What’s NEW at Object First

Anthony Cusimano, Director of Solutions Marketing, Object First. We've talked to you about why we exist, walked you through how we do it, and I'm going to tell you what's new and what you can get with Object First today. So, start with a little timeline.

I am employee number four. I was there, Gandalf, in 2020. We started off with OOTB, out-of-the-box immutability.

It was a box. We had a 128 terabyte and a 64 terabyte. Since then, we have added numerous iterations, 192, 2040, 432, as well as our mini line, which I'd love to show you about.

So let's take a look at our biggest box today. OOTB 432. 432 terabytes.

It is a 2U. All of our OOTB nodes are 2U. They rack and stack pretty easy.

The maximum size on any cluster is four nodes. 7 petabytes on a single four-node cluster of our 432 OOTBs. Now, if you've ever seen our marketing material, you'll see us say beyond seven petabytes of storage.

That's because what we do, because luxury of us working with Veeam backup and replication and their scale-out backup repositories, you can use as many clusters in that setup as you'd like, so you can effectively scale both in capacity and performance to however much server space you have. 432 is our biggest box today. We do leverage RAID 60 on our 432, so that gets you up to six disks lost, I believe, before you actually lose anything from a hardware side of things.

And everything we ingest on the network side is over two port, or sorry, a single dual-port SFP28 connection. And on the other side is our smallest box, the OOTB Mini. And we actually just announced this last year.

It's one of our newest hardware offerings, really built for the small space. If you have edge location, if you're a service provider and you want to get nice penetration in some of your smaller customers, it's a great little box that can just run on a desk or table. Comes in 8, 16, 24 node sizes today, or I should say tower sizes, it's not really node or 2U by traditional sense.

It does cluster the same way as our 2U boxes do. In fact, there is nothing different about the operating procedure in this box at all. Same software, same underlying operating system, just a different form factor and slightly different way that we ingest data.

On this one, you can see it's either two 10 Gig Base T or two SFP 10 Gig ports. So the only thing that changes really is the network configurations on these, and we try to make it appropriate for the environment it resides in. Great thing about these is they can be clustered the same way.

You can turn the honeypot on, just like we showed you in our previous section. So it's no compromise, just a smaller size. We also announced last year a new acquisition model.

Up to that point in time, we were operating at a perpetual-only offering. So you had to buy your box, own your box. We now have a consumption model that allows you to effectively subscribe to an Object First service, where we will work with you to understand what your capacity is, and we actually have an entire sizing calculator we've built for this operation because we know sizing storage is not easy.

Sizing immutable storage is even harder, because then you got to do the math of how long do we keep that data for and when can we actually remove it. So we built an entire calculator. We have a team that works with our customers that goes through how much data they have, how long they want to keep it for in an immutable setting, and then we will find the right size box for them and walk them through a tiered service.

Yeah. Let's dig into that for just a second. Jack Palmer with Paradigm Technica.

So you talked earlier about getting alerts for you're running out of storage or whatever. So what is the, "I need more space"? What's the process?

How does that work? What's the atomic level of add? I love that you asked that question.

So the reason we talk about telemetry in our how section is it is a requirement for consumption. So if you are going to use our subscription-based model, you have to have telemetry enabled because we need to know how much you're using, not just because we want to bill you, but because if you are getting close to that threshold, we actually send you a new box, and we have an entire swap-over mechanism to move your data from box A to box B, so you have room for growth. And we do that sizing exercise to make sure box B is the right size for future.

So I'll follow up with a question on that. Is that process where you outgrew box A, we're going to send you box B. Here's the process.

Is that a white glove thing from you guys that you handle the transition to the new box? Or is it, "Hey, call support and hope you have your Friday clear because you might be here a while," right? So we send box B.

They actually will configure it in their environment, and then we have a migration process that will occur. And then they send box A back. They send box A back.

Yep. We try to make it just as simple as it was with perpetual, 15 minutes or less. The same generic principle applies here.

We do not want to create confusion or complexity for our customers whenever we can. And the great thing about this is it really is pay for what you use, not pay for a large-scale box that you might not ever fill. And that's why we do this sizing exercise with every customer when we go through this process.

Hardware refreshes are included, and we do believe this actually creates a more predictable billing and management cycle when you are on this subscription setting. So just to give you an idea of how that looks, you got your CapEx, which is the little orange dotted line here. Hardware refresh is a jump.

I've grown. I need a bigger box. With consumption, there's only one point in time where that line is higher than it would be with the traditional CapEx model.

And we do see this as a benefit for-Growing customers, right? If you are a service provider and you've got a new customer, you're not exactly sure how they're going to grow over the next few years. Consumption probably makes the most sense.

We run the sizing exercise. We try and predict where they're going to be, and we try and get them in the right box on that first setup. And if they do grow exponentially, we're ready for that, and we have a system to get them in place.

So super simple to adopt. We do the free consultation. We go through the sizing exercise.

We figure out how much you need. You place your order with an Object First partner. It is worth mentioning we do not do any direct sales.

Everything is partner-led. They have to be a Veeam certified reseller. And we ship you the Oopjee appliance.

You get a fixed monthly amount by your Object First partner. If anything goes above the baseline, you'll be billed on a per terabyte basis, and you add capacity as your needs grow. Before we move on from consumption, any other questions about this?

So sneak preview time. I talked about how the Oopjee Mini is one of our most recent announcements. Consumption, we also announced last year.

At our Oopjee Mini event, we teased Fleet Manager, and in the next month, we're actually going to release Fleet Manager on May the 6th. That will be our official launch event for this. But I'm going to walk you guys through some insights here.

Nothing too secret. I don't care if it gets out. But this is your chance to get a sneak peek at what we're thinking next.

So you've already got the idea. We can support a lot of data. 7 terabytes on a four-node cluster.

We're thinking about service providers. We're thinking about growth. We're thinking about seven petabytes and beyond.

7 or maybe two petabytes each. You're growing. You've got a lot of storage to manage.

So we've been thinking about this. We've actually come up with a solution for this, and it's called Fleet Manager. It's in beta with quite a few of our customers right now.

And the entire point of it is to be effectively a service that they can log into in a secure cloud connection. No hardware, no software needs to be set up on their end. They simply log in.

They plug in their information. It's all telemetry-driven, same way our consumption is, and they will get a single pane of glass to go and view all of their Object First deployments. So what it does is it gives you unified fleet operations.

It's cloud-based. So that means that there's no setup or configuration required. If you are a service provider, you even have a delegation option.

So you might set up your master account, and you, the service provider, have a view of all of your clients. You can even delegate access so that your individual customers or clients can then log into Fleet Manager if they have multiple clusters across multiple sites, and they can get that individual view. It's all secure.

No backup data is ever transferred into the Fleet Management platform. Everything that we receive is purely telemetry usage, health, system health, alerts, notifications, Honeypot information. We never send any backup data.

That stays on the appliance. And what it creates is a single place to log into and see your Object First clusters. Using secure access controls, you can delegate who gets to see what.

Logical separation. If we don't want customer A to see what customer B is doing, we've got all that and their multi-tenant visibility and access controls there. And effectively what it gives you is a global operations place to log in to really set up your control and then manage your Object First environment from that single view.

And we see this as a great way for specifically service providers and partners who are operating at much larger scales than maybe even individual large businesses to really ramp up, optimize, and make sure that all of their customers have that absolute immutability so they're able to recover when they need to. And we can get into more details here. I think what's more important on the right, we have some screenshots.

So you can get a look, a sneak preview really, of what this looks like. So it is a web-based user interface, just like you saw in our Honeypot demo, but with a focus on logging in, being able to see whatever it is you delegate access to see. And it's all secure through existing authentication services with Entra ID.

So when we launch on May 6th, if you are going to log into this on that day, you simply have to fill in your information and start delegating through telemetry. Centralized fleet view. And the great thing about this is, again, it really gives the controls to the admins on who gets to see what.

We're never going to give up any backup data. That's not there. But what we do want to ensure is, "Hey, I'm an admin.

I do not want maybe my IT staff to get access to see all of my customers' and clients' data. " There's lots of different ways you can restrict role-based access control for visibility but still be able to get into this single place with that login. And like I mentioned before, we do support Honeypot, so any alerts or any of the pieces that we might capture will be bubbled up into this view as well.

And when it comes to operations, obviously alerts, events, we want those front and center. But we also want to make sure that our consumption customers or our service providers who are using the consumption model have a good view into their storage utilization and get an idea for their entire fleet what usage and utilization looks like. No surprise bills.

" They should be seeing this in real-time live when they log into this view. So it really does become the hub for any Object First customer that has more than one cluster in their environment. So just to give you an idea of what we've separated today and also a little bit of a look into the future.

You can see with the Cluster Manager, everything is really focused on managing that individual hardware appliance. S3 storage, creating your buckets, turning on Honeypot, turning on telemetry, all of that is managed through the Cluster Manager. Fleet Manager is for those larger monitoring and visibility operations.

And you'll notice at the bottom here, a little bit of even more of a sneak preview. We are looking at bringing more storage management features, potentially even things like creating S3 buckets from the Fleet Manager user interface, as well as being able to roll out appliance updates for those managed service providers. But what will stay consistent is you will never be able to access or control any of the backup data from Fleet Manager.

That always stays local. And again, that's our zero-trust principles at play here. We do not want to ever create a situation where even access to the data itself could be compromised.