Fireside Chat with IBM and FalconStor: Innovations in Hybrid Cloud and AI | IBM TechXchange

Is your hybrid cloud truly secure? Check out this special fireside chat with FalconStor‘s Todd Brooks and IBM’s Bargav Balakrishnan as they join host Steven Dickens for Six Five Media In the Booth at IBM TechXchange. The group discusses the strategic partnership between FalconStor and IBM and how their collaboration is shaping the future of backup, workload migration, Disaster Recovery (DR) in the hybrid cloud, and the expanding role of AI.

Watch their interview as they dive into ⤵️

  • The enduring success of the strategic relationship between IBM and FalconStor, focusing on modernization and optimization of backup, workload migration, and DR in the hybrid cloud environment
  • Insights into this relationship benefits customers and partners
  • The increasing importance of data protection regardless of data location (cloud or on-prem), highlighting the advantages in terms of backup, ease of data migration, DR, and cybersecurity measures
  • The role of AI in future partnership developments and the handling of massive data volumes for AI applications, and FalconStor’s AI data protection assistant
  • Potential new partnership areas with MSPs on IBM Cloud

Learn more at FalconStor and IBM.

Watch the video below at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode. 

Transcript

Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome. You’re joining us here at IBM TechXchange. I’m your host, Steven Dickens. This is another Six Five Media show, and I’m joined by Todd and Bargav from FalconStor on IBM. Hey, guys, welcome to the show.

Todd Brooks: Thank you, sir.

Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Steven Dickens: So tell us a little bit about FalconStor and what you do for the company. You’re the boss, but tell us what you do.

Todd Brooks: Yeah, well, I’m not the important person, but FalconStor is a company, we’ve been around for now 24 years, and we’ve had the privilege of having a partnership with IBM for about 20 of those years. Off and on different kinds of partnerships along the way. So we’ve been able to really evolve our software over time to work very well with IBM gear and with IBM products.

Steven Dickens: We’ll come back to the partnership, because I think that’s crucial. Bargav, just maybe position your role and then we’ll dive straight in.

Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah, yeah. So I have the pleasure of leading Product Management… I have product management responsibility for our Power Core platforms, modernization, and AI.

Steven Dickens: So let’s go back to you, Todd, you’re starting to talk about it there, the partnership. I think that 24 year history is crucial.

Todd Brooks: Yeah.

Steven Dickens: Tell me a little bit more and then I’ll come to you, Bargav, but tell me a little bit more what that means on the day to day, and how that manifests itself for the clients.

Todd Brooks: Yeah, so when I try to give our FalconStor elevator pitch to somebody, I always start off by saying, we are all in on IBM. Now, what that means from our perspective is that we think about the world from an IBM Power Customer perspective.

Steven Dickens: That’s your lens almost. Your-

Todd Brooks: That’s the way we look at it.

Steven Dickens: Broader than that, you’re thinking…

Todd Brooks: That’s right.

Steven Dickens: … Power Customer, what do they need? Translate that into the FalconStor product.

Todd Brooks: And then even more defined than that is how do we help a Power Customer protect their data that is on Power, wherever they choose to run their Power workload? So it could be on-prem, right? I mean, hundreds of thousands of people run Power on-prem or in the cloud. It could be in Power VS, or it could be with one of our 20-some-odd MSPs that offer a Power-based managed service. We want the customers to be able to experience the same data protection wherever they run their Power, and then obviously for that data to protection to be world-class. Right.

Steven Dickens: And I mean, Bargav, we’ve been talking about it today. We’ve recorded another video, check that out by the way. But we’ve recorded another video. I think Todd makes a great point about some of that optionality. We talked about it as core to what you guys are doing, you’ve got Power VS, you’ve got software inversions where you can run that on private, you’ve also got the traditional business. How’s that kind of playing out in the market, what are you hearing from clients?

Bargav Balakrishnan: Yeah, and before I answer, just one thing on the partnership here. The way I would describe it Steven from our last video, is clients are asking for the same thing. Growth, saving, compliance. The combination of FalconStor and IBM Power specifically, there’s so much optionality, because what Todd just talked about is the data protection, the compliance bit. There’s also such a huge bit on savings in terms of their do-do capabilities with Power.

Steven Dickens: That’s crucial.

Bargav Balakrishnan: And with AI that we’ll get to, there’s a growth angle there. So that’s on that piece. The partnership I think has such optionality because the value prop we can deliver has fundamental optionality within it. So now your question, I forgot.

Steven Dickens: Well, so yeah, I mean, you mentioned it briefly ,and I’m going to come to it, it was one of the questions. This data resilience. We’ve seen Dora in Europe, we’re seeing that start to come through. We’ve seen Sovereign Cloud, that’s something I’m tracking in the market. We’ve seen that from Hyperscalers, we’re seeing that from a lot of the server vendors. What’s that starting to manifest in those customer requirements? You chat to customers a lot. What are you seeing as some of those key dynamics?

Todd Brooks: No, it’s a big deal. No, it’s a very big deal, because the hybrid cloud has opened up a whole new set of regulations, needs, and things that need to be complied with. And you take a standard on-prem customer, and they’ll be rerunning IBM i, take on-prem, but maybe they have to comply with Dora. So one of the key Dora things says you have to have an offsite copy. So you’re either going to-

Steven Dickens: An immutable copy of that?

Todd Brooks: It’s got to be immutable. So you’ve got a couple choices. You can go spin up another data center, make that capital investment for these backup copies, or you can take advantage of a cloud vendor. And so Power VS is there, right? In Europe for example, you got Madrid, you got Frankfurt, and you got the UK. And so a customer can just take advantage of those immediately. And since our technology’s the same, whether it runs on-prem or in the cloud, as is Power and all the IBM stuff, it’s easy. It’s easy to do that.

Steven Dickens: I think that for me is the key takeaway. You’ve got an end-to-end story, whether it’s virtual machine, whether it’s private, or whether it’s-

Bargav Balakrishnan: And frictionless across the hybrid cloud too.

Todd Brooks: Yeah. Yeah.

Steven Dickens: There’s no difference there.

Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.

Steven Dickens: And I think putting a horizontal layer, something like FalconStor across that, brings that functionality. You’re not forcing a customer to make a choice. We talked about it in one of the other videos, the demos, in the console, being able to just pick a location, and then being able to snap in that data recovery and backup piece, and just have that seamless. It’s clicking that easy button for clients.

Bargav Balakrishnan: And the other way I would say it is it’s thoughtful workload placement that’s driven by business outcome and not driven by, “Ah, I have backup protection here, but I don’t have it here.” That doesn’t make sense. It’s about thoughtful workload placement.

Steven Dickens: Business can decide…

Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.

Steven Dickens: … where it wants to put the workload.

Bargav Balakrishnan: And we take care of the hard work underneath the covers.

Steven Dickens: And you guys aren’t forcing them to make a technical decision.

Bargav Balakrishnan: That’s right.

Steven Dickens: They’re able to make a business decision, and that’s crucial.

Todd Brooks: Even their backup solutions. So let’s say that they’ve been using, pick one Veeam for 10 years. When it comes to taking advantage of Power VS or Power and FalconStor, you don’t have to change that. FalconStor is a backup target, not a backup solution. So Veeam can write to us or Spectrum Protect can write, it doesn’t matter, right? We take the data from the backup, we dedupe it. As Bargav mentioned, we’re the best in the world at deduping. The average IBM i client right now has a 39 to one dedupe rate.

Steven Dickens: 39 to one.

Todd Brooks: That’s the average.

Steven Dickens: Jeez.

Todd Brooks: Now we quote, when we size an offering, we always quote 20 to one. But in real life, the average is 39 to one.

Steven Dickens: And how does that manifest itself on dollars and cents? I mean, that’s a consolidation ratio. What does that mean for customers kind of at the bottom line? What do you see-

Todd Brooks: So let’s take a standard IBM i customer, and let’s say they’re backing up 50 terabytes of raw data. If they’re just using BRMS trying to do that in Power VS and paying to store that data, they’ll save 80% by using StoreSafe because of our dedupe, even after paying for StoreSafe, and even after paying for the Power VS infrastructure you need to run it. So save 80% just in storage costs alone.

Steven Dickens: That’s storage-

Todd Brooks: Talk about an easy button.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, I mean, it’s not only an easy button from the technical implementation. That’s an easy button from a TCO perspective. So Bargav, as you talked to customers about that, obviously you are taking the product management lens from a Power perspective. How’s that collaboration making it easier for your business?

Bargav Balakrishnan: I mean, look, this comes down to if customers want growth savings compliance from an offering perspective, the way we are building this out is really driving that frictionless Power hybrid cloud thought, and having FalconStor along for the ride, both from an offering perspective, but now also commercially and go to market. There’s a lot of synergy there across those three dimensions, where it’s the same story. Offering, value prop, commercial go-to market. Just extreme alignment all around growth, savings, and compliance.

Steven Dickens: So guys, it’s 2024. I don’t know how long into the show we are-

Todd Brooks: Almost 2025.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, but we’ve been going for a few minutes here and I’ve not asked the AI question. Oh, it’d just be rude if I didn’t, right? So tell me a little bit about how FalconStor’s using AI. So we’ll go to you first and then talk a little bit about how that snaps into the wider strategy, but go to you first.

Todd Brooks: Yeah, so in the spirit of full transparency, when we went to Think back in May in Boston, I went in to Think with the opinion that, yeah, we need to get on the train, but maybe not tomorrow. We left to Think with an idea that, “Oh my God, we’ve got to get on the train tomorrow.” And we immediately went back, we spun up a watsonx team internally, and we gave them a challenge, like, “Look, let’s start with something we know, right? Let’s learn this watsonx tool, let’s learn what it can do for us, but let’s learn in a use case that is near and dear to our heart. And that is, how do we give guidance to Power Customers on how to improve their data protection?” And so we created Thomas. These are AI-based Watsonx-based virtual assistant-

Steven Dickens: I mean, what a great first name? How did you come up with that?

Todd Brooks: I don’t know. We’re pretty bright.

Steven Dickens: Somebody in product management did a good job there.

Todd Brooks: I know, Vicky did that.

Steven Dickens: I’ll congratulate on that original name.

Todd Brooks: Absolutely. So we started there, and now it didn’t take long to where we’re like, “Oh my gosh, here’s what we could do with…” Typically with a virtual assistant, you train them up with static data, right? You say, “Go scrape that website, here’s a document, memorize it,” blah, blah, blah. Well, what we’re going to add to it now is our connectors into databases. So like a connector into an IBM i Db2 or a connector into an SAP HANA database, or connector into archive data we’re already managing for the customer with our solution. So, in the future, you could ask the question, not just, “Hey, how do I better protect my data?” But you could turn it into an internal BI solution, or maybe a sales manager at a company could say, “Hey, I want to see sales in all of my stores for this SKU. And July of ’24 versus July ’23. Put it in a chart for me. Go.” Comes back, says, “Here’s your chart. You want me to email it to you?”

Steven Dickens: That’s where I’m going to see the AI go. We hear about all the fantastic consumer use cases, but it’s that enterprise data that’s going to be crucial. That’s the next evolution of this, as we start to see it move to deployment. How does that FalconStor story snap into where you are going from a Power perspective?

Bargav Balakrishnan: Extremely consistent, because at the end of the day, this is about enterprise data readiness is more or less what you just said. And enterprise data readiness only comes when you combine and stitch the Power and FalconStor together, because you’re looking at production data here, you’re looking at backup archival, and all that other data. And the combination of those two things is really what’s going to unlock enterprise-specific use cases that are differentiated.

Steven Dickens: So we’ve got to start wrapping up. We could talk about this for hours, there’s some great collaboration and innovation going. Todd, go to you first. Boil this down to one key takeaway. Toughest question I’m going to ask you all day. What’s the one key takeaway that the listeners and viewers here can take away, that really would capture the collaboration?

Todd Brooks: Well, I think from our perspective, it goes back to us being all in on IBM. We could try to be all things to all people, but we would probably fail, right? Because we’re just not big enough. But we can be all in on IBM, and we can then put all of our resources toward providing what we do, and that’s data protection. We don’t do a lot of other things, but we data protection, we do it very well. And so the more that we can continue to go all in on that and invest along that channel, the better off we’ll be.

Steven Dickens: And same question to you, Bargav?

Bargav Balakrishnan: It’s the alignment, Steve, right? So it’s the alignment around that north star, if you will, or that value prop, and bringing that to life, both from an offering, sales, and overall execution perspective. And that’s driven the success today.

Steven Dickens: Well guys, that’s come through the collaboration and joint innovation that you guys are driving Power and FalconStor. You’ve been watching another episode of The Six Five, we’re coming to you live from TechXchange. Fantastic conversation here with the guys. Lots more content from us to check out. Please click and subscribe and do all those things, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you very much for watching.

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