Hello everyone. Welcome back to All Road Leads to Archive Qualar series about everything media, entertainment, and broadcast and data. Uh the things creative content makers really need to know. I'm your host Jeff Sangpiel. Today we're talking with Dr. Mark Botchkus with our partner Ari who's got a 25 year history in media production with a goal of data management made simple. They talk to all manner of types of storage as well as many integrations with asset management solutions. Mark, thanks for joining me here today. >> Hi Jeff, thanks for having me. >> Uh, Arwware has a rich history and a diverse product line in the P5 suite. Uh, can you start with the background of where Aryware got its start all those years ago? Uh, as well as a bit of of your own background. Okay, so Aruare has a really long history of 25 years coming up next year, the 25 year um anniversary and uh it started out because our three founders were working previous in a previous company more than 25 years ago that was acquired by Quark and uh their software ended up in the Quark publishing system. So they started over and actually our first release uh was superior because of that. They had lots of experience in the data management field and uh build a very solid uh backup and archive solution from the beginning and uh yeah and we keep evolving and adding features and moving into other industries. So my own background is I had a previous career at as a scientist at the University of Munich. I'm an MD and medical informatics specialist actually and wanted to continue in this uh media informatics field actually that I was working in and uh so I uh joined the software industry and that was already
many years ago. >> Excellent. Uh I haven't heard the the the the company Quark in a long long time. So, uh, since LTO is where most of your work has been accomplished, uh, and I still have people walking up to me on a daily basis asking, "What do you mean tape?" uh, where do you see the future of tape archives heading to, uh, and why it's still such a big part of the aryear story? >> Yeah, so for us, we actually had LTO support and other tape format supports from the very beginning. So LT01 started at 2000 I think and uh by that time there was still DLT SDLT AIT tape formats around that we all supported at the time. So uh we had a strong tape uh foundation anyway from the beginning and um nowadays it's has changed in so far as it becomes basically the the last resort for for cyber security reasons. So for uh medium-sized companies, smaller companies that don't have a dedicated IT security department is basically one of the very few options that they have to keep their file cyber secure and have full data control. Um and also of course it is extremely costefficient and has extremely long shelf life. So it it adds up the all the benefits that LTO offers and continues to offer. And then the capacity of course uh is cons constantly increasing and we'll probably touch on that a little later. >> Yes. Sounds like a little bit of this the same history you he was here at Qualstar the the different tape formats as you know we've all been in the the business for a while. Um so so Mark Arwware has been active in object storage which as the building block of cloud brings you into new and
interesting products and verticals. Uh can you get a bit into the evolution of the company into object storage? uh that you've gone through >> of course so when when it became more popular we we wanted to offer this option for as a storage target for backup and archive as well. Um so that was the first step that we did and we still do that and we have some some options here in the um in the storage configuration panel. Um there are some uh specific uh targets that you can choose a generic S3 and uh then there's a totally different um chapter here that we opened since we can act P5 archive can act as a um glacia bucket. So we offer an integration row uh route here for people who have already an S3 implementation in their media asset management, digital asset management or production asset management software. so that they can actually um uh efficiently get S3 to LTO or S3 to LTFS as a result using us as the storage back end. >> Uh you mentioned Glacier there which a lot of people don't know is just simply tape in someone else's data center. Uh that leads to um something I I'd read that you folks were talking about at the beginning of the year which is storage as a service. How has that kind of evolved over over the year and what do you see the future of that? >> Um for us that's kind of a niche uh that we see. So storage as a service um for companies that um that don't want to touch or be responsible for their own devices. So you can have a a physical device in your company uh but someone else is doing 100% of the maintenance updates uh storage capacity expansion and so on. Um so that's that's one way to look at it and there's another way to look at it where people are kind of
renting out LTO capacity um to offer that to their customers. Um but both of those things for us uh seem a bit uh niche in a niche perspective and uh we see a lot of people especially in Europe that want to have full control of their of their data sets in all respects and so they they very heavily rely on onrem installations. >> It makes sense. I I've been hearing quite a bit of that a lot. folks are interested in the sovereignty of their data and having it under their control and because Ari is an excellent bridge from tier one and tier two on-prem storage clusters but also is able to handle those um migrations from cloud to on-prem archive um I think a great amount of what that does talks to your asset management ecosystem partners especially in uh how everything works in media and entertainment How have those relationships evolved both technically and in market demand uh for this kind of hybridization of pulling completed assets off the cloud and back to endprem and eventually to tape. So we have a number of uh partners in the media asset management dig digital asset manager production management system space that use us as their storage back end. So they want to have LTO availability uh LTO capability for their customers in their solution and use us as the storage uh means to to drive that. Um and with that they get of course all the benefits of P5 archive with multiple drives and scalability and u all the other things that come with it. And um and this has been constantly growing I could can say. So we we started out with one or two partners and now we have um a dozen partners of of different systems that work with us and it's still growing. There are some that will be released
next year. Um some very interesting and attractive partners that use us and um I think the attractiveness of LTO contributes to that. So they they want and need that for their partners and um as you can imagine the the younger developers don't want to dive into LTO storage development and with all the drivers and uh stuff that is actually has a long history and nobody wants to relearn that. So we have a strong technology base here as as a company and we see that um as a very attractive um market segment for us because they reach partners that that we have no contact to. uh they reach market segments that we have no contact to um but uh we still um be very present in the media entertainment space ourselves to be discoverable so we go to NAV show in Las Vegas in New York go to IBC in Amsterdam and other shows and that's very important to show up there but then people approach us sometimes and say yeah we have solution XY Z and want to have LTO support how would that Well, I I was at the supercomputing show in St. Louis and we were running into a lot of students who were not familiar with the concept of tape and we were having to describe it as well, it's it's it's Glacier or those other storage elements actually on on your on your premises. So, uh it's interesting trying to trying to educate folks that are uh brand new to the uh data management world as to what the options have been for for years. Um and and your your tool set is uniquely situated to work with the media environments. Uh you had mentioned the other industry verticals. What sort of verticals uh have been approaching you about solutions that uh have basically is something that's come up recently? So we see an an uptake in
um in science and research institutions because they create an tremendous amount of data and need to something need to have something that's cost effective and has a long story shelf life. So that's that's one part of it and the other part as I said is this um um small tomedium business that actually needs solutions for cyber security and for them it's the the most u affordable solution is to have a sometimes even a single LTO drive to to do a regular backup and backup to LTO is actually coming coming back strong. It was a hot topic uh 10 15 20 years ago but uh during due to uh cyber threats that are proliferating everywhere um it is coming back strong and we see increased demand here for backup to LTO actually >> I'm I'm seeing a lot of that as well and um people getting back into the concept especially in me and of archive first it used to be that we didn't have a choice we always archive first because that's how we acquired media Uh now we we're we're kind of seeing a resurgence of that because conceptually it's the most safe way to go. Um also the the other thing I've seen is uh video along with medical instrument um information being stored on tape. So there'll be video of a certain experiment and then there's results coming back from that. the two were tied together because video makes it very easy to find what you're looking for and and you know we figured out time code a long time ago. So Mark thanks for joining me here today like Qualar uh Arwware has got a very experienced team of channel partners that can consult on solutions directly with clients. Uh is there a way to locate a perfect reseller fit for Ariwware or if there isn't one contact
info for your sales team? You can easily uh reach us at um sales or teamarchy.com teamarchy.com or on our web page if you go to the navigation the hamburger icon uh you can uh select or search for a reseller in your region. So that's very easy to do actually >> and that that's the whole point of archy where it makes all of this easy. Uh for our all roads lead to archive audience thanks for joining us here today. Hope you've gotten as much out of our discussion as I have. Uh please smash those like and subscribe buttons for us to have episodes delivered right to your dashboard. Special thanks to Avid Technology for providing the editorial platform for us. Uh Mark, thanks for joining me again today and hope everyone has a great rest of your day.