use our technology, no, they can just buy what they need, they can decommission some servers who are anyway to be decommissioned, and then use it as purely storage. That's the advantage is the flexibility, the agility of the solution. So, yes, we are providing that, and yes, the the storm, the pricing we have at the moment, it's for us, I would say, a big advantage.

SPEAKER_02 30:37

You can take the servers, whatever the server brands are, could be a supermicro, could be a Lenovo, could be HPE, whatever, and you could take the storage arrays again, NetApp, IBM, whatever, and you merge them all together.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

That's correct. Yeah, whatever kind of storage uh hardware you have, you can merge it into this virtual storage area, and you can have access to the data extremely fast, extremely secure. And the GUI, so the uh graphic user interface, it's very simple to understand. I can tell you when you see when we do demos today, and and the people are looking at our console, they are like, Well, that's very simple. It's it's just exactly the story you told me before we started this post, where it's the graphic is the reason why people choose you sometimes. Yes, and uh but behind the the the the the GUI behind the interface, you have as well a technology, and the technology is a really solid. We have 99% of uh uh happiness uh from our clients on the support side. We have uh uh result of uh satisfaction uh up to uh official satisfaction. So just contact us 98%, so almost 99%. So we we have a solid solution and we have happy customers as soon as they start to use us.

SPEAKER_02 32:07

Brilliant, right? Well, thank you everyone. Uh you've heard about data core. Thank you. Uh nice to see you, David. Thank you for coming in. Thank you. It's a pleasure.