Tune into the Verge Technologies podcast to hear data experts discuss how SentientDB, an AI-powered database management solution, ensures performance, reliability and mobility in multicloud and hybrid environments. Enable your Government agency to prioritize data management, security and team development with innovative cloud convergence services.
Anthony Jimenez
Welcome back to CarahCast, the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft Production team. On behalf of Verge Technologies, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around automating database Asset Management in cloud environments. Jimmy Jobe, CEO of Verge Technologies, Dan Gallagher, CEO of NextGen Technology Solutions Group and Trisha Staugler, VP of Operations of NextGen Technology Solutions Group, will discuss how sentient DB verge technologies AI powered database management solution ensures performance, reliability and mobility in multicloud and hybrid environments.
Trisha Staugler
Good morning, everyone. I'm Trisha Staugler, and in today's session, we're going to cover automating the management of databases and database assets across the enterprise, with a special focus on hybrid and multi cloud environments. I'll lead our discussion today, along with Jimmy Jobe who will discuss the Verge Sentient DB product, its features and its benefits, also joining Dan Gallagher, who will share his insight regarding innovation and industry specific federal market needs we're going to cover today, management and the complexity of managing hybrid and multi cloud data environments, automating the management of database environments in these environments, establishing resilient, fault tolerant database management within And across all compute and cloud environments, and assuring SLAs on a regional and global basis. To go along with that, we'll talk about OPEX and CAPEX savings through better automation and operation of all database assets. In today's IT landscape we find hybrid and multi cloud environments, which has resulted in a need for management tools to manage database assets within and across different cloud and compute environments. As Gartner and others have confirmed, most enterprises are using as many as seven different service providers to cover their distributed operational footprint. Today's new normal for enterprise is that they have some of their database assets in a on prem data center and some in cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, IBM and Google, Google, just to name a few, enterprise architectures obviously become more complex. So, it follows that processes for managing, migrating and assuring these SLAs, as data and databases are moved and synchronized has also become more complex. More than ever, there's a need for true cloud convergence management that is managing many clouds as one. The sentient DB platform was developed by the verge team to address these needs for enterprise and for government customers, with an equipment and cloud agnostic platform that provides visibility across the enterprise and the ability to migrate and synchronize databases with zero downtime for end users. With that, I will welcome Jimmy Jobe with Verge Technologies. Jimmy, can you take us through what prompted the development of Sentient DB? I touched on some of today's challenges in the introduction. But what gap did you see? What was the broader challenge that you hope to solve?
Jimmy Jobe
Thanks, Trish. Yes. At Verge, we saw this huge migration to cloud services, just like everyone else did, right? We also saw some of the issues that resulted from this massive adoption that we believe we could help solve, and those issues included the fact that most enterprises who were trying to get to cloud services, few could ever achieve what I'm going to call an all in cloud, right for a lot of different factors, and because of these factors that resulted in even more hybrid or multi cloud environments, some of these factors included the fact that there's not a single cloud service vendor anywhere that the service that the enterprise footprint might land right. Enterprises were having to spin up local and regional service providers and then try to figure out how to get their data from the points of collection to fewer points of processing distributed to the teams on a regional or global basis, so they would have the information they needed at the right time. Second factor in that was that some of their legacy apps that were running in their on prem data centers would not run in the cloud. There were security aspects in certain verticals that they didn't want to run in cloud environments. So, these factors resulted in most, if not all, enterprises needing to run in what I'm going to call a hybrid cloud, or multi. Cloud environment. We also saw that the cloud service providers further establish what I'm going to call management and operational silos that were unique to their business models, right? So, you know, the main part of that business model is, of course, if you're not in their cloud, they don't make money, right? So, so they want to get you in their cloud. So, we found that there were a lot of tools and tool vendors emerging that, for example, only work in the AWS environment, or only work in the IBM or the Endura environment, and they definitely didn't work cross environments, right? We found that QoS levels varied from service provider to service provider. We started seeing best efforts on things like SLAs that were becoming the norm, and of course, kind of to the first point, certainly AWS or Google, for example, we're not going to manage the enterprise database assets that an enterprise had in Azure, right? So, these silos began to put up, if I'm going to call barriers and boundaries that were unique to their business and their business model, right? So, we saw a significant opportunity to improve database performance. And you say, why database? And really, we felt that data was probably the most critical element to an enterprise success. That's where you know, they run their operations. That's where they enter new markets based upon the data, based upon the sales, based upon their market entrance in a lot of different areas. So, we felt data was, was the place to start and improving database management at runtime, at real time, is, is where we wanted to focus our initial efforts. So we felt we could improve database performance, mobility, achieve 100% Service Assurance, and build what I'm going to call a resilient and fault tolerance database environment within these hybrid clouds through what I'm going to call cloud convergence, or managing many clouds as one clouds, and we felt that we could do this using artificial intelligence and machine learning automation and based on what I'm going to call a federated management platform. So what that really means is that when we manage if enterprise has some of its database assets, and let's say AWS, some in Azure, some in IBM, and some in, you know, 500 others scattered around the globe, we manage all of those database assets as if they're in One virtual data center. So, we built and launched sentient DB as an out of the box product platform that could essentially remove those silos and barriers and allow you to achieve what I'm going to call a true cloud convergence for managing your database assets across your enterprise on a local and global basis. And to do this in real time at runtime, with the possibility of zero downtime and zero outages, we felt that was our mission. And you know, until this time, you couldn't really control your whole enterprise, right? You could control the silos within your enterprise to a certain degree, and so we wanted to enable the enterprise use of AI and ML to automate database performance optimization, enable mobility globally, regardless of the database's cloud or physical location or where it was hosted. And we wanted to do this with a single pane of glass to control and manage your assets within and across all of those environments.
Trisha Staugler
So, some of what you describe, we've certainly seen with our customers at NextGen, as the migration to cloud has sort of evolved over time, and I'm sure it resonates with our attendees here as we look at multiple use cases across the federal landscape, we're seeing so many requirements that are focused on modernization and dealing with legacy compute environments while trying to move parts of their infrastructure to cloud services. With his insight into many of these projects and federal agencies, we welcome Dan Gallagher of NextGen Technology Solutions. Dan, through your business, you have visibility to Department of Defense and public sector challenges and requirements. Can you describe what you're seeing in terms of modernization efforts, cloud migration and how these agencies might benefit from using sentient DB to manage across multiple environments?
Dan Gallagher
Thank you, Trish and good morning, everybody. Yes, we are seeing. Lot of modernization issues. Many are focused on moving out of the legacy on premise data centers into cloud services for at least part of the office, agency infrastructure. Many products include more than one service provider due to the scope of the service being provided. There's always some subset of the application in these legacy environments that cannot be moved to the cloud services, whether it's a security factor like a design there are many factors. When I was introduced to Sen DB and understood how would we fit into these hybrid environments, I was impressed with the breadth and depth of the platform, the capabilities provide all the necessary parts to manage database environments, including performance optimization, migration, replication, scaling and processing capabilities in and out depending on workloads, as well as incremental and full backups anywhere on the globe. If I just look at one of the many use cases that being for migration of databases from on premise to cloud or from cloud to cloud, I believe this is one of Sentinel DBS most powerful capabilities as it relates to the projects. For example, since NDB can be installed and managed databases in your on-premise environment quickly in about five or six clicks of a mouse, you can start the migration of your database to a new cloud environment. During the migration, your database is never down, and your use users have complete access to it and will be completely unaware that the database has been they are using move from DC to Seattle, for example. DB does not does this with zero downtime, performing this migration using their AI based automation is even more powerful. You can schedule when you want it to happen, the platform can visit a new server at the new location, install the correct database on that server, then automatically perform a backup, migrate the database, and then decommission the old database, if that is what you want it to do. What's even more powerful is that once the migration is complete, sentient DB continues to manage that database and optimizes for performance at the new location, as well as providing the same management for those databases at the old location. So, my view, looking across all kinds of new projects in the sentient DB can provide immediate and significant value to many of these projects.
Trisha Staugler
Thank you for your insight. Dan, could you speak Jimmy to the effort required to actually deploy sentient DB in a customer environment?
Jimmy Jobe
Sure Trish. So, we can install the platform within two to three hours. The platform installs on three servers. They could be VMs or physical, bare metal servers. The Verge keen can do that installation remotely or provide download links if you want to install it yourself. The console is, I believe, very easy to use and operate, and usually within a couple of hours of orientation or enough to get you off and get you running right. We govern performance and take our automated actions based upon data collected rules set so that part of that Orient, then that is part of the orientation as well. Once installed, we pull in your server inventory using several methods, and then use our automated discovery subsystem called Scout to identify all the databases that are on all those servers, right? And then to pull those databases into the sentient DB management inventory. At that point, you're basically managing all your database assets across your enterprise in real time at runtime with the possibility of zero downtime, right? So, the whole process could be done in a day. It's that simple, but outside timeframes could probably be a few days.
Trisha Staugler
And if I recall correctly, Jimmy, we have some videos or other collateral for those attending here today that would demonstrate sort of what the user interface looks like and how we don't want to oversimplify what is a big problem for some but adequately demonstrate what the tool looks like, how it works we have access to those assets that we can share later. Is that right?
Jimmy Jobe
Absolutely. Our website has numerous white papers, videos that further drill down and explain the capabilities of sentient DB. So, we're glad to share those with everyone.
Trisha Staugler
So, once deployed, you know, a couple of days to get everyone set up and sort of oriented to using the product. What are the operational benefits of having sentient DB managing our enterprise database assets?
Jimmy Jobe
I think there's a number of those. And let me, let me go through some of what I'm think are the more important ones. And one of those is single pane of glass management of all the enterprise database assets within and across all cloud and compute environments within their footprint. Right, that. Iterated model of management allows you to manage them all as if they were in one virtual data center. Right in addition to that, we have automated workload management within and across compute environments. We can scale processing capacity of that database in and out based upon demand and workload variability. So, if you need more database compute capacity because it's a busy time or unexpected surge in in workload week, we will automatically scale out as many times as we need to and to ensure the database is operating optimally. And then once that variability passes, then we will release those on demand resources to get back to the single instance right. Performance Optimization and Service Assurance is another one across the enterprise, which means you meet your SLAs. And let me kind of drill down just a little bit in that and in the fact that one of the first things that we'll ask as we deploy within your enterprise is, what are your SLAs, right? Because SLAs are, you know, differ between different classes of databases. So, for example, if you had a certain class of database, it was absolutely critical to your operations on a daily basis, and your SLA was, I don't know, five seconds a year or whatever. Then when we pull that database into our inventory, then, then we would immediately start replicating and mirroring that and in several different locations. So, we spin up an active, active scenario. So, if your primary went down the second and the next transaction goes to your secondary or tertiary or fourth or fifth instance of that, which ensures that that database is not going to go down in your environment, right, and that you can meet your SLAs. Conversely, if you had a database, for example, that you used, I don't know, once a quarter, to run your quarterly reports, right? Then, of course, in that particular instance, you wouldn't want an active, active scenario, and we pull that database in, we would just replicate that off site. And if that database ever went down, we could just restore it. And again, your SLAs would be met, but those SLAs and how you meet them would be very, very different, right? I think the other thing that can't be under said right is common user interface, and that's across all of your database assets, so you don't have to learn different tools and tool sets and pay for different types of database tools and AWS versus Google versus Azure, and learn or try to do five or six different interfaces and different QoS is we pull all that together so that you can manage all of your database assets from a common platform and a common user interface. I think also zero downtime maintenance is one of our capabilities. I mean, that's achieved by basically either migrating or scaling out your database instance to a swing server or a spare server, doing your maintenance on that database or that server, then migrating it right back and all the time that that's going on, your users have access. They're never down, and 100% transaction consistency all the way through that maintenance cycle. And so, all of those factors really start to provide a very resilient and fault tolerance database environment where that zero downtime is possible, the automation that occurs around that database to optimize performance, to ensure that it doesn't go down. All those factors, we believe, from an OPEX or operational standpoint, our OPEX savings targets are in the 25 to 30% range, because you've got a lot less touch and the touch you have on that database, it doesn't cause it to go down, so all the factors and risk factors about bringing it down and bringing it back up, and resyncing it, and all those start to minimize a whole lot of other risk and a lot of time that your DBAs and your operational team are spending managing Database assets.
Trisha Staugler
A lot of factors that can be addressed with one tool, I think, that covers everything that verge and sentient DB hope to cover today.
Anthony Jimenez
Thanks for listening, and thank you to our guests, Jimmy, Dan and Trish. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe to CarahCast and be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you'd like more information on how verge technologies can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at verge@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.