Executive Q & A with Bruce Gilpin, CEO of Versity
Welcome, Bruce, to this Fujifilm Insights Blog Executive Q & A!
1. Please tell us about Versity’s archival storage products and your role and responsibility as CEO.
Answer:
One of the really fun and at the same time painful things about starting your own company is that you and your co-founders will have every job at some point. At the beginning, Harriet Coverston was our CTO and lead developer and I did everything else including finance, accounting, marketing, HR, product management, sales, and business development. Over the past 13 years the company has grown tremendously and now we have a fully staffed management team of very high caliber professionals so my job these days is focused more on product strategy, company strategy, and managing my team.
In terms of product, Versity is laser focused on the large archive data management market segment. Fortunately for us, this is the part of the archival storage market that is still growing and with the dawn of AI, our HPC business is absolutely booming. Scale Out Archive Manager (ScoutAM) is our main product and this is a comprehensive modern super scale solution for mass storage and large archives. We are rapidly consolidating the market that was traditionally spread more or less equally among IBM’s HPSS and Spectrum Archive products, HPE’s DMF product, Quantum’s archive manager, and Oracle’s OHSM & SAM-QFS product. Until Versity came along, there was never a clear leader in the market for various reasons including lack of product differentiation and high switching costs.
2. Versity has always delivered archival storage solutions to typical HPC customers like the National Labs and Department of Defense. Can you share a bit about the evolving customer profile you are now seeing in your customer base?
Answer:
Yes, we are seeing strong growth in our U.S. Government HPC business and in addition we have branched out and gained a lot of traction within the military and civilian government sectors of U.S. allies such as the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and France. These customers value air gapped data for security and they need modern solutions that can be supported within classified enclaves. With our global partners such as Dell Technologies, we are able to meet the stringent requirements of this customer base. Outside of AI and traditional HPC, we are seeing growth in media and entertainment, genomics, and banking and finance industries. Recently we won our first high frequency trading contract and this niche is likely to grow. People love to say that it’s a gloomy time in the archival data world or the tape storage business. We don’t see that at all. Our business has growth over 30% every single year like clockwork and recently that growth has accelerated. My conclusion is that at the high end of the market where the amount of data is over 100PB, the growth is accelerating. The issue for our competitors is that very few products function well or really have a solid value proposition at those capacity levels where things tend to get very complex and performance sensitive.
3. Among your expanding customer base, Versity is recognized for its scalability, performance, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. What else is driving demand among your prospects and target customers?
Answer:
Environmental sustainability is becoming a critical factor. Our solutions, like ScoutAM, are designed to optimize power consumption and overall storage expenses, aligning with organizations’ goals to reduce their carbon footprint and power consumption. AI systems are power hungry as we all know so people are looking very hard at ways to balance the power intensive part of the data center with something that is dramatically more efficient. We can deliver that with the combination of ScoutAM and the new class of rack modular tape libraries with field replaceable components.
4. It’s probably not that long ago that your customers had the challenge of managing archives in the tens or hundreds of petabytes range. But I understand you are now seeing multiple exabyte requirements these days; what is driving the increased storage demand?
Answer:
We used to hear about a one exabyte bid or requirement once every year or two and we would be really excited to work on a project of that scale. Today we are working on six different projects that are over one exabyte each and one of them is a greenfield build out for 10 exabytes of capacity. It has really been interesting to see this acceleration take place, and the timing is absolutely perfect for Versity since we gambled with our product plan four years ago and decided to put all of our resources into creating a super scalable solution aimed at the highest capacity users. It was not obvious at the time that this would pay off for us, but it put us in the leadership position at just the right moment. What is driving this is AI and the exponentially increasing capability of various sensors to capture data. We have much more sophisticated sensors proliferating on new sensor platforms – on the ground, in the air, in the ocean, and in space. They all generate data that needs to be effectively managed and secured in a stable long-term repository.
5. You mentioned AI as a key driver of increasing storage demand among others. But everyone talks about high-performance storage like SSDs associated with AI models. What is the archival demand that is being driven by AI?
Answer:
Flash is used in the scratch tier to power AI clusters and it is super effective. Companies like Vast and Weka have done a great job advancing the state of the art for scratch storage – meaning the storage that is closest to the CPU’s and GPU’s. But nobody has enough money to store the source data on flash so we see smaller 1-10 PB flash systems paired with 100-1,000 PB archival systems and in this configuration the archival data is the persistent copy. Usually, we are keeping a persistent copy of the original source data from sensors and sometimes we are keeping copies of checkpoints or the output of the AI cluster whether that is a visualization or some other analysis.
Q6: Tape systems have always been a standard component that Versity software manages. How are the new tape library systems like Spectra’s Cube or IBM’s Diamondback changing the tape value proposition among your customer base compared to the previous generations of tape libraries?
Answer:
These new rack modular systems are very interesting to our user base. I think it is common knowledge at this point that all of the hyper scalers have shifted totally to this model so clearly there are benefits including field serviceable robotics. The rack modular option is not a fit for every use case by any stretch but for very large sites that do a lot of random reads, it has a pretty compelling value proposition, and it opens up the tape market for sites that need simplicity and scalability. Each rack can hold around 30PB of LTO-9 media so these make very useful building blocks. Versity offers a per rack pricing model to help sites keep all of the cost elements within a modular framework and our S3 to tape capability is also a great fit for sites that want the modular libraries but still want to maintain the advantages of feeding the libraries with an independent vendor solution. This allows them to mix and match library vendors or maintain a dual supplier relationship to balance risk and optimize pricing on very large systems.
Q7: Finally, when you are not slaving away for Versity, what do you enjoy doing in your free time?
Answer:
Well, I’m really lucky to live in a part of the world where there is a vibrant outdoor sports community. I am hooked on a newer winter sport called snow kiting and in the summer, I like to kite foil, run, hike, and mountain bike. I have been known to disappear on a meditation retreat once in a while. My two children are in college now, so I have a lot of freedom and I am enjoying every second of it!
Thanks for your time Bruce, and we wish you a lot of success with Versity’s innovative archival solutions!
Check out Versity’s website for more info!
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