Three questions for…  Three questions for…   

Andrzej Niziołek, Storware VP of Sales

1. The data protection market is highly fragmented. What sets Storware apart from the competition?

The data protection market is incredibly competitive. The more mainstream a service, or the more standardized a platform, the more vendors offer their backup solutions for it. The best example of this is Microsoft 365 – there are dozens of different options to choose from. Just as many vendors focus on VMware backup. However, for platforms such as Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV, that number is significantly lower. Storware supports all popular platforms, but it’s with the alternative ones, like OpenStack, Openshift, Oracle Linux VM, XCP-ng, or VergeOS, that our competitive advantage really shines. We support many other hypervisors as well, because we want our customers to be able to choose a platform best suited to their business and technology needs. More and more organizations are realizing that protecting data in such environments is difficult with the tools that they have. Many of them come to us looking for professional consulting and professional-grade data protection tools. Interestingly enough, the number of inquiries we receive from faraway corners of the world still far outweighs the interest from the Polish market.

2. One of the main characteristics of Storware Backup Appliance is ease of implementation and use. And yet, many integrators still prefer DIY solutions. Aren’t you worried that this could make it harder to sell in Poland?

Storware Backup Appliance is the first solution on the market capable of protecting data in multi-hypervisor environments. This allows us to deliver fast and simple protection for customers who are making their first foray into “open” environments such as OpenStack or OpenShift, or who are looking for a stable, high-performance solution to protect their standard assets. Building a stable, efficient, and most importantly secure solution on your own is a complex process that requires significant skill. Over the years, I have seen partners and distributors adopt many different approaches to building DYI appliances. They wanted to add value by combining two or more products from their portfolio. Usually, these attempts ended in the same way: the solution entered production, operational issues emerged, and the project was terminated. The only systems that achieved commercial success were the ones created from A to Z by renowned vendors.

3. Are Storware solutions ready for exponential data growth and backup in HCI environments and computing clusters?

Exponential data growth has become part of our new reality. Having realized that years ago, we designed our solution to be capable of handling much larger volumes than seemed necessary at the time. Today, companies collect data for language models, broadly defined AI, and historical data analysis that helps to predict future outcomes. Storware Backup and Recovery was made to scale both vertically and horizontally. This scalability is possible thanks to a three-tier architecture that includes a central server layer and nodes responsible for communication and data transfer with hypervisors, container environments, and backup agents. Depending on the customer’s needs, the system can be scaled by adding more nodes or increasing the number of agents, which works well for distributed and large environments. As the infrastructure grows, the next step is to deploy the Large Scale Agent, capable of protecting hundreds of millions of objects as part of a single backup agent instance. This solution gives us a major competitive advantage and makes our product portfolio stand out among the rest.