What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Is Your Business Ready for the Edge Computing Revolution?
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
At the intersection of edge computing and simplicity sits StorMagic, a company that's redefining what's possible with hyper-converged infrastructure. In this fascinating conversation with Bruce Kornfeld, Chief Product Officer at StoreMagic, we dive deep into the technology transforming how businesses deploy mission-critical applications at the edge.
The traditional data center approach—with its racks of servers, storage arrays, and networking equipment—simply doesn't work for distributed enterprises with hundreds or thousands of small sites. StoreMagic's brilliance lies in its minimalism: achieving high availability with just two servers instead of three, dramatically reducing both capital and operational costs. As Bruce reveals, customers can deploy a fully redundant system for under $10,000, with TCO savings between 30-80% compared to competitors.
What makes StorMagic particularly relevant today is the perfect storm of market conditions. Meanwhile, the AI revolution demands more processing power at the edge, where data is created and real-time decisions matter most. StoreMagic's solutions bridge these needs by combining open-source foundations with proprietary enhancements that make deployment and management remarkably simple—under an hour, according to Bruce.
The company's latest release, SVHCI version 2, introduces VM migration from VMware environments, snapshot capabilities, and Edge Control—a cloud-based management platform that provides unified visibility across distributed sites. StorMagic is expanding its enterprise focus and strategic partnerships, particularly with HPE. With its rock-solid reliability (less than 0.03% of support tickets involve downtime) and laser focus on simplifying edge computing, StoreMagic is positioning itself at the forefront of a transformative trend in infrastructure.
Ready to revolutionize your edge infrastructure? Visit storemagic.com to calculate your potential TCO savings and discover how simplified edge computing can transform your business.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, really exciting chat today. Everyone knows the edge is hot and so is the demand for hyper-converged infrastructure. We have a real innovator in the space today with StoreMagic. Bruce, how are you? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. Well, thanks for being here Really intrigued by your mission and the great work you guys do. Maybe introduce yourself, the team and what is the vision at StoreMagic?
Speaker 2:Thanks very much Again, bruce Kornfeld, chief Product Officer at StoreMagic. I'm responsible for our product strategy as well as execution. So product management, engineering, all that technical stuff. Storemagic is all about making our customers' lives simple when they need to run applications on site, particularly, like you mentioned, at the edge, particularly at small sites. So it's usually big companies with thousands of sites or hundreds of sites, or it could be a small business that has one site, but their pain points are the same and we're all about figuring out how do we help them run their applications in a mission-critical environment and store their data locally.
Speaker 1:Love that you make it sound so simple.
Speaker 2:It is, it's easy until you start thinking about it, evan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that, but why now? Why is the demand for a particular hyper-converged infrastructure so hot? We've had edge, we've had distributed enterprise for decades. Why now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say so. Hyper-converged is all about making you know, to use that simple theme to making it easier for customers to deploy infrastructure at their smaller sites, at their edge sites. To deploy infrastructure at their smaller sites, at their edge sites, and the traditional data center approach, three-tier architectures with racks and racks of servers, racks and racks of storage and networking and switches and all the gear that's needed, the way that that's built for the data center, just doesn't work at the edge. So what HyperConverge does? It says you know what.
Speaker 2:We only need to run 10 virtual servers, maybe 20, maybe it's 50, but it's not hundreds, it's not thousands. So what you're able to do is you're able to shrink the physical size of what you need down into a single box or two or three. So you take a server, you virtualize the CPU and the memory and the serving technology and you also virtualize the storage. Then you add another one of those in case you want high availability, but everything's contained. It's simpler, it's easier to deploy, it's easier to manage and it's a lot less expensive. We have customers that can deploy a fully highly available dual HCI system for under $10,000. So technology has advanced so much that you get a lot of power in a small amount of footprint.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really total cost of ownership. Right, and we're going to talk tech and your speeds and feeds in a minute, but walk us through what makes a TCO so competitive, you know? Or is it OPEX? It's CapEx, obviously, network expense what goes into that equation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot of bits to it. So I would say you know, let's start on the CapEx side on. How are you going to save money on what you're purchasing that you have to install, whether that's hardware or software? And I have a funny feeling we can have a good chat later about the potential for CapEx to be increasing with the recent news of what's going on with tariffs and potential trade wars and all that. Maybe we save that for a separate section. But if you just look at CapEx yeah, I mean putting servers and storage and standing that stuff up can be very expensive. And if you have a dozen sites or a hundred sites or a thousand sites, every $500 or $1,000 you save is real money.
Speaker 2:So one aspect of TCO that our customers look at is how much kit do I need to purchase? How many physical servers, how many distress, how much memory do I need? How fast do those CPUs have to run? So the less physical hardware you have to buy, the better, because that's going to lower your overall costs. And that's something at StoreMagic that we've been very focused on, because we're able to deploy a two-server system for mission critical complete uptime, versus most of our competitors need at least three. So our customers can lower their TCO by having two physical boxes instead of three, and those servers are much lightly configured. You don't need as much stuff inside of it. Let's say we can talk speeds and feeds later if you want, but you need less stuff inside each. You're significantly saving on hardware Along with that.
Speaker 2:If you have less hardware, you have less software. You don't need as many licenses, you don't need as many VMware licenses or Hyper-V licenses or Oracle licenses or whatever you're doing, because you have less hardware, less CPUs, less cores. So you're saving a lot on software as well. So that's on the CapEx side. On the OpEx side, the less hardware you have, the less power you need, the less cooling you need, the less human beings you need to manage all of this. So there's a significant OPEX savings when it comes to operating these environments and what our customers typically see is that you know we've got a tool on our website. A lot of vendors do, but you can go to storemagiccom and you can use our TCO tool. Our customers typically see that they're going to save anywhere from 30 to 80% over other solutions that are out there. I mean, tco is still a big factor in decision-making, for sure.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that you also talk a lot about open source and the role of open source. How do you see open source evolving? It's been a long journey with, you know, mixed success, but where are we these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, open source has come a long way. I'd say, if you were building any kind of infrastructure, if you're an end user and you're building any kind of infrastructure, even five years ago or 10 years ago, open source is hard. I mean, there's a lot to it, and it's evolved a lot over the years, and what's happened is VMware just kind of took over the market for helping customers build their infrastructure to run applications securely, and VMware dominated that market, and what's happened is, because of the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, it's opened up a whole new world for a lot of CIOs out there that are now questioning like okay, now I've been dependent on VMware for a long time. My pricing has gone up significantly. What do I do? Do I stay with them because it works and all of my people are trained? But, to your point, evan, open source has become a bigger option now, so a lot of customers say well, I can get a hypervisor for free, let me go try. What happens, though, is it's not that easy to build it yourself, because now your engineers have to build the systems. How do you get two or three or seven servers running an open source operating system on a hypervisor? How do you get all of that working well together so that if something fails, all of the applications can fail over and keep running. It's the little details that are very difficult over and keep running. It's the little details that are very difficult. So you need a pretty advanced staff to do that is to build a pure open source system.
Speaker 2:So what we do at StoreMagic is we kind of take the best of both worlds, is that we are using open source software in our solution. It is based on Linux. Our hypervisor is based on KVM, just like many, many others out there. So we're using open source, but we're taking the hard work away from the customers. So we're taking open source. We're making it easy to use. We're building tools on top of it to simplify everything for customers. They don't have to think much about it. All they have to do is install one software package. They get all the open source tools from us and the store magic magic on top of it and under an hour you're up and running. You have a hypervisor, you can run applications, you can store data. So you're kind of getting the best of both worlds. You have open source, but you don't have to deal with it yourself. Brilliant, so you just had of getting the best of both worlds, as you have open source.
Speaker 1:But you don't have to deal with it yourself. Brilliant. So you just had a big release. Let's talk speeds and feeds and feature functionality. What was the big idea behind your latest release? And I'm more interested like what were some of the priorities that customers are asking for you these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say this we started this journey We've been in the market for over 15 years with a product called SVSand, which is virtual storage, and it works beautifully in a VMware environment or a Microsoft Hyper-V environment and that's been our business forever. We have thousands of customers around the globe, very happy customers. Our code works so well that we get so few support calls it's almost scary a little bit. So we have less than 0.03% support tickets where a customer is down, and that's unheard of in the IT market. So very stable code base, very happy customers.
Speaker 2:Broadcom came along and did what they did with VMware and it's caused a lot of customers to think about what do I do? Where do I go? I can't afford to run VMware anymore. I will say that Broadcom I think they're brilliant financially because their stock price has done quite well since they bought VMware and they continue to grow. So they're smart, they're taking care of large customers, but there's a big piece of the market that continues to be frustrated.
Speaker 2:So that's when, about a year ago, we came up with the idea of let's go build our own hypervisor along with our virtualized storage, and let's build a whole package. And that's what SVHCI is. So it's our full-stack hyperconverged system. It's been shipping now for about nine months and, like I said earlier, it's the hypervisor, it's the virtual storage, it's the virtual networking, all combined into one software stack that installs together in under an hour, whereas typically when you're installing a VMware there's lots of pieces to bring together, or a Nutanix or name your other vendor. But we've made it really simple One simple stack. So that's what we do. So now we've had this hypervisor built around our SV SAN storage for a while.
Speaker 2:What you're referring to is the announcement that we made I don't know a few weeks ago, is that we came out with our next version of SVHCI, which is version two, and what we've added there is we've added things like the ability to import virtual machines from a VMware environment to our environment, because the hypervisors are similar but they're not the same, so there is some work that has to be done behind the scenes to convert a VMware virtual machine to a Stormagic virtual machine. So we're automating that for our customers. We added the ability for customers to take snapshots so they can do snapshots, because many customers use snapshots as part of their data protection policy, like, for instance, if you're rolling out a new software update and something goes wrong and you're like you know what. It would be really great if I can go back to the way my system was three minutes ago.
Speaker 2:So that's what snapshots are designed for, and we've also built a tool for managing large environments. So, like I mentioned, we have customers with thousands of sites and one of the key requirements for them is we need to be able to manage all of this remotely from a single pane of glass. And we released a product called Edge Control and it's a cloud-based utility that has access to all of a customer's systems around the world and they can look at, monitor and manage all of them from one location, from any browser. So those are the new things that we came out with our version two. We're excited about it. The reception from customers has been quite positive.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, so a lot of excitement, as you no doubt know, around running AI models at the edge. I assume that's been a bit of a boom for you and your adoption of your devices.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. It's really funny. There's a person on my team who was on sabbatical before he joined us and he dove into AI and he learned all about AI, took courses and it's like one year later he's like Bruce. It's completely changed. Everything I've learned is obsolete already.
Speaker 2:That market is moving so fast, as you know, and, yeah, it's happening at the edge. It is happening, which is, I believe, what's going on here is that the world of thinking about running a business, running a company, where you've got small sites where customers are right. So the edge is usually defined as where are your customers or where are your machines? So the edge is usually defined as where are your customers or where are your machines. So if you're a manufacturer, your factory can be thought of the edge as well, where there's robots, wherever there's data being created. That's your edge.
Speaker 2:And these days, ai is super important and making decisions locally quickly is really critical. You can't take today's, you'll say, for a retailer. You can't take today's sales information, upload it to a cloud overnight and make decisions tomorrow. Maybe in some cases, you still can, but what's happening is people, that the pace of the economy is going so fast that end users, it departments, businesses need to make decisions fast, so they need the AI model to be local, and that is driving a lot of the edge. It is amazing to see I think we're right at the tip of it right now it's just starting and companies are the innovative ones, are doing it now, which is let's have our ARI models rolling at the place where the data is created, and that's driving a lot of demand in the edge computing space.
Speaker 1:That's exciting. So, looking ahead, where do you see yourself going and what's your sort of vision for the future of Edge? Where do you see the product evolving and so are your customers taking you over the next couple of years?
Speaker 2:is a piece of it, just the ability to run your applications and store your data reliably without dependence on the cloud. So I would say that's a trend that we see more and more of in the future, and what we're focused on is cloud has been deployed a lot over the last decade or two because of the ease it's very easy to stand up an application in the cloud. Back in the day it was lower cost. You could probably argue that cloud computing is becoming quite expensive these days, depending on your environment and also the OPEX side. I mean, think about, instead of building a big old data center, you now have Amazon or Google or someone else building the data center, so you don't need as many staff. So you're lowering OPEX significantly.
Speaker 2:And we see that those benefits are starting to be needed at the edge as well. So the simplicity of how easy is it to stand up your own infrastructure at the edge, like I said, the cost has come down. You can easily build something for about $10,000, whatever the numbers are but it's super inexpensive and super powerful. But it's got to be easy to do, just like the cloud is easy to do. It's got to be high performant, which the cloud is very high performant because you have an unlimited number of servers that you have access to. But the edge can be high performant as well.
Speaker 2:And then I think we already talked about the AI thing. I think that's going to drive a lot of the future of how do we help our customers get the data locally and not have it just sit there on disk drives whether they're spinning disk drives, nvme, solid state, whatever format data is being stored how do they actualize that data and turn it into information and use it? Ai is a piece of it, but there's all sorts of technology that we're looking at, for our roadmap is how do we make it easier for customers to get real insight out of all this data that they're collecting at the edge? So, yeah, it's an exciting time, evan, and a lot of technologies are being developed, a lot of movement to edge computing, and we're excited to be kind of right in the middle of it.
Speaker 1:Fantastic I see on your site. Here you're welcoming a new CEO and board member, susan. That's fantastic to see a woman at the corporate leadership level in tech you don't see that much. Maybe tell us a little bit about her appointment and your excitement around that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, she's been great. She joined us I guess it was about nine months ago as chief growth officer and she's done amazing things in helping the company position ourselves for enterprise accounts, large customers with large number of sites. We're starting to see more and more of those opportunities where customers are looking for simple solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, and Sue came in and did a really good job with that. So, as there was CEO transition, our previous CEO, dan Beer, is awesome. He was here for about four years. He's doing something else with his career and he didn't want to be CEO anymore. So he's doing something else and he's still on our board. And Sue stepped up to CEO. She's awesome. She's really good with people. She's been in the tech industry her whole career and with her sales and operational background, I think we're off to a really good start here and continuing to grow store magic at a fast pace.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. We'll have to invite her on Tech Impact it's on Bloomberg and Fox Business nationally at some point in the future. I'm sure she'd love to be here. But what's next? You have a lot of events and announcements and webinars and workshops. What's on your radar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a lot going on at Stormagic. We've got a lot of product innovation that we're working on to get out the door in the next few months. I'm hoping the engineering team can take a little breather over the summer and relax, but who knows if that's ever going to happen in technology. So, working on new things that we'll be able to talk about over the summer and in the fall. In terms of products, we have a lot of activity going on with our large customers. We're building enterprise advisory councils so that we get more direct feedback from our end users.
Speaker 2:We have some interesting things that I probably shouldn't say out loud, but we have some interesting channel news coming. So there's some channel excitement on the way that we go to market that Sue's been spearheading, that we can come back and talk about soon. So there's excitement on how we're adopting our go-to-market strategy, which we can talk about in the future. What else can I tell you? We are doing some events. We're a big partner of HPE's, so we'll be doing HPE Discover in June. We've been doing HPE Tech Jams.
Speaker 1:Oh, I should see you there. I will probably be there, so it'd be great to connect in person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I should see you there. I will probably be there, so it'd be great. Yeah, there you go, connecting in person. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, a lot of exciting stuff going on at Stormagic.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, congratulations on all the success and thanks for sharing kind of a peek behind the curtain onwards and upwards. Thanks, evan, appreciate it. Thanks for having me Likewise. Thanks for listening and watching everyone.