Protecting the Cloud-Native Edge: CloudCasa and SUSE Integration

Hey everyone, we're back here at SUSECON. You're watching Techstrong TV, and our next guest is Pawel Stanietz. Pawel is with Catalogic?

Catalogic. Catalogic. Absolutely.

And the product is? CloudCasa. Very good.

So Pawel, I messed up the name. People out here may not even have heard the name. Oh, no worries.

Yeah. Well- Tell us about... First, let's start with the company, and then we'll go.

Absolutely. Well, so the company was founded a really long time ago, if we look at the roots when it all started. And I think it was 1960s, but we don't want to go that far.

Catalogic as a entity that exists today was founded in 2013 as a spinoff of Syncsort. Okay. So, Syncsort decided just to focus on different things, and Catalogic separated out.

Now, that means that we are bringing a lot of experience to the table in the data protection space, right? Mm-hmm. So we work with all the big boys in that space.

So IBM's, NetApp's, and HP's, and Dell's of the world. So, we did it all. And we do have two products.

The one that we actually moved over from Syncsort is called DPX. Previously Backup Express, maybe some of you remember that, some of the people watching this. Now these days it's called DPX, and it's the enterprise data protection platform.

So it gives us a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge about not only the technology, not only how to do backups, but also what the customers expect. What are they restoring, how are they restoring, in what cases, what do they expect? So fast-forward to about 2020, when we started Kubernetes getting proper traction in enterprise implementations.

" We looked deeper into that and said like, "Oh, no. " Because it makes it so easy to scale, monitor everything that you deploy on it, right? Right.

And over time, we were more and more convinced we made the right call by developing CloudCasa because now it can run virtual machines, databases, and AI workloads. And it's basically the foundation of modern AI, right? Sure.

So, that's what Catalogic is. A lot of experience, a lot of knowledge in the data protection space translated into cloud-native form and everything that we put in the CloudCasa. Which is a separate product built on Kubernetes for Kubernetes, which is completely cloud native because this is what we saw.

We cannot do a legacy thing and convert it. No, you can't lift and shift that. You need native.

That's exactly what we thought. Yeah. Why would we force customers to actually keep part of a legacy infrastructure to actually host data protection- To host their data protection.

Yeah ... and then run everything else on Kubernetes? So we thought- It made no sense ...

we got to bet on one thing. Makes sense. We didn't really talk about your background, though.

Give us a little sense of where you've been, how you got here. Oh, well, I wish I could say I've been everywhere, but no. And I'm working in IT for about, I think now it's 25, I don't even know.

Long time. Hey. Long time.

I got you beat though, but still I know. Well, let's see. We can talk offline.

But, yeah, I started in low levels, like IT administration, doing little things for smaller companies. Then I spent almost 15 years for one of the largest financial institutions, also going through lots of motions. Working in information security, working in architecture departments, architecting systems risks, trade risk systems, or internal systems for that financial institution.

And then 2018, I had an opportunity to join Catalogic and also went through couple of motions there. Now acting as overseeing the technology for Catalogic software and driving the technology alliances in EMEA for CloudCasa product. Love it.

It's a great story, man. Yes. I've seen it all from the very bottom.

But that's the way you learn. That's exactly what I think. You know?

That's exactly what I think. You get a lot of these Gen Z, whatever the right term is for the... Everybody wants to start as the president, you know?

And it don't work like that. Yeah. You got to put in your time.

I won't tell you what I wanted to be when I was a little kid, but my mom remembers. Yeah. Well, it happens, and you got time.

Yeah. But anyway, it's an interesting journey when you... And I've spoken to other vendors, let's call them, who had legacy prior to Kubernetes, prior to this whole cloud-native stack becoming ascendant, if you will, and then Kubernetes changes all that.

It becomes the platform, not just an orchestrator, the platform. Sure. When we say Kubernetes, we're not just talking.

We're talking about Docker, well, not Docker, but containers. Oftentimes Docker too, but containers, service mesh, the entire stack. Mm-hmm.

Right? Re-architecting applications for a microservice-based architecture. It truly is a platform unto itself.

" Yeah. That's exactly what we thought. Yeah.

I think a lot of companies stumbled on that, to tell you the truth. They didn't realize it, and it was just the same old, same old. And I think the market kind of punished them for that.

Do you know what I mean? When we talk about this, though, my experience has always been everything sounds great until you got to use it. You know?

Then we say, "Well, it didn't work. This backup didn't work so good. The DR doesn't work so great.

" What have you seen as part of this transition to truly cloud-native? How has that kind of changed the way you guys look at the world, if you will? The way customers interact with you, right?

It's a different animal. Yeah, it is. It's definitely is, and that's a great question and great way to explain how the world changes.

And I remember the conversations when I started in the data protection space, and it was mainly about how many VMs we can protect, right? Or how much data we want to protect, and can you actually protect it? Like where we will be storing it.

And that was basically, well, the two, three most important questions. Now conversations with the customers that are using Kubernetes are so much different. All of them were able, thanks to the Kubernetes infrastructure, to fine-tune, to basically design the architecture in the way that fits, that is 100% aligned with their business model, with the way how they want to operate, how resilient they want to be in certain spaces, and where they can actually allow for some kind of a trade-off because they can always redeploy.

Sure. So now we are talking about cloud deployments, hybrid cloud, private clouds, complete self-hosted or even air-gapped environments. So now this is what we are talking, and this is where we thought, okay, if we started as a SaaS with CloudCasa, right?

Yeah. Because we thought, okay, this is where Kubernetes is gaining adoption. Well, everybody was.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So what do we thought, okay, no, but you can run Kubernetes on premises.

Now so how it's going to work? So what we did, we designed the architecture to be flexible to support both cases. So you can run control plane in a cloud and still protect the workloads that are sitting on your infrastructure in your data center.

So this is changing everything. If you still need to deploy your data protection stack somewhere, on a virtual machine somewhere deep, or it forces you to reconfigure a network and so on. So what I think Kubernetes is bringing is the sovereignty, which is a very- It's the topic here.

Yes ... timely... It's the topic.

And allows you to completely adapt your infrastructure to your business model. Now you have to fit into that. You have to support what customers want, what are they doing, and help them protect this in the way that is aligned to what they're doing, not forcing them to actually- No ...

change something. Part of this whole sovereignty- Yes ... discussion, to me, a word that goes with it is freedom.

Yes. Right? Absolutely.

I may want to just keep doing what I'm doing because it works for me. I may not. I may want to do this.

I may try this and try something else after. When people talk about sovereignty, it's about having choice and picking your solutions and not being dictated to, or using the solution you want in the way you want, and not being subject to anyone else. But really, to me, it's a question of freedom, right?

It's a freedom of choice- It is ... freedom of what you want to do, and it's hard to fight against freedom, right? How do you talk against freedom?

That's a great point. And we had an amazing session on Monday that was the whole theme that was sovereignty this time. Yes.

There were a lot of nice conversations, round table conversations, when people could explain what do they think about sovereignty, how it's going to impact IT purchases or IT decisions in the next five years, but also how they understand sovereignty. And I think this is fundamental because we need to answer ourself, what do we understand? Do we understand sovereignty as something that is provided by our government or our- Whatever ...

leaders? political entity, yeah? Well, so that's one perspective.

The other thing, you said freedom, I think freedom is absolutely at the bottom of this. But you can achieve freedom, especially in IT, especially in that space that we are operating in, by understanding what are your core values, not only in terms of technological decisions, but also the business decisions. Because eventually the business is about providing value to the external- Yes ...

parties, right? Right. If you understand what you're doing, then you can choose...

And sorry for not letting you speak. No, no, no. Go ahead.

I'll finish briefly. No, no, this is- You got to- ... your interview, not mine.

Talk. All right. So you have to understand what you want to provide and how you want to provide, and then if you really understand what you're doing, you can choose the right solution.

Right. If you know-Why you did make that choice. If a situation is risky or uncomfortable, you should be able to choose another solution that allows you to do the same thing.

I think this is sovereignty. That is. A lot of companies are in a very tight spot right now because they have not thought about how, at the bottom, they will be doing business.

What are they doing? They just decide, okay, we're going to choose this cloud provider, and it figures out scaling. That's great.

It's going to figure out scaling. Now, they don't even know what they are running underneath. No.

So if they would need to switch, now they got to reverse engineer what their processes- It's rebuilding the whole platform ... their business model. Absolutely.

The whole stack. So, I think the sovereignty should start in your company by understanding what are we trying to do and how are we doing. Then you got to match, you got to build around it with the technologies, libraries, infrastructure, everything.

So, I think this is important. This is what we need to emphasize. This is.

So, level one you described. " Sure. And open source gives me that freedom, right?

Because I'm not locked into any one vendor. I want my Kubernetes from Rancher. I want my Kubernetes from Red Hat.

Wherever I want to go. " And I think what we found out is that SUSE's a great example. They're an open company.

They specialize in- Absolutely ... open source stuff. One of the things I think they're doing smart is saying, "Look, we'll support you.

" Sure. "You want to run a different Kubernetes distro? " Absolutely.

That's true freedom. That's true choice. Not just because I pick something that's open source, I'm free.

Right? A lot of companies I think have gotten locked in making that choice, right? Absolutely.

And it is what it is. Let's talk about the relationship, though, between your company and SUSE. How does that partnership work?

I would say it's been an amazing story for the last couple of years, and I have to tell you that the moment we started working with SUSE on aligning a little bit better, we knew that this is going to be absolutely fantastic path forward. So right now, we are certified for, I think, everything that's possible on Kubernetes with SUSE. So we are certified for Rancher, the previous edition, RKE1.

We are certified for RKE2, for SUSE Virtualization, SUSE AI workloads, and we are building on top of that by integrating with everything that SUSE team is providing to their users. For example, Rancher management UI. So we were one of the first companies that actually prepared a Rancher extension, so now you don't have to leave the Rancher management UI to manage your backups, to take a look at the dashboard.

Are my backups, are my clusters protected? Are my backups running fine? But not only that, in recent weeks, SUSE did launch the AI assistant- Yes ...

the Rancher management UI. Again, we are- One of the first ... one of the first, if not the first, company that built MCP extension to our data protection product that allows the administrator to actually talk to their backups in the context of their clusters that they have configured in a Rancher management UI.

" And this is really nice because AI can compare all the data, and this is what AI is actually very good at. It can correlate a lot of data, look for patterns, and interpret them, and provide an output that is guiding you to the right answer. So you will see you got this amount of workloads, and you have this amount of data, and it's changing on a given frequency.

I was trying this today. I was asking how often data changes on my PVCs, and it was actually able, using observability metrics, it was able to tell me, like, "These PVCs are changing really frequently, but your data, your backup policies, are only configured to run once a week. " So this is kind of a non-obvious value that can be built.

And the beauty of working with SUSE is, as you said, it's open source. You're free to work with the team to take this thing, look inside, figure it out, add your extensions, modify it to meet your expectations. So I think this is really...

The multi-Linux support. I could talk on and on about this, but I think the- No, look. I've been writing about this this week.

They've built a- Amazing ... really nice and a great ecosystem of partners. That's exactly right.

Yep. The ecosystem is going to be very important. Very strong.

Well, it goes to the sovereignty piece. It goes to the- Exactly ... freedom of choice and everything else.

Hey, we're about out of time. I want to end with one thing. If people want more information, where do they go?

io, or you can find me on LinkedIn. Right. io will have a lot of information about our product, our alignment with SUSE.

We are also in SUSE catalog, marketplace. Real easy to find. Love it.

Pawel, thank you so much. Thank you, Jimena. A pleasure.

A pleasure. Hey, we're here at Techstrong TV here at SUSECON all day. We're going to have more in a second.

Standby.