Dell Technologies: Managing Unstructured Data and How to Migrate Legacy Data with StorARCH

Dell Technologies, talks with Krome Technologies, about its Enterprise Data Storage, Data Archive and Retrieval Solution StorARCH. An intelligent data archive tool that can be used to migrate legacy data, including both structured and unstructured data, into an easy-to-manage Enterprise Archive Solution with simple search, data retrieval and data redaction capabilities.

This video features Adam Jewitt, Senior Manager, Unstructured Data Solutions at Dell Technologies and Sam Mager, Commercial Director at Krome, discussing the benefits of the StorARCH solution, including how decommissioning costly legacy systems increases operational efficiencies, whilst delivering overall savings in excess of 75%, and improving the management of data regulatory compliance.

StorARCH is an Enterprise Archiving solution that is unique in the market, it was developed solely by Krome, who work closely with the team at Dell Technologies.

If you would like to understand how StorARCH can help you to save money, increase the operational efficiency of your enterprise whilst also improving your ability to achieve regulatory compliance, then please get in touch with us on 01932 232345, or visit https://www.storarch.co.uk/​

► ABOUT KROME: Krome Technologies is a technically strong, people-centric technology consultancy, focused on delivering end-to-end infrastructure and security solutions that solve business challenges and protect critical data. We work collaboratively with clients, forming long-term business partnerships, applying knowledge, experience and the resources our clients need to solve problems, design solutions and co-create agile, efficient and scalable IT services.

► KROME WEBSITE: https://www.krome.co.uk/

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Sam Mager, Krome Technologies. 
Adam Jewitt, Dell Technologies. 
Video Voice Over

Adam Jewitt  00:13

So welcome, I'm Adam Jewett, I am the Senior Manager of Unstructured Data Solutions at Dell Technologies in the UK. I'm here with Sam Mager, Sam is the Commercial Director at Krome Technologies, who are a key Platinum Partners of ours. Okay, so back in 2020, between lockdowns, I had the pleasure of meeting Sam, and members of his team, and we're here today to talk to you about a solution called StorARCH. So there is something StorARCH, something that's immediately obviously, they've created something unique. It offers significant value to our clients across multiple industry verticals. So today, we're here to talk about solution, the use case that has, and how it can deliver for our clients. So firstly, Sam, why don't you tell us where the idea came from?

Sam Mager  00:51

Certainly. Thank you, Adam. I guess the idea came from the fact that a customer asked me if I could solve a problem for them, and as any salesperson would say, I said yes. And then we had to work out whether we could, which was the interesting part because the customer had gone to market looking for a solution, and you know, checked Gartner and all the standard places and realised that there wasn't actually a solution existed that could do what they needed to do. So we're involved, in a bit of a POC and had to design from the ground up a solution to ingest 9000 DAT tapes, that had 450 million call recordings, that may or may not have contained what they call the PAN and SAD data, people in finance will be aware, the credit card, the long number, and you know, the number on the back, etc. And we had to bring those into our solution, which is a cloud-based solution hosted off-site, give their users access to it without caching the call they're listening to locally, to keep it all PCI compliant. And then also to put a purge engine in, so that after a certain date, those calls were purged from the system. So again, nothing existed that could do that, from the ground up, that's where we, you know, we coded, wrote, programmed, etc, and developed StorARCH and if you fast forward, now, eight years down the line, and eight years of development, we now have a solution that not only does voice, but does video, does mainframe, does any file format you can think of, we've yet to find one that we can't manage, and does the full retrieval, redaction process. So for things like compliance, amazing, for helping people remove legacy architecture, let's be honest, a lot of customers, our customers, your customers, will have boxes that are sat there spinning their disk just because, because for compliance reasons, they have to have them. And we often have the ability to turn that off, but retain access to the data. So from an audit and compliance perspective, they're absolutely protected.

Adam Jewitt  02:52

Well, that's fantastic Sam, and I understand that you've got a video you can show us, which will give us an overview of the offering.

Sam Mager  02:57

Absolutely, we do, so it's well worth investing two and a half minutes to watch the video. It very concisely sums up what StorARCH does and how it does it. I can tell you, Adam but this, this recording would be about three hours long. So if we play the video, let the viewers you know use that to understand better, you know the context of this call. And then I guess we can we can knife and fork through some of the detail once we've watched the video. So I guess, let's play the tape.

Video Voice Over  03:26

The data world is constantly changing. For businesses keeping on top of the data you manage and the responsibilities you have to keep it readily available and safe is complex and expensive. GDPR has revolutionised the landscape of corporate data practices and made significant waves in compliance standards. Add to that the rising tide of organisational complexity and the eruption of strategic restructuring activity. It's clear that there's a need to simplify operational access to data in a way that is intuitive, efficient, and doesn't cost the earth. StorARCH is a Secure Digital Storage Archive and Retrieval solution hosted onsite or in the cloud. With it, you can create a secure environment where your structured and unstructured data can live. And you can navigate around this environment to search, retrieve, redact and display the information you need at a moment's notice. All your data is available online with controlled access via a web browser provided to your team based on their role. Everything is easily searchable to view or download through a secure portal, with your entire data footprint centralised in one harmonious ecosystem, you can decommission costly legacy systems, enabling your organisation to reduce its physical footprint and simplify your data landscape. StorARCH helps businesses to work in harmony with the real world too, by supporting a paperless document workflow. StorARCH is compliant with PCI DSS security standards, as well as ISO 9001 quality standards. Your data is protected with backup and disaster recovery solutions to meet your needs and fully support your business continuity plans. With GDPR in mind, you can rest easy with full audit trails for data access and usage. And the ability to undertake targeted data purging at the end of its retention lifecycle. To find out how StorARCH can help your business, achieve regulatory compliance, improve operational efficiency and reduce costs, get in touch with us today to arrange a demonstration. So Sam, fantastic video, look that gives us a fantastic overview of the strength of the StorARCH offering, I'd just like to now dig into some of the key salient points in it, and probably the first one like to raise we talked to a lot of our customers around the legacy systems, the cost of aged and technical debt, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do in terms of saving that cost for your customers?

Sam Mager  06:33

Absolutely. And you are right, it's a huge amount of investment goes into, let's call it keeping the lights on. You and I, and people watching this video, will no doubt, have walked around a lot data centers, and seen a lot of very beige-looking equipment, you know, as it used to be that many moons ago. And there's a reason for that, you know, technical architects were told at the time, build a solution to take care of this problem. And they've done that. And that's fantastic. But not everyone has an eye on what could happen in 15, 20, 25 years time. So we unintentionally build these technology cul-de- sacs, and they become more and more costly every year, in the maintenance of the hardware, in the foot space they take up in a data center, you know, go back 15-20 years, and you'd be lucky to get 250GB of space in a rack. You know, it's obviously very different these days. Add to that the costs of extended support on things like Microsoft, you know, I won't name names, but I have a customer who is paying a multi-million pound bill for extended support on Microsoft. And that is not unusual. And it's simply because they're stuck on proprietary systems with no real easy way to get out of there, but a very real-world requirement to have access to that data for the regulators and for things that we touched on like GDPR, and etc, etc. So what we do is we enable them to remove and cut that tie to that legacy architecture, we retain the data but without the requirement for having, being tied to the legacy application. And we consolidate, so we can take, you know lots of disparate systems and bring them into one place. We have a customer right now, who has collapsed 30 separate systems into one, we have a roadmap to take them easily out to 60. Now that's if you imagine a system as a rack, that's 60 racks that have disappeared into one. So just from heat and power, that's a huge saving, then we factor in the operational savings of actually accessing that data. So you know, we'll probably talk a bit more about compliance in a minute. But you know, people have to access the data. That's why they retain it. And that's very difficult when you have lots of disparate legacy systems that don't talk to each other. Whereas when you if you bring these into StorARCH, we can search all that data through a singular interface. And it is very simple, imagine, and I know you've seen it, so I'll describe it to you anyway. But it's like a Google page, as you know, it couldn't be any simpler to actually access that data once we've collapsed it into StorARCH and reduced your footprint in the datacenter hugely. So yeah, as you say legacy architecture and the removal of, is massive, and to give you a number, we have yet to undertake, to build a business case for a customer, where we've not been able to show at least a 75% cost saving, on doing what they're doing today, versus transitioning to StorARCH. So there's 100's of different reasons to do this, compliance and operational efficiency etc. But if any business isn't interested in you know, savings of 75% or more, questions should be asked.

Adam Jewitt  09:56

Well I know absolutely, I know you've saved hundreds of thousands and many many millions of pounds for your customers as well, I have to go back to you, I'm not sure you're old enough to remember racks with 250GB of data in it. But I'll believe you there.

Sam Mager  10:08

Sadly I do. [Laughter] 

Adam Jewitt  10:11

So look, again we see it, we share it, we share the value, unstructured data all around consolidating workloads. So again, it resonates with us. I also, you talked about where you probably alluded to ease of management there as well, my understanding is you deliver this as a full managed service, so in fact, for training and the, the expertise needed from the customer is relatively small.

Sam Mager  10:31

Indeed, yeah. So, we offer in a few different ways. So we're not completely prescriptive as in you must have it this way. But when you get into the business case, with a customer, it is just more efficient, when you look at the different options for them to give it to us. And for us to deliver it as a managed service. The whole thing with StorARCH is taking away the legacy data problem. So the management thereof, you know, where you host it? And is it patched, fed, watered all that sort of stuff. If you can outsource that make someone else's problem, kind of why wouldn't you? So, yeah, most of the solutions we do are as a managed service. Absolutely. That is, that's definitely the way to go from what we're seeing.

Adam Jewitt  11:10

And you can do that on-prem, or you can host it out of the Krome data center. Am I correct in saying that?

Sam Mager  11:14

You're absolutely correct. So we can host that in our data center, we can do that in the likes of Azure, and AWS and whatnot, in ECS, obviously, but it is much easier to have our full service wrapper around the solution. And we should talk about actually, the ease of use of the solution. You know, a lot of these systems that people try to push legacy data into and whatnot, there is still a huge demand on IT. So wherever the data resides there is a request to IT, I need file X, Y and Z, it's many years old, it related to case whatever it might be, IT have to intervene at some point. And there's an overhead on IT to manage this legacy data in this legacy platform. With StorARCH it's self-service from the people that require the data. So it could be for example, call center users trying to find a call, that's in question, they can go into the system themselves search by whatever metadata we've created. And by the way, if the information we gather from a customer is light on metadata, we have ways that we can actually help them create the metadata for the system. So it's not a problem if someone's system is light on metadata. They can then search by as I say, in a call center, it could be by time, date, customer number, line, ID, etc, etc. and find that piece of information, redact that piece of information and recall that piece of information, based on user access, based on, getting that wrong sorry, user access controls. So you know, we define who is allowed to do what obviously, but that entire process can happen without any intervention from IT. And when you look at the operational savings of that, they can be huge, and I will give you one example, actually of a good saving. So we have a customer, which manage data subject access requests. So that's when you're calling into a bank, an insurer, or wherever it might be, and you as Adam Jewitt are requesting all the information they hold, pertaining to you. For this particular customer, it was a two-week process, and the reason it was two-week process was lots of disparate legacy systems to access to try and find information that related to you, to then, and this is not a joke, literally print it off, and then the redaction process was a Tippex or Sharpie, and then they would staple that together and that could then be sent to the customer. That process was a two-week end-to-end process, a manual process. That is now a sub 30-minute process by using StorARCH. We've calculated the savings for that half a million pounds per annum just on one process in their business, which is now simplified via the application of StorARCH as a product.

Adam Jewitt  14:07

Wow, it's unbelievable to think that people still do that in this day and age isn't it, so so in terms of saving money and total cost of ownership, we retire legacy applications, we consolidate into a really small 75% saving into a into a repository. I mean, I echo that from the Isilon file system or the ECS object-store. Again, we kind of work with you one, it could be a small solution that scales up in a really simple to manage set and forget way. So again, we just complimented the savings you add into this as well. So total cost of ownership is fantastic. And that example as well of the users just doing that in sort of 30 minutes to just outrageously different from where they were.

Sam Mager  14:45

The simplicity absolutely of things like Isilon, the way that you guys scale and the simplicity of doing so, I think, yeah, that's why it works so well with what we do, there are two very, if you look under the bonnet, they're very complex, what they do is exceedingly clever. On the face of it, it looks rather simple. And the fact the ease of the way you guys can scale when you need to is brilliant, no interruption to service, always-on, all that sort of good stuff, which works great for what we're trying to achieve here with StorARCH. You know, as people bring stuff into StorARCH, it's what we see very often is we go into address point number one, and we put a solution in place, and then the compliance or records people go, hmm, now we could use it for this and this and this and it fills. So having a back end, if you like, that can grow easily without service interruption is vitally important for the way we manage our product. And obviously, hence the synergy between us and UDS.

Adam Jewitt  15:45

And we see lots of customers who did exactly what you say, they think of a use case, they do something, if they don't get the plumbing, right, which will scale with them, at the time, whether it be 10 terabytes up to however many petabytes. If they don't get there, right up front, they end up doing it, doing it again, and again, they end up in that technical cul-de-sac again, so what about things like encryption and ransomware, and things like that is, this is GDPR compliant. So I'm assuming there's, we can cover ransomware from a Isilon and ECS perspective. But I'm assuming you've got encryption and other features in there to remain compliant? 

Sam Mager  16:15

Absolutely, everything you'd expect. So yep, it's all fully encrypted. We're protected behind layer 7 application firewalls, we have zero-day threat agents on all the technology. So, as you can imagine, you're the data that we're storing for our customers is very sensitive, this is financial data, this can be healthcare records. This is not the sort of thing that can get out into the public domain without there being some severe consequences. So you know, by working with your team at Dell, you know, it's security by design. So the way we've built StorARCH fundamentally, that has to be a secure repository, or let's be honest, it's dead in the market before we even move. And then you layer that, if you like, with the Dell Technologies, and that just enhances what we're able to offer, so collaboratively, we know we have a solution, which is a safe place for this, and let's be honest, it is very sensitive data, to reside.

Adam Jewitt   17:14

Yep. Excellent. You're looking after my credit card and healthcare records, so I'm delighted with that Sam, thank you very much. Talking of industries, you mentioned healthcare and finance verticals, is there a limit to the scale or potential of what verticals this would reside in? Or is it ubiquitous?

Sam Mager  17:32

Yeah, there really is no limit. Because ultimately, everyone has this same problem, you know, data grows exponentially day by day, I don't know the statistic off the top of my head, but you know, whenever you look at what how much data have recreated today versus last week, versus, and it's this huge curve like this, we create data, like no time in history, well, that ultimately has to go somewhere at some point, it lives in your production systems today, and six months, you know, 12 months, whatever, at some point, it needs to come off those systems and and, you know, be archived, so this requirement for archive is going nowhere. So we have to have a solution, which is is almost limitless in scale, and we know from our system, that we can have, at the moment, I'm going to say limitless amount of datasets simply because we haven't found an amount that we've fallen over at. You know, we haven't found a breaking point as yet. And then if you look at where you guys go with Isilon, that is a pretty much limitless scalability there. So someone would have to come along with a huge and vast data lake to cause a headache to us. But so far, we've yet to find anyone that can trouble either our application, or the underpinning architecture from Dell Technologies.

Adam Jewitt   18:56

Great, and I can probably help you some numbers, I mean, to about 80% of data in the world is unstructured. And that's grown about 50 to 80% year-on-year. And actually, you touched on some interesting points there. Because historically, some of this sort of data gravity might have pushed it onto tape. But keeping these repositories online, people start realising there's a lot of value of data over time. So whilst a lot of what you're doing is making sure data gets deleted, there's also the value of that data where people are coming in requests and that kind of stuff. Or maybe they're going to run some analytics, keeping it in that online repository, understanding where the data is, and that kind of stuff. Again, that's that's a huge industry trend of keeping your data on line being able to do something with it.

Sam Mager  19:34

Absolutely. I had a conversation with a customer a little while back, and they done a rather large archiving project. It wasn't recently, it was a few years back to be fair to them, but they'd used, oh god, do you remember the old kind of big laser discs? The plasmon?

Adam Jewitt  19:52

Yeah yeah,

Sam Mager  19:53

Yep right okay, there you go. So they had, you know, boxes upon boxes of these things. I said, okay, that's an interesting take on archiving. I said, what happens when you need to call that data back? Okay, well, we call, it was Iron Mountain or one of those type of people so brilliant, and then the process for getting it back? And the penny dropped on the guy, and he went, oh we don't actually have the players anymore. And you think crikey, and yet we see this, we've seen this before, where people have audiotapes in the likes of an Iron Mountain and so on, which is that's what they do. They're great doing that. And they, but they've upgraded their call recording technology three or four times, and they're only backward compatible so far. So whilst tape is a great medium for storing data, if you can't bring it back into your environment and replay it, then at that point, it becomes worthless. You know, and using our solution, like you said, it's always on. And you know, compliance and regulation is getting stiffer and tougher all the time. So give you an idea of how quickly we can find that data. So put in a request in the old-fashioned way. Go to Iron Mountain, get your box of tapes, or plasma discs, whatever might be back, try and find the right one, try and find the right device to play it in, play it back, hope that it's not corrupt, and it may be in there somewhere. That's quite a lengthy process. You know, we had a solution, as I said before, over 450 million records, well over a petabyte of data, that had a search time of sub-three seconds and 100% accuracy. So when you start looking at again operational efficiencies, versus tape and other different ways of trying to solve the archive problem, we are leagues ahead of where anybody else is. And from an, I guess from a function perspective, now there are people out there that are a bit of what we do. So some people can do the voice, some people can do file, there isn't another product out there that can do unstructured, structured, voice, video, mainframe, etc, etc. From one solution. So if you want to do this, anywhere else, you pick your four or five different products, and you try and weave them together, hopefully successfully, you know, to solve a problem. Where is in a very, in a very elegant way, we've done this with one solution.

Adam Jewitt  22:14

Do you have any other sort of use cases around compliance? We're going to share with us?

Sam Mager  22:18

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are there are many, okay, and I will start by just confirming to you that I am not the compliance expert within StorARCH, by any stretch of the imagination, but you learn a bit from sitting around these meetings listening as these people talk. And you've got things obviously, PCI, yes, clearly, there's one, GDPR, there's another, the Freedom of Information Act, and that covers, you know, covering all public bodies, the Companies Act, you know, for access to corporate financial records, pharmaceutical things like HIPAA, you know, and on and on, and on. Actually, we have a slide that we share with customers, where we, you know, we put up a non-exhaustive list on a PowerPoint, and you literally can't fit them on, there's just too many. But it all pertains to the same thing. It's proving that you have this data, being able to access it in a timely fashion, proving that it's, you know, that it's in the state that was when you recorded it, it's not been manipulated, in any way. And actually, in the process that we undertake, with StorARCH when we take a piece of data and redact it and then bring back a cleansed copy to site the original piece of data is, as was, so that can be submitted as evidence in a court of law. And we have, we've proven that we actually passed a report of compliance, a ROC, that's a financial industry term, but it just shows you that what we're doing proves that I guess everything is for want of a better way of putting it, above board. We're doing what we say we can do. And the data is in its original format and untouched. A vitally important if you're getting into things like medical records, and all these different governance and compliance acts. So again, if people are interested in learning more about specific verticals, and the use cases, and how we address those, then we have a lot of very intelligent people working in StorARCH that know about those industries, and the use cases are strong and how we solve those problems.

Adam Jewitt   24:21

I think you're reminding me a little bit more about my lightbulb moment again, I'm thinking about all the conversations I have, in all of the industries that like to keep a chain of custody of the data, being able to present it in a court of law. Just there's so many use cases out there. So yeah, that lightbulb moments just resonated with me again.

Sam Mager  24:40

Absolutely. And again, it was the same thing of you know, when you think about all these different verticals, again, they have the same problems, they have to retain this data, think about pharmaceutical, I guess that's pretty spot on right now, you know, all the different stuffs going on with COVID, vaccinations, etc, etc. There's lots of data that has to be recorded and has to be recorded for an awfully long time, because if we ever have to refer back to it, we need to be able to refer back to it, very quickly, and know that data is, as was, and untouched. Something on the flip side of that mortgage data, for instance, you know, I wasn't aware till we started getting into this, that your mortgage company keeps your mortgage on record for the life of the mortgage, so that could be 25, 30 years, depending what sort of mortgage you've gone for plus 7 years to life. Now, that's a huge amount of time to keep a piece of data, and like I said before, some have built a solution at a point in time that was fit for purpose. It's not their fault that the world span ahead 20 years and things changed, and now the company stuck with that legacy piece of technology. So we A, resolve it by retiring, that retiring the costs, moving into StorARCH greatly improving the operational efficiency, but keeping this data, I guess, you know, sacred, but presentable in courts of law that's, that is vitally important that we can prove that, because it just adds validity to the credibility of our solution.

Adam Jewitt  26:08

Perfect, fantastic examples. I think another part of compliance is also to delete data at the right time. And I'm pretty comfortable, and confident that the StorARCH solution provides that as well.

Sam Mager  26:18

Yeah, and that's a very interesting point actually Adam, thanks for raising that. That is, I should call out that StorARCH is not a, you know, it's not an off-the-shelf box. So it's not a case of how much storage do you need, this is your part code, ship it to site, there's a good piece of engagement, we have to do the customer upfront, and that is understanding what data they have, where it is, etc, etc, as well, you can imagine with the differing types of data people have across multiple different systems. The heavy lifting, if you like at the front end of the project ensures success throughout the process. And part of that is understanding purge cycles, so what regulatory compliance pertains to your vertical? How long do you have to retain data for, and prove that retained it for that? But as important when you purge data, you have to show and keep a record to prove that you have purged it. So we actually work our customers, again, non-prescriptively, to work with them to design a purge engine around each individual data set, because they're different. And we cannot be prescriptive in that otherwise, we've, we're not a useful application or useful solution at that point in time. So the team worked very closely with our customers to understand what the purge cycle has to look like. And then how we evidence that we've done that.

Adam Jewitt  27:38

Perfect, and thank you for that. And then we're talking about lifecycle management as well, if we're talking around people keeping stuff for up to 99 years, for example, how do we how do we keep the debt, we talked about old tape etc. And so that's one of the things from an Isilon, ECS perspective, is kind of an evolution of a cluster evolution of an object store, so you'll never have to do a full data migration, that kind of stuff, again, staying are those technologies, so we keep the chain of custody, the compliance from an application, we keep it from a platform and the plumbing underneath it? So again, we providing a complete solution. So we're greater than the sum of our parts in that respect.

Sam Mager  28:12

Absolutely. That's a good point, you know, we've worked very closely, with I say, we, my technical contingent have worked very closly with your technical contingent, looking at, you know, our code, your technology to ensure that, you know, that we work over time, what I mean by that is your customer will invest in a platform today. And they may have let's call it a 7 to 10 year refresh cycle on on that installation, they need to know that if you know, in 10 years time that StorARCH will still work on the next iteration, and that's why we work exclusively with Dell as our underpinning architecture. Because we need to know that as we develop our product that it will work with the next generation of products that you bring out because you have a customer roadmap, you know, they need to know they're investing in you today. And then we talk again about technology cul-de-sacs, that they're investing with something that can change and evolve over time, and they're not stuck. Well, we did that with StorARCH. So we make sure that we're aligned with your roadmap, and that we will work with the next-generation and iteration of Dell Technologies. So at no point do we hit a crossroads where suddenly we don't work together anymore, we have to give them that reassurance. Any investment in Dell and StorARCH is fit for purpose for the duration.

Adam Jewitt   29:29

Okay, so Sam, it's been brilliant learning even more about this fantastic offering you've got. Sam, I'd like to personally thank you for your time today, the dedication to Dell Technologies and this, and discussing the innovative solution with us. The team and I look forward to continuing working with you and your team. I'm really looking forward to some successful engagements going forward. Thank you very much.

Sam Mager  29:50

Thank you.