Hello everyone, welcome to Equinix's Tech talk series. Today we're going to be talking about protecting your data in a hybrid environment with Dell Technologies and equinox and please be mindful of the resource section as well as the other materials that you have available to you as we go through this conversation with a few of our guests and I'd like to go ahead and introduce them. So I'm Gracie Andrews, and I'm a principal product evangelist here at Equinix Metal. And today I'm joined by Peter Mahoney, who is a senior manager of sales engineering at Dell Technologies and Glen Deck Hazer, who is a principal solutions architect here at Equinox. And before we get started, I want to do a little bit of framing around what we're going to be talking about today and what we're identifying as the problem that we're helping to solve. So here are a couple of stats and. Figures. They're from a global tech trends survey that we did this year in 2022. And so you'll see here one of the first questions that help with us to understand that, help us to better understand what we're talking about today is how people are deploying to the cloud. So we see that there's hybrid cloud, private cloud and public cloud with hybrid cloud having the most amount of respondents across the globe, basically saying that it's a main part of their component of digital first strategies. And that's really important to keep in mind, because you know, in a world where a lot of people are more familiar with either private or public cloud life, this hybrid cloud infrastructure really is one that is everywhere and is a part of the future. And then when we think about what that means, we really have to ask ourselves, well, what are the expectations around cloud migrations and you can see here that a lot of our surveyed respondents said that they will move more functions to the cloud. So as they go into this hybrid cloud model, they're actually going to be taking a lot of their resources, a lot of their functionality there. And that's really important to think about in a global connected market. And the final figure that I want to introduce to help us with our framing today is the kind of threats that exist to the business and to overall business success. As people move into this digital first strategy market and I do want to emphasize a couple of points, 1 being around cyber attacks, security breaches, right a lot of times when we think of threats to business, we may think of global shortages or we may think of a shortage in talent. But the truth of the matter is, according to the respondents. A lot of people are really concerned about security, especially around cybersecurity and the potential for data leaks. And I think that that really serves as a good backdrop for what Glenn and Peter are going to be talking about today. So I'll go ahead and pass it off to Glenn and Peter. So today we're going to be talking about a solution that addresses many of the dynamics that Grace was talking about. First of all, we have customers that are moving dramatically quickly to the hybrid cloud, the multi cloud and are still relying on data protection architectures that they designed years ago, hoping that they would extend somehow to these other locations. However, we're finding that there's a big stress on the organization and. Companies that find themselves victimized by cyber attacks, or that simply need to restore data from physical data loss or some sort of human error, are finding that their data protection architectures and operations aren't up to the challenge. And So what Dell and Equinus have done. Have come together with Equinox's global locality and interconnectivity and married it with Dell's data domain technology, which reduces the amount of data not just stored on a device, but that can be transmitted from a source to a target. Combine this into a solution that is a very forward thinking architecture for Metro located backup targets for lots of different backup. Software, Peter, did you want to add to that? Yeah. So, so first of all, Glenn and Grace, thank you very much for the opportunity to to join this tech talk and this is one of the biggest topics right now in Dell Technologies. We have a great story around cyber recovery, but as you know, grace, you kind of hit it in the very beginning. Everybody's moving to a cloud or with a hybrid cloud mindset. Cyber recovery and cyber attacks are like the number one topic that cisos CIO's IT departments are having conversations with now Dell Technologies, we have a great story around cyber protection and how to recover from a ransomware attack, but honestly when we partner with Equinix, this is where the solution really came together. How do you provide customers that really want that cyber resiliency with the whole concept of a hybrid cloud and a cloud mentality? So that's where I'm really excited about how our offerings have come together. To provide these solutions for the marketplace. It's a good time to talk about Equinix Metal. Go ahead. Sorry. And I think you're going to actually hit on this Glen, as you kind of talk about how Equinix Metal fits into this model. You're using words like resiliency and flexibility, and I I'm curious if you could define what that means in the model we're looking at and the way in which our solutions are knit together to provide that. So resiliency represents the ability to come back from an event quickly, which is extremely important it it's one thing to do a backup job, but the reason we do backup is to restore. And so if you can't restore within a an acceptable service level then your business is going to suffer and and that that has a real cost associated with it. Most organizations haven't updated their architectures to accommodate for hybrid multicloud maybe they're starting to back up. Inside of a cloud and most customers we speak to don't like the idea that they have production workloads in a specific cloud, and then they're also backing up those workloads into that same cloud. The customers we speak to are telling us that this is a risk that they that no one has really addressed well. The solution that we put together here does address that, and Equinix metal to give a little introduction to that platform is the ability to put single tenant. Bare metal servers and network. Adjacent to the multicloud. Also adjacent to metros, in which customers may have resources, assets, locations of their own either inside the Equinix platform itself or perhaps in a remote site local to that site that allows us to have what we'll call a data pivot point where all backups from that area can come in from some backup software that is compatible with data domains technology. Deduplicate that data so that we can avoid. Expensive egress charges from the the public clouds and also make the most out of our our network links. And store that data. On Equinix Metal running data domain, the virtual edition. So this allows us to have data located in various metros as depicted in this in this diagram. Don't worry about the the metro names themselves, but it could be any of our 19 metros that we have back next metal available in today. And be able to restore that data that is now located on the data Domain Virtual Edition on Equinix Metal. To any of the sites that are located either. Approximate by you know, the multicloud into various cloud providers and we connect over 1200 providers, service providers on our Equinix fabric or to customers sites within Equinix platform or through their own on Prem sites. This capability happens at a much faster rate than it would be in the cloud itself because we're leveraging all flash technology. And this allows us to do things with data domain that you typically can't do when you're in the cloud. We actually have the capability of restoring a cloud workload back to that same cloud faster than you could if you put data domain VE in that same cloud. So that ability gives you a faster restore again. That's why we're doing all this. From some sort of a cyber event or simply a loss of data through human error, right? And cloud, a lot of that happens. And so, Grace, I also want to come back to the cyber resiliency, right. So in Dell Technologies, we talk about a cyber plan. And the solution that we've partnered with Equinix is, is one element of a plan, right? So you have the Cecil organizations, there's network monitoring tools, there's Active Directory, you know, making sure that the right people have the right access to data outside threat vectors. For those of you that remember the log 4 J where there was capabilities for bad. Actors or hackers to pretty much access server infrastructure through web portals. These are all real threat factors that Cecil organizations are fighting and the solution that we have created both Dell Technologies and Equinox. Is a part of that plan. Hey, in the event that you've done everything possible to try and prevent an attack from happening, or a cyber ransomware event. In the event that you are hit and you have to recover from that, you're going to be looking to your backup and restore environments. And like a great example of this is the colonial pipeline. It brought the eastern United States to its knees and all because a hacker organization came in and impacted the billing database for that for those oil production so they could ship the oil. There's no issue with shipping oil, they just couldn't build people and so rather than charge customers. You know revenue that they may not have incurred, they had to wait and restore the entire database from backup. And so that's what we're trying to create from a solution here is that, hey look, the CSO organizations with real time threat monitoring, that's that's all important without a doubt. But in the event that you are attacked, you're going to be looking to your recovery and backup systems to put that data back. And many Times Now ransomware is targeting, deliberately targeting your Dr copies and your backup application software and hardware to destroy that data because if they can impact that environment, they can pretty much guarantee that they're going to get a payday. And so part of the solution that we've, you know, created with Equinix on metal is really important. So a couple things that customers really want nowadays. They wanna they wanna cloud like experience and that's what metal provides and they want the ability to provide software defined capabilities and that's the real value here is that I can take software licenses and I can bring it into the echo next metal environment and I can leverage your fabric to connect to anywhere you have. What was it? 4400 different interconnected points all over the globe, spanning from a WS Azure GCP OC I. IBM Cloud and various destination endpoints, these are extremely powerful statements or capabilities that end customers are relying on to provide a cyber resiliency to come back from an attack. So that's why I love this offering that we've put together. I think that that's a really great segue into, you know, maybe this is a statement I'm making or maybe it's a question, but a lot of times, you know what you just said, people will, for instance, attack your reserves, they'll go where they know you would go for your backups to ensure they get paid, right. So if your disaster recovery plan is really contingent on backups that live on the cloud, other clouds, etcetera, I something I've heard, Glenn. Today is that there is a best practice to protect your public cloud data outside of a given cloud provider, and I think that that's an interesting part of the solution as well, and I've got a diagram here that I'd love for you all to apply some of what you've been saying to because you know this hybrid multi cloud data protection and projection. You know image that we're looking at is really impactful and important for risk for mitigating risk and decreasing, you know risk and also increasing. Resiliency, right, and so I'm curious how the integration and the relationship between the two the tools work in this kind of framework. Well, in, in this particular example, we're showing all of that, plus we're adding the extra dimension of business flexibility, right, and giving the leverage over your data back to the owner rather than to a cloud provider that would hold it hostage with tremendous egress. Again, it's one of the things that customers don't like about having cloud providers provide their own backup using the same cloud resources, right. It provides not just a risk, but it also creates even greater data gravity in a place that the customer does not control. The the whole point is that on Equinix Metal and on the platform Equinix, the customers in total control of their environment. So in this particular example, as we number the different in in order, the different operations first we have a a workload that's running in a WS and we have some backup software doesn't and any of the backup software that that data domain integrates with. And there's a litany of them, not just from Dell, but from also Dell's third party partners that would back that data up from a. In the US, send it over a Equinix fabric. Which connects again over 1200 different partners over to the data Domain Virtual Edition in Equinox Metal and that is a specifically engineered device built to run data domain Virtual Edition at the highest possible performance levels. That data domain data now can be either restored back to a WS as we see in the green, where we can restore that data at about 4X or more the speed of what it would have taken if you had that same technology. Located within a WS. This is not because of data domain run differently in the cloud. It's simply because in the cloud you're running with a shared network architecture and a lot of network limitations and and architectures that prohibit maximum performance of the application. We are giving data domain Virtual Edition all of the power it requires for maximum performance local with our flash and NBME devices. Now that's great so we can take the data from a WS. Provide a 75% reduction using data domains technology as well as the reduced cost of egress using Equinix fabric and private interconnect to that data domain and restore it again more than four 4X the speed of in the cloud. But talk about the business flexibility and now we have the capability of taking that data. And perhaps restoring it to a different cloud. If you want to try a SQL database that was an AWS and restore it to Azure to try something out, you need to only restore the data from D from the DE on equinox metal to Azure using another equinox fabric connection which you can create in 5 minutes or less, or even automate it through Terraform Ansible. And create a new outcome for your business. Should you want to repatriate data and 49% of businesses these days have repatriated a cloud workload, either one or more, over the last year. Equinox metal provides a great place to spin up new hosts. And restore the data from data domain Virtual Edition right to hosts on Equinix Metal very quickly and and create. More of a private cloud outcome. So again, this opens up a whole world of optionality and gives you back leverage over your data from and and also gives you sovereign control over that data for you to do what you want and take egress out of the business decision when you do so. And and also I want to add some of the great choices that we made with metal. So so Glenn kind of articulated that you know these are running on all flash power edge servers. I really want to accentuate the importance of that. So in Dell Technologies we have analytic software and that analytic software integrates with our data domain Virtual Edition. What are we doing here? So back? The benefit of copies of data backup is that not only can I recover from it, but I want to be able to use that data. So Dell Technologies has created this AI software called Cyber Sense and the whole purpose of this software is to provide analytics of your backup data looking for anomalies or any type of ransomware attack vectors. We use 200 different reports that are looking at the data in various ways, looking for an attack and the benefit here with an all flash powered server I can scan that data much faster I can speak on. You know, personal experience with this that as the datasets grow it's more difficult to scan those workloads, especially when we leverage high density disk and SAS drives. But again the value here with the all flash metal servers, I can scan that data significantly faster. So not only can I recover the data much faster back to either a various cloud AWS, Azure, GCP or back on Prem, but I can let my end user know faster that hey, this data has been impacted by ransomware. What are my good copies of data? The more data I can scan in a period of time, the better of it outcome that I can provide to you with information, and so that's the other big benefit here is that I can provide analytics much, much faster to my end users. More I think to to add to that for customers that aren't even using those kind of analytic kind of applications, the ability of data domain, Virtual Edition running on Equinix Metal to provide that kind of performance. Reduces time to restore and that in in in any event, no matter what application you're using is a huge value to a customer. So while analytics are absolutely an important part of what Dell brings to the table from my recovery from a cyber attack and customers really take a good look at this solution and and it is a widely used solution in the industry today. It's the one I see most even in a simple case for customers who are using this technology in a very simple way. In the cloud to backup cloud resources, we now have an option for doing it faster in a sovereign way that now gives you a lot more optionality on your data. Yeah, thank you so much for that. I think that that's. You know, it's a lot of information for me, right? I I don't get to get my hands on the products as often as I desire to. But it really makes me think about the kinds of customer questions I hear or that, you know, sometimes second hand, sometimes first hand, really about what is disaster recovery, what is resiliency. A lot of time these questions, they're philosophical in nature, but there are concrete best practices that can be instituted. Immediately today to get people started, and I guess I'll kick off our Q&A with that, and that is if someone is trying to come up with a resiliency plan or a restoration strategy in case of disaster or crisis, where do you begin? What are two or three things that everyone who is new to this journey should do? And if they've been doing it, what are two or three things that they can use to up level the kind of resiliency that they're? You know, integrating into their solution. Peter, so creates great, great question. So let me kind of start with a couple of things that we think of as best practices. So number one, you need to kind of separate disaster recovery from cyber recovery. Those are two different events. So number one, you should always be thinking, hey, is this a DDR type of event or is this a cyber recovery event because there are two different things and let me provide you a really good example of that, right. So if you have a natural disaster where you know a data center is taken out and you don't have corruption to data, most customers have a secondary site. Which is many times, and Equinox, Colo, where they can spin up that data, they've been doing asynchronous or synchronous copies and in great, they're back up and running in a short amount of time. But when you come back from a cyber attack, that's very different. You're trying to figure out where did they attack, what's corrupted, where am I exposed and what data is good. And so step #1 figure out are you in a cyber attack recovery scenario or you in a disaster recovery scenario. And those are two different planning that you have to take into account for other areas that you have to kind of, you know, think about is again RTO and RPO's is a very common statement. And again the big benefit here with metal is, is the. The capability to recover using flash technologies, those performances are much faster, but you always need to look at not only just infrastructure such as Active Directory, DNS. So if you are compromised from a cyber attack, the basic plumbing is attacked first. And we've seen this with many customers. Hey, we didn't know what we were being attacked, we lost Active Directory, we lost DNS, none of our servers could communicate and we were completely locked out of the environment. And so that's why it's always important to make sure that the basic plumbing. Not only you know the critical database applications and web applications are protected, but again, those basic plumbing environments as well. Glenn would love to hear your comments on that. Yeah, I mean that that's a fantastic answer. I'll, I'll, I'll pile on on that in that in in the world of Equinix Metal and the Equinix platform. Take all of the stuff that Peter just talked about and then add the ability to spin up an on demand form of servers running the applications that to be to be restored and also dynamically creating the network connections to get those servers connected into your environment. Because you may not be able to or want to restore onto the systems that you that you were originally running on for lots of different reasons. They were, they got cyber attacked. You never know if there's something in the BIOS. There's a whole lot of things that have to be done to those servers before you can feel comfortable putting them back into main productions, because otherwise you'll be back in the same situation. So we have the ability to spin up new environments quickly to restore to and that value. If you have the data already on data domain VE on Equinix Metal, you are located in an extremely high network bandwidth situation to restore that data onto servers local to that environment and you'll be back up a lot faster than you would if you had to go and buy servers, set them up in a clean room somewhere and get them going. This dynamic is extremely valuable to a customer. Yeah, and Glenn let me kind of add something that because you just you just kind of reminded me of a story. So hey, for those listeners, please keep in mind when a when a customer is impacted by a ransomware attack. Hey, here's a fun fact the FBI gets involved. Here's another fun fact. They confiscate the equipment so you may be thinking to yourself that, hey, listen, I want to recover. I'm going to lay my the information to backup data I'm going to recover back to the original infrastructure. Hey, if that infrastructure was compromised, the FBI confiscated, you may be finding yourself. Without any infrastructure at all. And hey, so here's the value of metal. You can spin up hardware platforms on demand to leverage compute and storage resources that you can recover into because you may not have those resources, they may be taken away. So that's a great point. We've actually seen that happen with a lot of our customers and then they try to order service from us and we're like, hey, there's there's a six month lead time for servers right now. There's a supply chain issue still happening in this world, in this world of ours and we can't get through those service fast enough to you. You can't be down for six months. And then Q and metal. Yeah. And and and just the last point on that is the metal doesn't have to be your final resting place, but it's the quickest way to get to that first restore. Once it's there, you can then methodically and at your own your own pace migrate some of those workloads to various cloud vendors as you see fit, right. So it it because of the adjacency of our Equinix metal to the higher the hyperscalers, the public cloud providers and our ability to dynamically interconnect to all of them, it gives you tremendous. Optionality on what happens when things get bad. We're the ones you wanna be with when things get bad. Exactly right and and look again. People listening to this webinar. The reality of a scenario is that. When we come, when we talk about cyber recovery, typically the most common thing attacked database workloads. Windows operating systems. There's technologies out there and we, we do a great job ourselves of protecting database workloads, protecting VMware images cause again, VMware is still the elephant in the room that the King Kong of on Prem hyperscale hypervisors. And so you want to leverage technologies that can put the data back quickly. And so for example, leveraging image baked based backup technologies and then recovering to either VMC or AVS or GC VE. Leverage those capabilities within the public cloud that allows you to do in a life or like transfer of the data type. So if I backed up the data as a VMDK and you don't have the ability to spin that up at your on premise, great with the equinox fabric and then this high speed connectivity links go recover that VMDK image back into again VMC or AVS or GCE, you have a lot of flexibility with this solution to recover that those workloads. Yeah. And I think you know something about the way you are answering these questions that I really am enjoying is that you're bridging the old world with the new world, which is what hybrid cloud does. You know, you're you kind of wrapped up by talking about images and using those as you know your first point of restore and how that can be placed in a flexible model like metal. And I think that it's really important for all of our listeners today to recognize that that's what we're really trying to do here with solutions like D VE. On metal and on platform. Equinix and that's giving you the flexibility to bridge the old world with the new world without having to sacrifice consistency without having to lose Peace of Mind. And with the ability to really adapt quickly. And I think that that's a foundational piece of any digital solution, especially in a modern world. So with that I really want to thank you all for being such great guests. I personally have learned a lot. I feel very confident in saying that I think our listeners have also learned a lot. If I'm allowed to speak for them and on their behalf and I really hope we can continue this conversation into the future. And you know for folks who are watching today or listening, thank you for joining us. We've really enjoyed having you know your attention and if you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at AM, EREV ENT at equinix.com. That's a mayor event at equinix.com and will respond as quickly as possible and friendly reminder to also. Look at your resources. They're a great place to get started with D VE and Equinix metal. Thank you for joining us and we hope you can join us next.
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