Updated and extended cyber protection capabilities, including new Threat Center, backup of object storage and AI assistance in Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1, will keep businesses running as ransomware and cyberattacks continue

Veeam Software, the leader in Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, released general availability of the new Veeam Data Platform 23H2 update, including the New Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1 release as well as Veeam ONE v12.1 and Veeam Recovery Orchestrator v7. This latest release from Veeam includes hundreds of new features and enhancements designed to not only protect enterprises’ most critical data, but to enable them with radical resilience to bounce forward from ransomware and cyber-attacks. 

“The latest Veeam Data Protection Trends Report found that 85% of organizations experienced at least one ransomware attack in the last year, while only 16% were able to recover without paying the ransom,” said Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam. “Ensuring your organization is protected and resilient in the event of an attack is the only way to make your business immune to its impacts. The new Veeam Data Platform 23H2 update, including Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1, builds on what Veeam does best: reducing downtime and data loss for our 450,000 customers. This latest release provides the shortest gap between cyber incidents and recovery, arming our customers with radical resilience to keep their business running and moving forward.”  

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Sixty percent of organizations need significant or complete overhauls between their backup and cyber teams, with those roles closest to the challenges of cyber events often the least satisfied with the partnering between the teams.^[i] New updates of this latest Veeam release are designed to unite IT, cloud and security teams with technology to confront, contain and conquer ransomware together. New features and enhancements include: 

·       AI-powered built-in Malware Detection Engine performs low-impact inline entropy and file system analysis during backup for immediate detection of ransomware and malicious file management activity.  

·       New Veeam Threat Center highlights threats, identifies risks and measures the security score of an environment. 

·       YARA content analysis helps pinpoint identified ransomware strains to prevent reinfection of malware into an environment; detects the presence of sensitive data in backups (like PII, PHI and PCI data). 

·       Enhanced backup protection prevents accidental or malicious deletion or encryption of backups, including using additional immutability capabilities and the new four-eyes principle to prevent accidental backup or repository deletion. 

·       Greater security for cloud backup ensures least privilege access to backup and recovery tasks with more granular IAM permissions, as well as immutable backups for Amazon RDS PostgreSQL databases.  

·       Security & Compliance Analyzer continuously verifies your backup infrastructure hardening and data protection approaches against best practices to ensure recovery success.  

As the #1 provider worldwide in the Data Replication & Protection software market, Veeam is launching new capabilities to help organizations of all sizes achieve radical resilience that can only come from complete confidence in protection, response and recovery. New key capabilities include:  

·       AI-powered assistant driven by large language models and using product documentation as a context provides real-time access to wealth of Veeam’s knowledge, improving efficiency. 

·       Object storage backup strengthens recovery with powerful granular restore capabilities for on-premises or cloud object storage data, secured by an ultra-resilient immutable backup. 

·       Expanded workloads in the cloud to now protect Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure Blob, Azure virtual networks, and Google Cloud Spanner. 

·       Automated cloud recovery validation saves time by automating the manual post recovery tasks required when recovering an on-premises workload into Microsoft Azure. 

·       Veeam App for ServiceNow offers open integration leveraging ServiceNow workflows to monitor backup jobs, sessions and restore points in a pre-built dashboard with automatic incident creation. 

·       New plug-in for IBM DB2 and support for Linux and SAP HANA running on IBM Power eliminates the need for multiple backup solutions in an IBM data center.  

·       IBM 3592 “Jaguar” tape supportreduces costs without compromising security by combining Veeam’s air gapped data protection with low-cost storage at enterprise scale. 

·       Expanded Enterprise Capability with support for large volumes on NetApp ONTAP FlexGroups, instant recovery for PostgreSQL, and integration with native backup immutability on EMC Data Domain and HPE StoreOnce Catalyst Copy storage. 

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“Cybercrime continues to be a highly profitable business for cyber criminals who are getting smarter and their attacks more sophisticated,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Vice President at IDC. “This has raised the bar for backup and recovery vendors that now need to provide a full range of cyber-recovery capabilities. This includes security functionality that allows targeted companies to detect and stop the attack in its tracks Veeam’s new announcement offers significant enhancements to cyber protection capabilities. The AI-powered built-in malware detection engine, threat center and zero-trust further demonstrate Veeam’s ongoing efforts to keep customer environments safe and recover quickly if attacked.

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

The post Veeam Expands Cyber Protection Capabilities with New Veeam Data Platform 23H2 Update appeared first on AiThority.

Today, be it a small business, a start-up, an established brand, or even as a freelancer, backing it with a robust Customer Service Management (CRM) system is very essential. CRMs help brands to identify and strengthen leads in the infancy stage and offer better revenues, and greater levels of customer satisfaction.

It would interest you to know that CRMs are not new; well the term may be relatively new but they have been on the scene since the 80s. Robert and Kate Kestnbaum were the trailblazers of database marketing (a form of direct marketing involving customer analysis through data to identify the ones who are most likely to react to a specific marketing campaign).

This concept became a success, and so the Kestnbaums joined hands with Robert Shaw who ushered in a myriad of innovative marketing concepts like customer lifetime value and channel management.

With a promise to improve brand presence and enhance the customer journey, the CRM industry is growing at a staggering rate. Considered to be one of the biggest growing software markets globally, it is predicted that by 2025, CRMs will reach more than $80 billion in revenue.

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Informatica’s B2B technology report revealed that 25% of marketers are clueless about their lead conversion rate, mostly because they are not using the right CRM strategy which hinders work efficiency and sales growth.

In this post, we are decoding Customer Service Management system and the top cloud platform that

What is a Cloud Platform?

Let’s first understand what a cloud platform is. It is an operating system that enables software as well as hardware products to seamlessly co-exist in a remote setup or at scale.

Organizations pay rent to access various computer services such as storage, analytics, servers, software, networking, etc. With the help of a cloud platform, organizations can do the following:

• Create cloud-native applications.
• Test and build applications.
• Store, backup, and recover data.

What is a CRM and Why do you Need it?

It is an established fact that CRM is an incredible tool that is bestowing companies with the power to create massive sales leads, improve conversion rates, and expand their customer base.

In a nutshell, a good CRM will help you address a variety of questions like – what customer information is needed for a flawless sales process, how to communicate with your clients and customers in a better and effective manner, how to keep a track of high-priority tasks, how to efficiently streamline processes.

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A Customer Service Management system collects lead data and customer information and then showcases it to the sales, marketing, and customer service teams and helps the teams collaborate better for better ROI. The basic function of this software is to paint a holistic picture of leads and customers and enable brands to offer personalized journeys to their customers.

CRM Helps Companies to:

• Improve sales, and jump in revenue.
• Better segment their audience.
• Automate the Data Analysis process.
• Offer 24*7 customer service assistance through chatbots.
• Feedback Loop.
• Personalize relationships with customers.
• Social media integration.
• Predict sales forecast.

Let’s take a look at the top cloud platform for CRMs.

Copper CRM

This can be called God sent for Google users. This CRM is designed in a way that it can work in real-time inside G Suite and works effortlessly with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Slide, etc.

It is embedded with all the basic CRM tools like workflow automation, deal tracking, contact management, and reports. It can integrate with a host of common yet necessary tools like Zendesk, MailChimp, Quickbooks, and Slack.

Copper CRM takes extra efforts to protect data by performing independent third-party audits of their systems and providing data security training to the entire staff. The only drawback with Copper CRM is that you may require refreshing your Gmail inbox to update the Copper panel.

HubSpot

An admirable player in automating marketing tasks, HubSpot lays great emphasis on the sales process. You can work around with a variety of tools to generate leads, accomplish more deals, and enjoy a loyal base of returning customers.

One top feature of HubSpot is its library builder which enables all team members to share useful sales information and analyze which works the best for reuse.

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You can make good use of the template generators to create blog suggestions, invoices, business plans, email signatures, and marketing plans. The basic version is free for unlimited users along with unlimited data.

EngageBay

It comes with a free CRM system for several functions such as sales pipeline management, paid marketing, basic contact organization, and service modules.

The high point of using EngageBay is its ability to log each and every customer interaction via email into the CRM database while also allowing you to make calls or draft emails right from within the system.

It also gives an option of publishing your calendar online enabling your customers to select dates for phone calls or meetings along with follow-up reminders.

Be it transactional emails for invoicing and payment tracking or business processes, you can streamline all these with the help of Zapier, Mailgun, and SendGrid integrations. And if you are worried about migrating all your contacts from your previous CRMs, EngageBay automatically takes care of it.

Agile CRM

Apt for large and small businesses, Agile CRM is an all-in-one CRM that is powerful, easy, and affordable. You can count on Agile for good speed and smooth data encryption as it is hosted on Google cloud.

It has an array of effortless integrations and social plugins like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and offers countless tasks, deals and documents even in the free version.

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Salesflare

Touted as a commendable support in task management, Salesflare magically works its way with your data from the phone, calendar, and other mobile apps and logs them in the system automatically.

Its seamless quick search, organizing, retrieval functionality, and super-fast document uploading are its main highlights. After smartly scanning all your tasks and data, Salesflare sends mobile notifications about important tasks to be completed.

By allowing your team access to your Gmail and Microsoft Outlook inbox while also letting them work, your team’s productivity is likely to improve phenomenally.

Sugar CRM

Considered amongst the top cloud-based CRM systems, Sugar CRM works with a robust army of marketing, sales, and service, steadily converting small business needs. While working on the details of a social media ad campaign, an email marketing campaign, or landing pages, Sugar CRM offers insightful SMO and SEO suggestions.

To strengthen your game, Sugar offers impactful insights from different business and social data resources to ensure your sales team is way ahead. This comes especially handy while planning sales forecasts and project management.

What refines the customer service experience is Sugar’s customer support console. Sugar also keeps a tab on SLAs and provides the latest updates on the support department.

Conclusion

As of now, the CRM industry continues to grow at a tremendous pace, and having a robust one in place is the need of the hour. Right from learning about your clients and their preferences to centralizing all information in one place for the stakeholders and maximizing sales and conversions, CRM is a one–man army for all your business needs.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com].

The post Predicting Sales & Strengthening Leads: 5 Top Cloud Platforms for CRM appeared first on AiThority.

Infinidat, a leading provider of enterprise storage solutions, announced a series of new initiatives, extensions, and updates to its channel partner program worldwide. Infinidat continues to invest heavily in providing support for partners, with channel revenue contribution up 52% year-to-year globally.

New additions include a significantly enhanced EMEA and APJ channel program and a new sales enablement and training program − the Infuziast Certified Partner Program − along with regional program enhancements, such as channel partner advisory boards. Infinidat has also expanded its channel base with 22 new partners and distributors and extended the Infinidat channel sales team with the addition of seven new channel partner managers worldwide. Furthermore, in EMEA and APJ, Infinidat added a new, very seasoned director of channel sales, accelerating Infinidat’s momentum with its EMEA and APJ channel partners.

“We’re proud of the expansion and deepening of our channel partner programs, particularly those in EMEA and APJ, and we know channel partners are very excited about what we are introducing in 2023,” said Eric Herzog, CMO of Infinidat. “2022 has been a banner year for our channel-centric progress that has garnered several industry awards and recognition. However, with the exciting new additions and enhancements we are bringing to Infinidat’s channel partner experience, 2023 will be even stronger.”

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The following outlines the major enhancements and expansion to Infinidat’s partner programs going forward:

• Enhancements to the EMEA and APJ channel partner program – Infinidat is enhancing its EMEA and APJ channel program with new tiering levels for partners; an enhanced deal registration process; new backend rebates; a redesigned criteria for MDF; a not-for-resell program; redesigned the enablement program on the InfiniVersity partner portal; and increased joint marketing efforts.
• Infuziast Certified Partner Program – Infinidat is introducing its major new sales enablement and training program, starting in the first half of 2023 in the Americas and in EMEA and APJ in the second half of 2023. Channel partners, ranging from sales consultants to technical personnel, will be able to earn certification through this new program, which also includes a rewards component.
• Personnel Update – In 2022, Infinidat announced a new leader for the channel across EMEA and APJ, with the appointment of James “JT” Lewis as Infinidat’s Director of Channel Sales for EMEA and APJ. The company also added seven new channel partner managers to the global Infinidat sales team to support the expanding number of partners and distributors around the world. Continuing as the channel sales leader in the Americas is Mitch Diodato, Senior Director of Channel Sales for the Americas.
• Partner Advisory Boards – Infinidat will establish partner advisory boards for the channel in the Americas, EMEA, and APJ in 2023.
• Partner Tech Clubs – Infinidat will set up partner tech clubs for engineers, solution architects and solution advisors in EMEA and APJ.

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Supporting Channel Partner Quotes:

“Infinidat runs one of the most robust partner programs in the industry. Their program enriches our experience as a partner, and I’m very excited about the company’s new Infuziast sales enablement and training program,” said Dean Jamison, Co-president and Chief Technology Officer at Dynamix. “Infuziast will better equip us to increase our business and reward us in a clear and compelling way. Infinidat is making all the right moves to expand and enhance its support of channel partners, and I look forward to what the company is rolling out for the channel in 2023.”

“I am very encouraged by what Infinidat is doing to demonstrate its strong commitment to the channel in Germany and around the world. All of the new program elements that the company is introducing in 2023, ranging from sales enablement and training extensions to tiering levels to increased joint marketing efforts, are a win for all Infinidat channel partners,” said Jan Veith, Director of Sales and Business Development at H&G Hansen & Gieraths IT Solutions GmbH. “Infinidat is continually refreshing its multi-dimensional channel partner program, constantly bringing something new and exciting to the table. This is a great time for us to be selling Infinidat’s cyber storage solutions because the level of channel support is more comprehensive than other players in the market.”

Infinidat’s channel momentum steadily grew throughout 2022, fortified by the following accolades and advancements:

• Infinidat was recognized with eight channel partner centric awards, out of a total of 25 awards
• Gartner named Infinidat a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage for the fifth consecutive year
• The Infinidat Partner Program earned a 5-Star Rating from CRN
• Eric Herzog, Infinidat’s CMO, was named a CRN Channel Chief for 2022
• GigaOm recognized Infinidat as the industry leader in ransomware protection for block storage
• Infinidat was included on the prestigious CRN 100 list
• InfiniSafe^® technology won a 2022 CRN Tech Innovators Award for data protection
• Infinidat revamped its partner portal to rave reviews

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

The post Infinidat Supercharges the Channel for 2023 with Expanded Partner Program Support appeared first on AiThority.

Public Storage, the nation’s leading owner, acquirer, developer, and operator of self-storage properties, announced the reopening of a facility adjacent to Apple, Inc. offices in Cupertino, California.

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“We are pleased to reopen our Cupertino facility and provide customers with a broad array of storage options”

The Public Storage, 20565 Valley Green Drive, Cupertino location now features two five-level state-of-the-art buildings that offer our industry-leading customer experience, including app-enabled digital property access and account management, eRental® capability, and smart security cameras.

We enhanced an existing, forty year old facility from 51,000 square feet to 195,000 square feet and built it with sustainability in mind—including energy-efficient solar panels, motion-sensor LED lighting, and sustainable landscaping improvements. The site previously housed 585 first generation storage units and has been expanded to 2,593 climate controlled units. The facility is also being certified to LEED Silver standards.

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“We are pleased to reopen our Cupertino facility and provide customers with a broad array of storage options,” said Joe Russell, Public Storage Chief Executive Officer. “This Cupertino location reflects one of Public Storage’s unique competitive advantages; specifically the ability to redevelop and expand properties driven by our experienced development team. This development exemplifies how we are enhancing our 200 million square foot portfolio across the country through acquisition, development, and redevelopment.”

The Company’s current total development pipeline of approximately $1 billion includes over $500 million in redevelopment opportunities with 20 projects totaling 3 million square feet of new space.

“We thank the City of Cupertino for its support in enhancing this tremendous location,” said Andres Friedman, Public Storage Senior Vice President of Development. “For nearly five years, numerous team members across Public Storage, the City of Cupertino, and vendors have been closely aligned in the redesign, approval, construction, and completion of this landmark storage facility.”

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 [To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com] 

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Benchmarks show Huawei’s OceanProtect surpasses peer

As modern enterprises hail data as the lifeblood of their business, comprehensive data protection has become paramount. Indeed, the accelerated pace of digital transformation in recent years has made data a fundamental and strategic business resource as well as a key production factor.

Already, data is being generated, consumed and stored at an unprecedented pace. According to IDC, global data creation and replication is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23 percent from 2020 to 2025. In 2020, 64.2 ZB of data were created or replicated. The research firm reckons that the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage.

The data deluge is prompting prudent companies to refocus IT budgets on protecting data, especially their most critical business asset – production data.

Efficiency, performance, reliability

The cost of data protection aside, the major challenge for IT is to mitigate the risk of a devastating data loss in the face of mounting ransomware attacks and data breaches.

Further, the rapid development cycles of modern cloud-native application environments and evolving data-intensive applications – such as artificial intelligence, automation, Internet of Things and video surveillance – have increased the required levels of protection, performance and scale dramatically.

Such demands overwhelm the capabilities of traditional backup tools. In this exacting IT landscape, enterprises need data protection solutions that bear three critical attributes: highly efficient data reduction rates, fast backup and recovery performance, and highly reliable and available data copies

Data reduction efficiency enables enterprises to store and transfer large amounts of backup data expeditiously so they can optimize investments in storage hardware, increase effective capacity and reduce total cost of ownership.

Fast backup and recovery performance enables businesses to minimize operational downtime or disruption, especially in the aftermath of a ransomware attack. Underpinning these is reliability. Having a good, clean backup to recover from lays the foundation for an effective data protection strategy.

Geared to deliver these benefits, the Huawei OceanProtect data protection solution adopts a unified approach – protecting exabytes of structured and unstructured data generated by databases, file systems and VMware virtual machines (VMs) – that ensures zero service disruption, zero data loss, and long-term information retention.

Huawei OceanProtect outperforms peer

A recent report jointly published by Evaluator Group presented results of comprehensive benchmarking tests that compare the Huawei OceanProtect data protection system with a peer product, the Dell EMC PowerProtect DD, based on the three attributes mentioned above.

The test environment was configured for function and performance verification. Network connectivity and hosts had the same configurations. Each data protection system was connected to seven servers through IP switches. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 x86_64 operating system was deployed on four of the servers for performance tests.

VMware virtualization applications and Oracle database applications were deployed on two servers to compare and verify data reduction ratios in different scenarios. The other server was used as the media server for the backup application Veritas NetBackup (NBU).

Rapid backup and recovery

To test backup and recovery speed, the primary tool utilized was vdbench in file mode. The aim is to accurately perform file operations while ensuring high I/O rates to files as desired. The choice of tool removes potential bottlenecks from the backup application as well as any bias for or against any third-party backup application.

The Huawei OceanProtect and Dell EMC PowerProtect systems each included a storage pool created with a 1 PB filesystem. The filesystem was then NFS mounted to eight mount points on each of the four machines running the workloads. High performance optimizations were set for both test systems.

Test results show that Huawei OceanProtect’s Oracle backup performance of 6,853 MB/s was 2.6 times faster than the 2,621 MB/s clocked by the peer product from Dell EMC. In the VM backup performance test, OceanProtect’s speed of 8,004 MB/s was 2.4 times faster than the peer product’s 3,383 MB/s.

Next, the write performance of both systems was measured by simulating the first full backup of general applications. Here, Huawei OceanProtect’s 10,591 MB/s was 2.3 times faster than the peer product’s 4.640 MB/s.

Overall, Huawei OceanProtect delivered more than two times faster backup data rates than its leading competitor. The test results bolster Huawei OceanProtect’s status as a solution that creates opportunities for improved system utilization, cost savings and management efficiency.

After the backup simulations, the read bandwidth recovery performance of both systems was simulated and tested. The application restore performance comparison showed that Huawei OceanProtect’s read bandwidth after the first backup is 1.5 times that for the Dell EMC system.

Since the recovery test was performed after the first backup, the read bandwidth of systems like Dell EMC’s, which use rotating media (i.e. hard disk drive), will decline as additional backups are created and backup data become scattered. In contrast, this has little impact on the all-flash OceanProtect system so its recovery speed advantage over those systems would increase with additional backups.

Efficient data reduction

The NBU application was used to verify the data reduction ratios of both products in daily full backups of Oracle database and VM data.

The Oracle database to be backed up was activated with the NBU client installed and user authentication on the NBU client and Oracle database completed. From the management pages of both systems, Evaluator Group observed that the data reduction ratio of Huawei OceanProtect for daily full backup of the Oracle database was 43.4, higher than the 28.1 for the Dell EMC product.

The Linux VM to be backed up was prepared on each solution’s VMware ESXi server. Again, the Huawei OceanProtect’s data reduction ratio of 29.3 for daily full backup of VM data was higher than the peer product’s ratio of 19.7.

By achieving approximately 50 percent greater reduction ratios for various data, Huawei OceanProtect has an effective capacity of nearly 50 percent greater than Dell EMC PowerProtect when configured with the same raw capacity.

OceanProtect’s high data reduction ratios is an endorsement of its efficient usage of data storage infrastructure. Using advanced algorithms and byte-level compaction technologies, OceanProtect breaks data into chunks based on the source and other data characteristics before it deduplicates, compresses and compacts the data further.

High reliability

The Evaluator Group also observed how the simultaneous failure of any three disks in a storage pool affects backup services on both backup storage systems.

The analysts installed and configured the file backup client, prepared the test data, and recorded the Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5) value of the test data. They created a 1 TB NFS file share in a storage pool on the Huawei OceanProtect system and a 1 TB Mtree NFS file share in a storage pool on the Dell EMC system. Strikingly, OceanProtect supports RAID triple-parity (RAID-TP) but the peer product does not.

The file shares were mapped to the backup server as a backup storage repository. The analysts then ran a full backup of the files on the two systems. Data from this completed backup was then restored. The success of the recovery was verified by calculating the MD5 value of the restored file and using it to check the integrity of the restored data.

Meanwhile, the full backup job was run on the common file again. When this job was initiated, three disks were removed from the storage pool. Then, the status and alarms of the affected storage pool as well as the running status of the backup task were checked.

Consequently, the backup services of Huawei OceanProtect remained normal and showed no loss of access to data, but the backup services of the peer product from Dell EMC reported errors. Equipped with dual-controller active-active architecture, RAID-TP and ransomware prevention technologies, Huawei OceanProtect is well positioned to deliver 99.9999 percent availability, as can be shown by real-life examples beyond the lab.

Conclusion

The Evaluator Group’s test results evidently show that the Huawei OceanProtect outperforms the peer product in all three critical aspects: data reduction ratio, backup and recovery speed, and reliability.

Significantly, Huawei OceanProtect’s superior capabilities translate to shorter backup windows and data recovery times, reduced expenditure, and higher levels of uptime. They also affirm OceanProtect’s trustworthiness as an intelligent all-flash backup storage designed to address enterprises’ data protection pain points in a dynamic, data-intensive digital economy.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

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Hi Phil and Tony, please tell us about your current role and the technology you handle at NetApp and NVidia. 

Phil Brotherton is Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. He focuses on the engineering and partner ecosystem for customers use cases. AI with Nvidia is a great example of one of these solutions. Phil joined NetApp in the 2004. While the technologies change, the constant in his work at NetApp is it is always focused on helping customers optimize their business results with our products, services, and partnerships.

Tony Paikeday is Senior Director of AI systems at NVIDIA, responsible for the go-to-market strategy for NVIDIA’s DGX portfolio of AI supercomputers. For the last 6 years, his team has worked to democratize AI for enterprises around the globe. In collaboration with NetApp, our joint solutions have helped businesses everywhere enable faster insights from data, speeding the ROI of their investment in AI.

Please tell us how IT and AI have converged at NetApp? What do you think about AIOps solutions?

One example of how IT and AI have converged at NetApp is NetApp Active IQ. Active IQ is a digital advisor that simplifies the proactive care and optimization of NetApp storage. Fueled by telemetry data from our highly diverse installed base, it uses advanced AI and ML techniques to uncover opportunities to reduce risk and improve the performance and efficiency of your storage environment. It then provides the prescriptive guidance and actions to make it happen. This “actionable intelligence” simplifies storage administration and leads to higher availability, improved security, and higher-performing storage.

AIOps can help teams evaluate and act on their data more quickly and reduce manual work. AIOps can provide intelligence and enrichment to data and NetApp is all about managing, protecting, and sharing data.

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What is the core vision and technology foundation of NetApp-NVIDIA partnership? Could you please elaborate on it from the POV of AI and HPC workloads? 

NetApp has been collaborating with NVIDIA in AI infrastructure solutions since 2018, enabling enterprises to infuse their businesses with data-driven insights. This month, NetApp announced the certification of NetApp all-flash NVMe storage and BeeGFS parallel file system, with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. This turnkey AI data center solution brings together two screaming-fast storage systems that can handle the biggest AI workloads. Our latest solution makes it simple for all kinds of companies to deploy high-performance infrastructure that meets the demands of extreme AI workloads.

NetApp’s certification for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is built on a long history of collaboration to serve customers through our combined strengths. NetApp is unmatched in its role as strategic advisor to enterprise CIOs and NVIDIA offers leadership-class infrastructure with fastest time-to-solution for AI. NetApp and NVIDIA customer deployments scale from single GPU systems to hundreds of accelerated systems on-premises, at co-located facilities, and in the cloud. Only NetApp offers the data fabric for AI that underpins it end to end.

NetApp and NVIDIA have validated solutions for healthcare/life sciences (medicine), financial services, automotive, manufacturing, and government as well as solutions that address challenges across multiple industries, such as recommendation engines, natural language processing, computer vision, and others. NetApp and NVIDIA offer a full spectrum of IT infrastructure consumption models, from reference designs to pre-engineered solutions, to hosted AI Training as a Service, as well as a suite of industry specific solutions targeted at the most widely deployed use cases

We hear so much about Hybridization and acceleration of Cloud centric software architecture. Could you please tell us how your alliance with NVIDIA simplifies demand for HPC workloads?

In earning certification status for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, NetApp EF600 storage—combined with the BeeGFS parallel file system—exceeded NVIDIA’s baseline performance threshold. Each EF600 array and BeeGFS-based scalable building block adds up to 76GBps/23GBps of sequential read/write performance and 431TB of capacity. Both capacity and performance can be easily sized and optimized for metadata operations, data storage, or any mix of the two. And with proven 99.9999% availability, the EF600 significantly reduces system downtime.

The data-fabric glue between NetApp’s storage system and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is the BeeGFS parallel file system. This award-winning parallel file system, delivered by ThinkParQ, features a modern user space architecture that’s used in many supercomputing environments today. No more hacking away at kernels to get your parallel file system up and running. No more hardware vendor lock-in. No more paying for premium features you don’t need. And best of all, no more complicated pricing.

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What kind of training would be provided at HPC/AI Centers of Excellence? Would the training solve AI problems associated with Cloud and Data Ops industries?

The training would involve model training, inferencing, use cases, training in the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid. Specific to industries, NetApp has focused on AI in Financial Services, AI in medicine, AI in manufacturing, AI in government and AI in automotive.  For use cases, NLP and computer vision are two broad use cases we have focused on, in addition to HPC. These use cases appeal to many industries, as they can be customized to improve safety, operations, and communications across different domains.

IT security and application modernization remain the biggest challenges for most organizations. How do you solve these for your customers at NetApp?

The latest release of ONTAP data management software contains over 30 invaluable security features. It helps you enhance data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, while strengthening your company’s overall security posture. In addition, automatically protect your data from ransomware attacks and avoid paying ransoms, meet compliance requirements with ease, and create a zero-trust perimeter around your organization’s data—no matter where it lives. As a leader in data management, NetApp applies its skills to prevent the damage of ransomware where it hurts the most, at the data layer. Our portfolio of solutions focuses on thwarting threats to your data, while accelerating data recovery.

Specific to application modernization, with our industry-leading solutions that support hybrid multicloud capabilities, NetApp has become the go-to partner of enterprises looking to modernize their infrastructures and get maximum value from their SAP, Oracle, and SQL Server databases. Our cloud-connected all-flash systems are designed to help organizations accelerate their digital transformation and fuel data-driven strategies. Powered by NetApp ONTAP data management software, NetApp enterprise application solutions deliver the industry’s highest performance and resilience, superior flexibility, best-in-class data services, and tight integration with the world’s leading clouds: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon AWS.

Which industries are leading the space in adoption of AI and HPC platforms? Any case study/use-case example you would like to share from NetApp’s recent portfolio?

The following industries are leading in adoption of AI and HPC, and NetApp has a strong focus on:

• AI in Financial Services
• AI in Medicine
• AI in Manufacturing
• AI in Government
• AI in Automotive

 The following are NetApp examples of use cases:

• Using AI technology to optimize call center outcomes
• Sentiment analysis for financial services use cases
• Monitoring face mask usage in healthcare settings
• Deep learning to identify COVID-19 lesions in lung CT scans
• NetApp NLP web page
• NetApp Computer Vision web page

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What are your predictions for the AIOps industry and how NetApp is positioning itself in the supercomputing IT ecosystem?

AIOps is going to continue to grow and become more prominent.  For example, analysts expect the AIOps market to grow at >30% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) until 2023. The increasing demand for automation across various industries, (e.g., financial services, healthcare, manufacturing) is driving the growth.

NetApp is a market leader in high-performance computing (HPC) and analytics and has a pedigree in managing data at scale with extreme throughput and ultralow latency for mission-critical workloads. With NetApp EF600 all-flash arrays at the foundation of NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, customers get an agile AI solution that scales easily. BeeGFS enables customers’ entire storage capacity to be served up in a single namespace, significantly reducing data management headaches. And BeeGFS integration with NVIDIA Base Command Manager makes deployment of storage for DGX SuperPOD much simpler.

Thank you, Phil and Tony! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

The post AiThority Interview with Phil Brotherton, VP Solutions and Alliances at NetApp and Tony Paikeday, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, AI Systems at NVIDIA appeared first on AiThority.